To me, this movie is perfection.

Sorry, this movie sucks

So much average

The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

I can see the light at the end of the proverbial tunnel, as I'm nearing the end of my infamous Mill Creek 50-film 'Nightmare Worlds' pack. This was a really strange viewing experience, and honestly made me wonder if my red wine had been spiked with some hallucinogen by some ne'er-do-well prankster. It had some intriguing ideas, a big one being that the USA and USSR are afraid that China is going to destroy the world, so at the last minute, just before a scheduled space flight to investigate Venus, NASA administrators replace three of the astronauts with female counterparts, and include a mysterious large suitcase.Though it says 1972, you can distinctly feel that it was made years earlier, before the game-changers of '2001: A Space Odyssey' and the manned space flight to the moon completely changed the way sci-fi films were made (unless you're the sad saps behind monstrosities such as 'Star Odyssey', that go on as if any relationship with the way things are in real life is an entirely accidental and unintended coincidence). Most of it was made in 1966, but funding ran out, and it shows. The filmmakers couldn't even afford the intended climax, and that shows--the film simply ends. But for all of that, this bizarre experiment of a forced Adam and Eve scenario in outer space, as a future for Earth, is decent--and it would be two generations later, when in Christopher Nolan's 'Interstellar', that this idea would be fully realized with human decency and artistic integrity.

Spoiler: The sequel ending with details which no one else seems to know about or failed to comprehend. The film "Star Pilot" didn't just steal scenes from Doomsday Machine, it provided a sequel to the ending.Although Doomsday Machine leaves you hanging with the last two survivors of this rescued film in the add-on sequences, the film, "Star Pilot" gives us their fate. At the end of the rescued, add-on sequences of Doomsday Machine:The surviving couple were left stranded, alone in the soviet craft. Earth was literally destroyed & Venus refusing their approach after having destroyed their fellow astronauts in the US ship. Leaving the 2 astronauts the only option... to find another planet to settle as the Sole surviving human couple.Star Pilot finishes the story by beginning earlier in Earth's past where a group of scientists are taken captive to repair a space ship from Hydra. The aliens (human style) decide to take their captives to their planet Hydra as they also develop relationships.Enroute, they encounter a skeletal pair of astronauts in a soviet style ship from Earth's future. They realize time has passed faster on earth during their voyage to Hydra & learn of Earth's destruction from the craft recording system. This dead skeletal pair of astronauts were the same surviving couple on the finale of Doomsday Machine. So we now know they died looking for a new home planet.The Star Pilot Characters argue about returning to Earth (which was destroyed when it blew into pieces on Doomsday Machine) or continuing to Hydra. The alien Commander makes the decision for them by gassing everyone. Upon arrival to Hydra, she discovers her planet abandoned & contaminated by radiation with a monument which states the Hydra inhabitants have fled on their fleet of ships, seeking a new planet to avoid the pitfalls of radiation & mutation.It leaves one wondering if the inhabitants of Hydra went to Earth (which no longer exists) or found a new planet. The group is left wondering what to do with Earth gone & Hydra contaminated. They are now homeless as well. Earth violently destroyed by a doomsday machine & planet Hydra contaminated with radiation & abandoned. Did the inhabitants of Hydra find a new home planet? If so, where? Thus, another open ending.Is there a sequel to Star Pilot?

Warning: Spoiler, if 'spoiler' means that warning you that the ending of the film makes no sense spoils anything.This loopy, cheese-ball pile of gumpf involves the Chinese having a Doomsday device (discovered by a girl throwing a cat at a dog for real) and then us cutting to NASA, where a planned tripped to Venus is slightly altered to include three females. Why? No one is told just yet, but our seven astronauts head out into space, guided by Casey bloody Kasem, and shortly afterwards the Earth explodes in a craptastic display of bad effects.Our seven 'heroes' are all shocked and stuff by this, and it becomes evident that the good old US of A had the foresight to have a mixed sex crew head for Venus and restart the human race. Let it slide that Venus has 2000 mph winds and a sulphuric acid atmosphere (they probably didn't know that when the film was made), and marvel instead at the interior of this ship, which is rainbow coloured inside for no reason whatsoever. Also try and ignore that various ships that are meant to present the one ship these people are in (or else you'll have a fit trying to figure it out).Our crew involve three young guys (one a complete mental case), three 'young' women, and an old guy. Turns out that the Earth exploding has put a dampener on their plans to get to Venus as the radiation will render them sterile by the time they get there, so they'll have to lose four crew and a lot of baggage before they get there or else face having duff knackers! Luckily the mental case manages to kill himself and a girl in a botched sexual assault that involves an airlock and hilarious 'floating around' effects.This is where the film suddenly decides the viewer is not worth actually giving a satisfying ending, as two of the crew end up stranded in space, find a Soviet module, and turn into completely different actors doing nothing but pressing buttons for ten minutes while nothing happens. Wait till you get a load of the non-ending! I'm not sure if telling you that the folks on Venus basically tell them to bolt and fire them into space will ruin the film for you or not, so I won't tell.Hilariously, truly bad film so full of cheese it could be a stuffed crust pizza, with some endurance test sequences, awful effects, and general shabbiness. I kind of liked it, in a way.

I feel like half of this movie wasn't made. You know, the half where stuff actually happens? It's not that I'm against the occasional non-ending. Although I do agree with the sentiment that since the end of The Sopranos, it's been wholly overused, and is a terrible cop out. However, in certain applications, it can be acceptable. At any rate, this movie came out long before then.Doomsday Machine's non-ending fails so badly because it forgot to have anything else! It has a beginning and middle in the sense that in the time-space continuum, it must. But for the majority of the film, almost nothing of any real importance happens. I've seen more happen in a half-hour sitcom than I did in this movie. They announce the threat in about the time it takes you to read this sentence, then nothing, they make sexist jokes, then nothing, they launch them in to space, more nothing, more sexism, one "action" scene, more nothing, then finally the biggest nothing of all: the end. There isn't a single scene in this movie that's worthwhile. They even spend EIGHT minutes of screen time showing two astronauts fixing a computer. And they don't even show what they're doing! No joke, you're practically looking at a still frame for eight minutes. That's how little was going on. Consider the short run time, the already very little that took place, then consider that they included an eight minute scene of LITERALLY nothing to that. This was a final draft? It looks more like half of a rough cut.The one "action" scene in this movie was not only wholly inaccurate, it also wasn't any good. And the fact that they didn't actually attempt to make another scene or two that was at least on that level just proves that this movie is one big NOTHING. Seriously, all it would have taken to get a little more credibility was to have one or two other "dramatic action" sequences take place, and they failed at that. We got one scene that sucked.I'm not even going to complain about the sexism. For one, this movie is clearly camp. Two, I would look at it as more speaking as the attitudes of the time. I can accept that. But regardless of it's campiness, low budget, etc., it doesn't excuse the fact that this movie is 83 minutes of nothing. Sure, no one expected it to be great. But we did expect it to be more than nothing.If it was going to be a movie which could not be taken seriously, it could have at least went to one or two extremes. Either gratuitous mindless action, gratuitous mindless raunchiness, or both. But you get the smallest taste of either. Seriously, if you're the biggest camp fan in the world, you'll still not like this. It barely qualifies as being a movie.