World Without End

A team of four astronauts on a mission to Mars loses contact with Earth and crash lands on a mystery planet. "We could be anywhere," confesses their navigator, but the discovery of gravestones confirms what the familiar scrub wilderness of Southern California hints at: this is Earth, hundreds of years in the future. The group are attacked by brutish, one-eyed cavemen in animal skins and by giant spiders (charmingly cheesy rubber puppets) mutated from a nuclear war, and they find the civilized but timid remnants of humankind living underground. This dying society is populated by beautiful young women clad in revealing outfits (designed by pin-up artist Alberto Vargas) and impotent, frail men, which creates sparks between the women and the virile astronauts (especially Hugh Marlowe and Rod Taylor, who doffs his shirt for a little beefcake). Although Allied Artists produced this 1956 film in CinemaScope and Technicolor, it's basically a low-budget feature with cheap and recycled special effects, purely functional direction by B-movie veteran Edward Bernds, and a plot that shamelessly lifts ideas from H.G. Wells's classic novel The Time Machine. A minor, often dull example of 1950s sci-fi, this is not a necessary purchase. (S. Axmaker)