And yet almost from its opening credits (AIP logo; cheap, Superman-styled credits), it was clear Meteor was going to be a profound disappointment. It fails so spectacularly it's easy to overlook its couple of good points, or that it at least could have been worthwhile. Most prominent among its innumerable failings are its pathetic visual effects. In the wake of Star Wars and Close Encounters two years earlier (or Star Trek, Alien, Moonraker, and The Black Hole, all released the same year as Meteor), the special effects were on the level of an overly-ambitious amateur film: dreadful, even by the standards of the time. Even by the standards of 1959.

Still, it's an interesting artifact, and there's just enough interesting/entertainingly bad material within Meteor to make me want to look at it again every ten years or so. It never had a decent DVD release, making Kino Lorber's new Blu-ray all the more welcome. The transfer is good, visually, and the mono audio is okay. The IMDb claims the movie was released in four-track magnetic stereo and, while, possible, I suspect that's incorrect. The original distributor, AIP, almost never sprang for that added expense and Dolby Stereo was quickly supplanting the older "CinemaScope sound" format, though mono releases still dominated in the late-‘70s. Addendum: No stereophonic elements apparently exist for the AIP release, nor was the film advertised anywhere in stereo. However Warner Bros., which distributed the film in some territories outside the U.S., did create a stereophonic version, so apparently it was exhibited in some markets outside the U.S. that way.

A newly discovered (and see-through, courtesy the lousy effects) comet strikes the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, sending the colossal asteroid Orpheus on a collision course toward Earth, with huge splintered pieces of rock threatening major disasters before its biggest chunk could create an extinction-level catastrophe, throwing enough debris into the atmosphere to spur a new Ice Age.

NASA's Harry Sherwood (Karl Malden) recalls former engineer Dr. Paul Bradley (Sean Connery)*, who haughtily resigned from NASA after learning his pet project, Hercules, designed to protect Earth from threats exactly like Orpheus, was perverted into a space platform aiming nuclear missiles at the Soviet Union. Sherwood needs Bradley's help convincing the President (Henry Fonda) and the military keepers of Hercules, led by Maj. General Adlon (Martin Landau), to a) allow the missiles to be realigned toward Orpheus; b) in so doing, acknowledge to the world the existence of the top secret program; and c) help convince the Russians to combine Hercules with their equally top secret nuclear space platform, its warheads (pointed at the U.S.) essential to Orpheus's destruction.

The awful, plentiful visual effects quickly undo what might have been a thinking-man's disaster film with a strong Cold War political underpinning. Footage of the comet, the asteroid belt, and the meteor and its fragments heading toward earth are shockingly poor. The filmmakers would have done better to restrict all views of this to what would have been visible through telescopes and other monitoring devices. Footage of a NASA craft, the Challenger II (the Space Shuttle Challenger was completed in 1978 though not launched until 1983), looks like a plastic model kit, and the art direction of its interior is equally cheap and unconvincing. Hercules and its Russian counterpart, Peter the Great, manage to look even worse. They're shiny like white plastic or carved wood painted white, and lacking in detail. Further, the effects show things scientifically impossible, such as the asteroid passing within a hair's breadth of both Mars and our own moon, roaring ominously in airless space. If Orpheus had passed that closely it would have been drawn into their orbits, not the Earth's. In some shots the missiles look more likely to strike one another than the asteroid.

Splinters from Orpheus strike Earth in a series of laughable set pieces. One hits Siberia, apparently near Mongolia, forcing a family (Korean comedian Johnny "They Call Me Bruce?" Yune plays the dad) to flee in terror. A deadly avalanche in the Swiss Alps is mostly footage from another movie, Avalanche (1978), the sequence capped by an outrageous cop-out that had 1979 audiences yelling at the screen. Impressive stock footage shows 12,000 cross-country skiers "mere hours" before they were all killed in the avalanche. Luckily, says a newsreader, the camera crew that shot this footage got away just in time. Yeah, right.

Hong Kong is struck by an impossibly huge tsunami, in film focusing on one family's desperate but unsuccessful efforts to flee the big wave. These scenes show thousands of extras scrambling through the streets of Hong Kong, many with broad smiles as they pass in front of the cameras.

For the would-be socko finish, the biggest chunk of rock lands right in New York City's Central Park, eerily (and with impressive aim and impossible trajectory) striking both towers of the World Trade Center on the way down. This footage is greatly undermined by the use of yet more stock footage, this time of real building demolition film.

The live-action, first unit footage directed by Neame is a bit better, but also disappointing. Connery has no character to play. He's basically a grumpy scientist who likes to express himself with colorful imagery: "Why don't you stick a broom up my ass?" he tells Sherwood. "I can sweep the carpet on the way out." Malden comes off better, trying to hold everything together against impossible odds. The only really bad performance, though the script does him no favors, is Martin Landau's, the normally excellent actor then going through a rough personal and professional phase (The Harlem Globetrotters on Gilligan's Island lay in his future). He makes a strident villain, overacting with a sweaty upper lip in several scenes.

Conversely, Brian Keith and Natalie Wood prove a pleasant surprise playing a pragmatic Russian scientist and his attractive Russian translator. Both actors spoke the language fluently, Wood being born to Russian immigrants, though where singularly Irish-American Keith learned Russian is anyone's guess. Ironically, he spoke not a word of Russian in The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming (1966), Keith's best movie role.

The two actors not only speak Russian, but are clearly acting in that language. Keith's alternately circumspect and rascally scientist is maybe the best thing about Meteor, something unanticipated.

Meteor was not a studio production, but rather an internationally financed co-production with moneys coming piecemeal from all over the world, including Sir Run Run Shaw's Hong Kong-based movie empire, hence the sequence set there. In America funds came from Sam Arkoff's American International Pictures (AIP), Meteor's stateside distributor. Arkoff got himself a real bargain: in exchange for just $2.7 million of the film's $16 million budget he retained U.S. (and, probably, Canadian) distribution rights. Wikipedia claims Meteor's relative failure helped lead to AIP's downfall, the studio then trying to upgrade its image from cheap drive-in movies, but this is unlikely. The film made $8.4 million at the box office, meaning at worst, even factoring prints and advertising costs, Arkoff probably broke even.

Clearly most of Meteor's budget went toward its star-filled cast instead of the effects, and probably some of that was skimmed off the top by the various entities producing the film. But it was still a relatively big film, climaxing with most of the characters, their control center based in New York (beneath the AT&T Building, now Sony Tower) having to flee through the subway system as the East River pours in via a torrent of mud. Though relatively impressive, even that is hard to take seriously: with all that goopy mud, in these scenes Brian Keith in particular looks like he's wearing a colossal butterscotch sundae.

Video & Audio

Filmed in 2.35:1 Panavision, Meteor looks quite good on Blu-ray, if overly bright here and there. Detail is sharp and the color is good, though the high-definition image only makes the effects work appear as pathetic as it was in theaters. The 2.0 DTS-HD Master Audio mono is okay (see above) but unremarkable. No subtitle or alternate language options and the disc is Region A encoded. The only Extra Feature is a trailer, in high-def.

Parting Thoughts

And, bad as it is, Meteor is still better than the execrable Armageddon (or the more sincere but nearly as bad Deep Impact). Not a good movie, but an interesting artifact of its time and genre, and for those reasons Recommended for fans of this stuff.

* He's interrupted in the middle of yachting race. The uncredited sailor standing behind him is instantly recognizable as Roy E. Disney (Walt's nephew). Disney was an avid sailor, setting various speed records, and presumably they used his craft. I've never seen this mentioned anywhere else, nor does the IMDb note his appearance in the film.

Stuart Galbraith IV is the Kyoto-based film historian and publisher-editor of World Cinema Paradise. His credits include film history books, DVD and Blu-ray audio commentaries and special features.