DOS COSMONAUTOS A LA FUERZA (1965)
aka 002 operazione Luna

Article 3588 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 5-26-2011
Posting Date: 6-11-2011
Directed by Lucio Fulci
Featuring Franco Franchi, Ciccio Ingrassia, Monica Randall
Country: Italy / Spain
What it is: Franco and Ciccio comedy

When two Russian cosmonauts are lost in space, the KGB kidnaps two petty thieves who happen to resemble them and try to pass them off as the originals. But then the original cosmonauts are found…

I was amazed at the opening scene of this movie. It features Franco and Ciccio being led to a rocket, and during the whole scene, Franco didn’t mug once. Of course, shortly after that I saw a scene with Franco and Ciccio trying to rob a warehouse where the usual mugging is back, and I was quickly able to deduce from this scene that the first scene must have featured two characters who just looked like the comedy team, which gave me a clue to the plot, which was helpful since my copy of this movie is in unsubtitled Italian. It was also helped me to differentiate the Russian cosmonauts from the comedy team throughout the movie; if Franco goes five seconds without making a weird expression, I knew I was watching the cosmonaut. Like most of the movies by this team, I find that, despite the language barrier, there is at least one scene I find fairly amusing, and that occurs early on here, when the two thieves run into problems while performing a theft because two other thieves keep stealing from them. The rest of the movie is the usual Franco and Ciccio experience, and the ending in which we have the comedy being confused with their lookalikes, is all too predictable. I did notice, though, that if Franco mugs in just the right way, he has more than a passing resemblance to James Brown which, given Ciccio’s resemblance to “Weird Al” Yankovic, gave me a bizarre vision of these two musical personalities teaming up for a concert. That’s what happens when you watch a movie in a language you can’t understand; your mind starts to wander.