MAN IN OUTER SPACE (1962)
aka Man from the First Century, Muz z prvniho stoleti
Article 4465 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 3-3-2014
Directed by Oldrich Lipsky
Featuring Milos Kopecky, Radovan Lukavsky, Anita Kajlichova
Country: Czechoslovakia
What it is: Science fiction comedy

A repairman accidentally launches himself into space on a rocket. He returns to Earth 500 years into the future to find a Utopian society, which he seeks to exploit with the help of a space alien who is capable of turning himself invisible.

I like Czech science fiction, and I really enjoyed Lipsky’s I KILLED EINSTEIN, GENTLEMAN when I saw it. This one isn’t quite up to that level, though I know the substandard dubbing on my copy of the movie is probably a big stumbling block in appreciating the movie. Most of the humor is quite obvious; a greedy con man tries to take advantage of his unique position as a relic from an earlier time and his secret involvement with a scientifically superior extraterrestrial entity to amass a fortune, but finds that not only is the world not designed for him to take advantage of, but that he himself is eventually considered insane. More interesting is the alien himself, who sees things only in patterns and attempts to gain an understanding of this thing the humans call love. The ideas are interesting, and there’s a lot of imagination in the set design and special effects, but (in the dubbed English version at least), the laughs aren’t there. Still, it manages to have some points of interest, and it does have a great ending line.