Is It Worth the Watch?

It had been a long work week, so I thought I’d look for a movie that was mindless, stupid, and maybe a little inept. I found it … in spades.

The Lost Missile from 1958 may well be one of the most carelessly made films I’ve ever seen. With half of the screen time eaten up by pointless stock footage, the laughable plot, in which the world is about to end but characters still seem to have time to pause for uber-serious but rambling, utterly inconsequential romantic conversations, never develops in any way.

Now, a good science-fiction film would use a premise like an alien spaceship destroying cities as it flies over them as the first three minutes of opening exposition, but here it’s stretched to the film’s entire seventy minute running time. Nothing ever happens.

Nothing.

Nothing!

This was one of the first films to star Robert Loggia, who went on to have a long and distinguished career in film and television, but I have a feeling he scrubbed it from his résumé pretty quickly.

Is It Worth The Watch? The plot at five minutes to the end is exactly the same as it is five minutes from the beginning. Watch the first reel, then save yourself, give-up. You now know the entire story. 

1958

70 minutes

Starring – Robert Loggia, Ellen Parker, Phillip Pine

Director – Lester Wm. Berke

Screenplay – John McPartland, Jerome Bixby