This played double bills with — The Terrornauts. And much like that movie, this one has a great poster that advertises a movie I want to see more than the one that I actually watched.

Based on Joseph Millard’s The Gods Hate Kansas, this was directed by Freddie Francis for Amicus. He claimed that the studio spent all of the budget for this on the aforementioned The Terrornauts, leading to an inferior film.

This one is about the Master of the Moon (Michael Gough!) spreading a “Crimson Plague” that wipes out a whole bunch of humanity so that the government will send the bodies of the victims to the moon to hide what really happened to them, at which point he will bring them back to life and use them to fix his spaceship.

It’s a really complicated plan that gets torn apart at the end by hero Dr. Curtis Temple, who basically tells the Master that if he’d just asked for help, humanity would have done it. This causes one of the most powerful beings in the galaxy to just start crying.

Supposedly this was Anwar Sadat’s favorite movie. I only have IMDB as a source for this, but I find that absolutely hilarious and have decided that it must be true.

Don’t have the box set? You can watch this on Tubi.