EDITOR’S NOTE: Moon Zero Two was on the CBS Late Movie on January 26, 1973 and June 7, 1974.

Hammer does science fiction! Directed by Roy Ward Baker and written by Michael Carreras, this promised that there would be moon colonies by 2021. Millionaire J.J. Hubbard (Warren Mitchel) wants space explorer Bill Kemp (James Olson) to capture an asteroid in low orbit that can be transformed into better rocket fuel, allowing people like Kemp to not just colonize or be a tourist to the moon but to go to other worlds. After all, kemp was the first man on Mars.

Kemp lucks out by offering to help Clementine Taplin (Catherine Schell), whose brother owned a nickel mine — and was killed by Hubbard — putting her in the position of being rich once the asteroid lands there.

One of the film’s other writers, Gavin Lyall, wanted this to be much tougher than as glossy as it got. His wife, Katharine Whitehorn, said, “It was about — or supposed to be about — space travel when it had got to the beat-up-old-Dakota stage of grubby reality. The people who made it were dazzled by Kubrick’s 2001 and couldn’t resist trying to make it glossy and improbably perfect, the exact opposite of what the authors intended: all the gritty realism was gone.”

It came out three months after man went to the moon — maybe — which caused Ward to say, “Moon Zero Two was a bad picture. It was hopeless, and never got off the ground. We didn’t have enough money to do it properly. It was crazy – a complete muddle. And, it was undercut by the fact that you could turn on the television and see Neil Armstrong jumping about on the real Moon.”

Maybe he wasn’t totally right, as the sets were so realistic they were reused for years on TV shows like Space:1999, Moonbase 3 and UFO, as well as the movies Superman II, Superman IV and 2009’s Moon.

In the U.S., this was sold as the first space western. It played double features with When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth.