udar55 The set up on this film sounds like one of those fake movie announcements that pop up on the internet around April 1rst - an Italian miniseries adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson's TREASURE ISLAND but set in space and starring Anthony Quinn as Long John Silver. But it is real and I've seen it. Young Jim Hawkins finds himself going on a intergalactic journey when Billy Bones (Ernest Borgnine, who has the sense to get out early) hands him a treasure map. Directed by Antonio Margheriti, this actually sticks pretty dang close to Stevenson's classic (yes, I've read a book) and features all of the famous bits from the book except with the occasional spaceship and android running around. Quinn just barely saves himself from Richard Harris STRIKE COMMANDO 2 levels of Italian exploitation embarrassment because this production actually looks like they had a budget to work with. There are actually some pretty impressive space ship set here. Plenty of familiar faces fill out the cast including David Warbeck as Dr. Livesy, John Morgan as Hands, Klaus Löwitsch as Capt. Smollet, Bobby Rhodes as Black Dog, Sal Borgese as Morgan, Biagio Pelligra as Pew and Hal Yamanouchi as the amusingly named Pete. The version I watched was actually a condensed one that runs 2 and 1/2 hours.

smittie-1 If you've seen every other goofy Italian sci-fi flick and thought you'd exhausted the field, fear not! Here's EIGHT HOURS of Antonio Margheriti doing what he does best, compositing cool model spaceships with beautiful starscapes and familiar B-level actors, in an utterly unnecessary (yet glorious) updating of Treasure Island. Everything here holds together: the sets, the models, the props, the costumes, etc. This is no bottom-of-the-barrel cheapskate production! This is Margheriti's magnum opus, and the logical pinnacle of Italian SF - derivative, fast, and fun!See it if you can! Unfortunately for us Americans, we'll have to make do with cruddy "grey- market" versions until (if ever) a real release comes along . . .

ruben_james7 First of all...why?-Because this movie got so deep into my heart being one of those movies which surprised me in a very special way becoming the one i somehow waited and had wished to be created and still it over passed all my expectation and fulfilled my every childish dream.The movie has something mysterious and magic in the same time,combining the fairy tale of childhood which parents used to read us at bedtime about pirates and treasures with the teenager's dream of time conquest and space traveling mixing them both with intrigue and adventure,creating an unique feeling of something true and possible in the future,..creating in the teenager's mind -The Dream!

Michael A. Martinez I recently acquired this little gem which is next-to-impossible to find over here in the United States. I wasn't prepared for a full 8 hour miniseries split up into four parts! I realize a lot of early 80's Italian films began as miniseries and were later cut down to feature length and sometime rescored for their American release, such as CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS, MARCO POLO, HEARTS AND ARMOUR, and YOR THE HUNTER FROM THE FUTURE, but to my knowledge this film never appeared on American TV despite the top-notch cast.Basically this flick is what you'd expect from the title and director (if you've seen any of Margheriti's early 60's space operas). Some kid ventures off into space in a ratty old spaceship with a ragtag crew of cut-throat pirates legged Long John Silver in search of a long-lost treasure on a remote planet. The film follows the original novel pretty closely though it drops a few characters and adds a few others. Mostly the outer-space twist on the whole story works to the film's detriment, with lots of silly changes like the fact that the blind man Pew's walking stick is instead a motion sensor.As I said before, the cast is uncommonly great for such an obviously low-budget effort. Anthony Quinn stars as Long John Silver, David Warbeck is the doctor, and Phillipe Leroy is Squire Tralaney. On top of that we have Ernest Borgnine as Billy Bones, Biagio Pelligra as Pew, and among the pirates such familiar faces as Giovanni Lombardo Radice, Bobby Rhodes, Al Yamanouchi, and Sal Borgese! It's a wonder it seems no one has heard of this movie, as it really isn't that bad at all. Though at times it does feel awfully long and drawn-out, the special effects are much better than Margheriti's 60's offerings, though they range from excellent to marginally terrible. The Hispaniola spacecraft only looks about 2 feet tall in some shots and a lot of the astronauts floating in space look suspiciously like barbie dolls. The dubbing isn't too great either especially with Giovanni Lombardo Radice who's dull voice doesn't go at all with his over-the-top sleazy performance as the head mutineer. There's a wealth of impressive sets and some escapist fun (like the climactic battle in Dinosaur Valley), but too many goofy effects and weak action scenes to make it any better than so-so. I couldn't help but enjoy spending a good half a day sitting through this though. Margheriti injects a lot of the fun into this film in terms of strange camera angles, like shots from behind small objects or up at the actors from floor level. This was his second to last science fiction film, as his last would be the unfairly critically snuffed ALIEN FROM THE DEEP which he shot in the Phillipines for Franco Gaudenzi.