User Reviews

Attention, this review contains spoilers, so do not read if you don't want to know what happens in this movie. I was quite impressed when I saw this movie on a matinée, back in 1961. Now, 51 years later I understand why. El conquistador de la Luna makes extensive use of stock footage from Irving Pichel's Destination Moon and from the Russian movie Road to the stars. Every time the spaceship takes off, land and during the space walk sequence what we see is footage from Destination Moon and Road to the stars. The story is pure space opera. Antonio Espino plays Bartolo, a young inventor in love with Stelita (Ana Luisa Pelufo), the beautiful daughter of an absent minded professor. The professor build a spaceship that can go to the Moon and back using a new fuel. Bartolo goes aboard to talk to Stelita, press the wrong button and the young couple take off to the Moon. Landing in the Moon they are captured by martian lizard people who look remarkable like the slistack from Land of the Lost. The martians are ruled by a disembodied brain with a cyclope eye that plans do destroy Earth with a doomsday missile. The evil alien brain also wants to take over the body of the beautiful earth woman. Bartolo swallows a pill that makes him invisible and saves Stelita from a destiny worse than death. The lovers flee from the Moon and use the escape of the rocket engine to destroy the roving eye and kill the evil brain very muck like Ripley destroyed the monster in Ridley Scott's Alien. Everything is played for laughs but many elements in Jose Maria Fernandes screenplay would appear later in serious horror movies. The alien brain with its cyclope eye would be back in Ib Melchior Journey to the seventh planet and the four armed martians look like the creatures in last year Cowboys and Aliens. I give this movie six stars for the creative screenplay and the charming leading lady. And the same footage from Destination Moon, would be used again in Irwin Allen's The Time Tunnel

Rogelio A. Gonzalez directed two of the movies that I feel most strongly about when it comes to classic Mexican science fiction and horror: The Ship of Monsters and Dr. Satan vs. the Black Hand. Both of these movies refuse to play by any rules of the genre and mix humor with outright shocks. They also make frugal use of their budget to craft truly fantastic vistas that some would say were impossible to craft for the money.

This film, however, is a vehicle for Mexican comedian Antonio "Clavillazo" Espino, who plays a bumbling fix-it man who finds himself on a rocket for the moon and up against four-armed aliens that look way more frightening than this simple film would deserve.

The aliens are led by an even more intimidating creature, a large brain that floats around on its own power that would have scared the absolute pants off of me had I seen this as a kid. More of the brain! More of the aliens! Less of the hijinks!