Now here’s fun. Vincent Price dons a dodgy beard as Robur, Jules Verne’s less-celebrated airborne version of Captain Nemo, out cruising the skies in his all-paper propeller-heavy airship, reciting the bible through a megaphone and bombing stock footage of tall ships in a bid for world peace. Among the hapless, convict-jumpered hostages out to foil him are Charles Bronson, in a non-shite film for once in these listings. Vito Scotti provides more scarcely needed comic relief as a hapless onboard French chef, there’s some of the least spectacular model work in the history of cinema, and, best of all, if you video the first ten minutes you get, for no real reason, a compendium of all that vintage ‘early flying machines that didn’t work’ footage, including the one with five sets of wings collapsing, the pumping-up-and-down-umbrella one, etc., making this an invaluable service of sorts.
