Have Rocket Will Travel (1959)

‘Hey, Moe, your outside head is broken.’

Three maintenance men invent a new fuel using coffee, sugar and popcorn and go into space in a rocket.

Going where no men had gone before (apart from Abbott and Costello), the Three Stooges head for orbit on this science fiction comedy bandwagon! The problem is that the trio were far better suited to short two-reelers and TV spots than feature films. 75 minutes tends to expose the limitations of their act, which basically consists of hitting each other with whatever comes to hand. The slapstick is very broad, predictable and gets wearing at this length.

In the trio’s defence, this was their first full feature and Columbia gave them an unfamiliar scriptwriter and director. There’s a whole undeveloped romantic subplot featuring other characters which seems to have wandered in from another movie and really slows things down. Also, Moe and Larry were still breaking in a new Curly (Joe DeRita as ‘Curly Joe’) and were getting a little old for all the physical stuff. Ironically, it was at this point and for the following decade that the Stooges enjoyed their greatest success – as stalwarts of U.S. children’s television.

Errr…..

Despite being very successful in its day, the movie is now really for fans only. For a start, matters remain earthbound for far too long with only a fairly brief visit to Venus in the second half of the picture. Actually, the alien world looks a lot like the Southern Californian desert, only with giant fire-breathing spiders, a unicorn and a boxy robot with 6 arms. Again, the last 10 minutes at a homecoming reception looks like it comes from a different film. Basically, this is a patchwork of comedy skits, none of which are fully developed and are not scripted with enough creativity or invention anyway.

My favourite moments were watching Larry trying to put a constant –and surreptitious – headlock on the pony playing the unicorn (who obviously wasn’t happy!) and when the rocket suffers the inevitable attack by meteorites. Just how many meteorites were circling the Earth in the 1950s and what happened to all of them?!