Overrated

Am i the only one who thinks........Average?

Each character in this movie — down to the smallest one — is an individual rather than a type, prone to spontaneous changes of mood and sometimes amusing outbursts of pettiness or ill humor.

If you're interested in the topic at hand, you should just watch it and judge yourself because the reviews have gone very biased by people that didn't even watch it and just hate (or love) the creator. I liked it, it was well written, narrated, and directed and it was about a topic that interests me.

I love older sci-fi movies but in my 67 years I had never heard of this one. I have never seen it on TV and have never seen it in any lists of sci-fi movies. As this movie is fairly well done-the color for example is very good and the acting is good and the story is interesting-I wonder why it is so little known? P.S. I now know why-having now finished watching the entire movie, I know why it is mostly ignored-it is way too talky and utterly unexciting. As well, the outdoor scenes were so obviously not taken in China.

'The Bamboo Saucer' attempts far more than its obviously tiny budget can manage, and at 100 minutes takes much too long to deliver too little. Writer-director Frank Telford's garrulous script feels like one written in the fifties that took ten years to get made - so was then brought up to date by making Red China rather than the Russkies the heavies. A competent cast led by the late Dan Duryea does their best, and Lois Nettleton as a hot Russian scientist with lovely blue eyes gamely spouts some particularly atrocious dialogue. (There's a lot of Russian dialogue in the script; and it would be interesting to learn what a native Russian speaker makes of her accent and how convincing the dialogue spoken by her and the other actors playing Russians actually sounds).Competently lit in an overlit TV movie sort of way by twice Oscar-winning Hollywood veteran Hal Mohr, the 'Chinese' locations resemble an episode of 'Star Trek' and the Chinese church where much of the action is played out is presumably a standing set from something made earlier. But where the corner-cutting really shows is in the dreadful music score and the perfunctory special effects. The score is obviously carelessly selected odds and sods taken from a library when a halfway decent score would have generated a bit of much-needed atmosphere to make up for the slack pacing. And the special effects are spectacularly inadequate.The budget evidently didn't exist for the design & construction of a full-sized flying saucer exterior for the studio scenes, so we instead get a flatly lit superimposition that looks even worse than Edward D. Wood Jr's notorious hub-caps of ten years earlier. When the thing finally takes off, the flight to Saturn and back (aided by shots of outer space, the Moon, Mars and so on presumably lifted from other films) certainly makes for a final ten minutes that is fascinating for what it attempts with so little.

It's always a treat to watch Dan Duryea. He just made everything look like fun. The former Western bad guy plays an authority figure here, but does so with the same lust and zip that gives a charge to an otherwise dull script.The situation is "cold war" intrigue, with Russians and Americans teaming together to find a downed flying saucer guarded by the Red Chinese.The characters are actually fairly credible for the times. If the film was made today, I doubt a writer would be able to sell "time credible" characters to the ignorant masses, particularly the masses too ignorant to realize they are ignorant.However, it is sort of routine. It looks like a sort of "make believe story" you and your friends would play with as adolescents.Still, the actors, particularly Duryea, help make this enjoyable enough to sit through. I could sit through it, and with my attention deficit disorder, that says a lot. Fairly well paced. Nothing to brag about, nothing to be ashamed about.

A team of American scientists, under the leadership of a military man, go to Red China to investigate the report of a downed flying saucer. They encounter a similar Russian team with the same object. The two are forced into an uncomfortable alliance to avoid the Chinese army. They find the saucer in the ruins of a church; the local villagers hate the government for killing the priest. They work together to figure out how the saucer works. In the end, as most of the expedition dies fighting off Chinese troops, three of them make their escape in the saucer. In keeping with the "lets end the cold war" spirit of the film, they agree to take the saucer to a neutral site, Switzerland. The script and the acting are rather wooden but the movie makes an honest attempt at believable science fiction.