No vone can hear you scream in space, Comrade.....

While watching some oddball early 70's Russian animated shorts I found a few Russian SciFi movies of the eastern bloc. The two movies I dug up from the "archives" was Ikarie XB-1 and Adromeda Nebula.

I'm going to cover Andromeda Nebula first. Why, because if there were a movie out there tailored specifically to convert Americans to follow the Marxist manifesto. This would be it, and it is. The story follows earth in a Utopian future where man has begun to strike out into the stars. The story is all over the place and it took a good while to figure out what was going on. On one half of the story is about a ship traveling to Andromeda cluster they encounter a "iron star" that sucks every passing starship into it's grip. They end up crashing on a planet in the iron star system where they find a derelict alien craft. I love the ship they are on as it must have been around the time of the Soviet Olympic machine and the interior looks to be a gym and a sweet pool...in  a spacecraft....in space. Awesome! The second on going story is a weird love affair by a superhuman blonde blue eyed couple on earth as they spew forth marxist propaganda. I'm not 100% sure why this plot line was even included in the movie, but there you go. The crew on the planet meet up with a benevolent alien race that sucks the life out of them one by one, then death death death...movies over. weird.

The next movie Ikarie XB-1, while made several years before(1963), was actually not a bad flick. They did away with a lot of the Marxism, but left in a anti-nuke message. This time a crew on a space mission of 100 years, actually spend some time talking about the science of traveling through space(well as far as you can get from 1963 terms). This time they hit another similar "dark star" that lets off radiation that make people fall into a sleeping trance. During this time, they find another earlier Nuclear Age starcraft also caught in the stars trap, but when they examine the leftover ship they detonate a nuke it was carrying. Here it became a little preachey. But unlike the last movie, this one had a happy ending with a alien race that helps the ship through the star trap behind the scenes, and they live together happily ever after. This one I liked, it had some decent acting for the what you got back then, and the story was halfway interesting. Out of the two, I would choose this one if you get the chance.