Tockinit
not horrible nor great
Griff Lees
Very good movie overall, highly recommended. Most of the negative reviews don't have any merit and are all pollitically based. Give this movie a chance at least, and it might give you a different perspective.
Freeman
This film is so real. It treats its characters with so much care and sensitivity.
Bob
This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.
Clockwork-Avacado
Unusual mid-sixties science fiction story about three crash landed aliens who "recruit" a scientist and his team to make repairs on their ship, and pilot it back to their home planet. Reasonable effort, although slightly drawn out and uninteresting, still has moments of suspense and character drama. The usual Italian glamour is provided by the sexy wanna-be actress, who goes along with the team, and wears increasingly outrageous outfits, and flirts with one of the male aliens. The lead alien, a fire haired female begins to see the error of her emotionless ways, and at one point exhibits romantic inclinations towards Kirk Morris. Acting is fine, effects average, storyline meandering but rarely fatally dull, with a few good bits, such as a rather weird attack by a group of alien gorillas. Slightly lacking in traditional Italian high octane liveliness, but compelling, and not without a few interesting twists.Pros; -Interesting basic storyline-Most of the film's acting is consistently competent and believable-Good imagery – especially the pair of skeletons at the cockpit of the other spaceship Cons; -Ends rather abruptly -Some of the movie's logic is questionable-Quite a few characters are simply left as cardboard cut outs -The alien race appear completely human and aren't especially convincing as such -Main room of the spaceship set gets claustrophobic after a while -A very long sequence where the characters are in space, changing an arial, kills the pace for a bit and is un-necessarily tedious -A child-like robot is killed early on, and after only a minute's screen time, although its' design was not especially interesting -Plot stretches thin in some places, as it is a fairly basic idea with little deviation to carry the film along -A terrible voice over at the start
John Seal
This film has it all: spandex suited space aliens who will remind you of the brain gobblers from Monster Zero, neurotic robots who look like mummies, oriental (not Chinese) secret agents, terrible special effects, worse fight scenes, an incomprehensible intergalactic language, and the incredibly yummy Leontine May. In the pantheon of Italian science fiction, 2+5 Mission Hydra is perhaps only outdone in the cheap 'n cheesy stakes by those Argoman movies, but there's so much going on that it's hard to get bored with the proceedings. As for the Star Pilot reissue: did this really happen? Does anyone remember paying to see it in 1977? If there's an IMDb user out there had the misfortune of seeing this in expectation of more Star Wars style thrills, I'd love to hear your tale of woe!
lemon_magic
Sometimes a movie is so silly and retarded and inept that you can't help liking it in spite of its many deficiencies. Watching "2 + 5", I can only imagine that the director saw a couple of American science fiction classics like "Forbidden Planet" and "The Thing", and was so thrilled that he immediately went off to make films just like them.The problem was, he had no idea of the time and talent and effort that went into those productions, and he just slapped a bunch of story ideas and stock footage together, expecting the magic of film to somehow inject quality into the end-product. Instead, the results resemble what you'd get if a bunch of precocious 3rd graders put on a musical pageant based on "Planet Of The Apes". One of the cheesiest (if enjoyable) aspects of the production is the young woman who plays the part of the ingénue; she wears an amazing variety of alarming and distracting outfits that seem calculated to completely destroy the composition of any shot she appears in. Seriously. The other actors and actresses will be emoting away, and she will walk in and totally disrupt any atmosphere or mood the scene or shot might have by gadding about in some runway outfit complete with violent decals, eye-searing stripes, go-go boots, fringes,spandex and feathers. Sometimes the camera even follows her while the other poor saps are still carrying on the actual plot-driving dialog. The running joke among the group of people I watched this with was, "For 10 points: guess which cast member slept with the producer or director (or both)?!"Also of note is a drunken walk of a plot, which starts out as an mystery, veers into an story of international intrigue and conflict (with the "2" part of the "2+5" cast,who are "Oriental, not Chinese!"), mutates into an alien abduction scenario a la "This Island Earth", and then decides it's a time travel paradox story resulting in an "Cosmic Adam And Eve" resolution that wasn't really justified by anything that came before it. And some really badly translated and dubbed dialog. Half the time I wondered if the voice actors doing the dubbing were actually reading the English phonetically, with no real idea of what they were saying. But as I said...there is just something so innocent about the whole mess that I can't help but like it. A little, anyway. This is a "movie" in the same way that your kid's refrigerator art is a "painting." Nothing here resembles a mature, competent product, but you end up being somewhat fond of it.
Vigilante-407
This film reminded me a little of Mission Stardust in reverse...the aliens land on our planet instead of what happened in that movie. While fairly coherent, the movie doesn't really know where it's going, as a lot of Italian SF movies didn't in that era. I'm still trying to figure out what the heck the secret agents were doing in the movie (and please remember, they're "Oriental, not Chinese"). Once the spaceship gets off the ground, we're treated to a lot of stock footage from Toho's Gorath, as a number of space stations and satellites try to pretend they are the starforces of Hydra. Then there's the time travel thing, and the female characters' need to wear fishnet bodystockings with leather or feather bikinis (obviously either an aside to the popularity of the fashions of Barbarella or just standard wear in Italian space operas...lord knows I've seen at least four other movies where leather was the material of choice for spacesuits). And then there's the need for spacehelmets when venturing onto a new planet, but two people can cross the cold void of space between two ships in what amounted to a snorkel and leather.To me, 2:5: Mission Hydra reminded me a lot of They Came From Beyond Space or the Terrornauts or similar British features made in the mid-sixties...not bad, but not necessarily well thought out.