{Note: these comments and score refer to the AIP film 'Battle Beyond the Sun', NOT the Russian film 'Nebo Zovyot}'. American International Pictures bought the rights to 'Nebo Zovyot' ('The Sky Beckons') (1959), a Russian 'hard' science fiction film about a cold-war race to land the first manned spaceship Mars. Although a bit plodding, 'Nebo Zovyot' is an interesting film with excellent special effects (the scenes of the cosmonauts standing on the asteroid Icarus with Mars looming above them is especially memorable). Despite the project being handed off to a young Francis Ford Coppola (a film student at the time), the Americanised version is just a bargain-basement mix of time-filling introductory voiceover, bad dubbing, and sloppy editing (note the crude mask covering the "CCCP" on one of the spaceships, note also that they missed the Red Star on the tailfin). Oddly, all of the names in the credits have been changed to fictional 'western' names and only the "Mosfilm" credit suggests the movie's actual origins. The film, which originally depicted Americans vs Soviets, has been depoliticised (the spaceships now represent fictional Northern hemisphere and Southern hemisphere political rivals) and the only new footage is a laughable monster fight on one of the Martian moons (referred to as a moon of Mars in the dubbing but called "Ikar", because in the Russian original, they landed on the asteroid Ikar (Icarus)). Apparently Coppola's boss, the legendary Roger Corman, decided that the original scene, in which a cosmonaut stranded on the tiny moon looks up a hill and sees his rescuers, would be better if instead he saw monsters, so we're treated to a headless creature with protruding eye-stalks eyes battling a menacing-looking 'vag-dentata' beast. Such juvenile additions seem ridiculous in retrospect but no one can question as to whether Corman knew his audiences and if it wasn't for his unerring eye for talent (and profits), few people in the cold-war era 'west' (especially in the USA) would have had any opportunity to see some of the great work being done by filmmakers behind the Iron Curtain. As a stand-alone film, 'Battle Beyond the Sun' is hard to rate: the Russian special effects are great (I would give 'Nebo Zovyot' an 8/10) and, while the AIP version is awful (independent of its Russian visuals), it remains an interesting example of Corman's chutzpah, and, if you didn't know the provenance of the special effects, you'd likely think that 'Battle Beyond the Sun' was a well-made and pretty cool '60s science fiction movie. *there is only a single IMDB entry for the film and I don't seem to be able to rate the Russian (8/10) and the American (4/10) versions separately.