MovieChat Forums > Terrore nello spazio (1965) Discussion > What language are they speaking?

What language are they speaking?

posted 19 years ago by DrGoldfoot
4 replies | jump to latest

Just got through seeing this at the Tate Modern (evidently from
a DVD - it broke up badly in the middle and towards the end
and we lost a good 10 minutes). This may seem like a silly question,
but what language(s) are the actors speaking in this film? The
one I saw was very obviously dubbed *into* Italian --
the lip synch was way off and didn't seem to match the Italian
words at all.

Very enjoyable film though - loved the bit near the beginning
where red lights flash and someone says "Red Alert! Emergency!
The Emergency lights are flashing!" (they certainly were)
And what about their guns which were basically lighters
stuck the end of a tube?! And it was great to see where many
of the ideas for Ridley Scott's Alien came from, especially the
weird alien spaceship and giant skeleton.

[–] albesart 19 years ago

I watched it at the Tate too... I believe part of the cast were speaking italian, part english as done in other italian movies when the cast was partly foreign.

I liked the movie, after 40 years from release I found it still enjoyable. I don't think you could say the same for many sci-fi movies so old and their special effects.

I mean, it's certainly a B-movie, but that's why I found it still surprinsingly fresh and captivating.

[–] prosopopeia 19 years ago

As was typical for Italian films (and this continued through the 1980s), all the actors were speaking their own language, so that Barry Sullivan was speaking English, Eva Marandi in Italian, Angel Aranda in Spanish, and Norma Bengell in Portuguese! It's worth keeping in mind that, even in those few films shot entirely with Italian actors, the actors were *still* dubbed back into Italian—this was standard practice in most Italian films, doing all sound post-production, that initially began as a work-around for inferior audio equipment.

This was the third Bava film I've screened in the last couple of weeks, and while I'm very impressed by the stylish visuals, I just can't get worked up about them. The narrative drags pretty hard, and the more atmospheric and moody pieces (like this one, or *Black Sunday*) just don't frighten.

[–] hanshotfirst1138 17 years ago

Where does one acquire a DVD with the original Italian soundtrack?

I believe that like most Italian films of the period various actors spoke different languages on the set and it was dubbed into English AND Italian for the respective markets later.

Go to [email protected] and ask them to work on the Apu trilogy and Sholay.

[–] Squonkamatic 17 years ago

The Italian DVD is available under it's original Italian title Terrore nello spazio at http://www.xploitedcinema.com and actually runs about four minutes longer than the English dubbed versions. It's a Region 2 DVD so you'll need a zone free player to make use of it.