Like Danny Boyle's 'Sunshine' forty years later this film starts promisingly enough with the receiving of a mysterious distress signal from the depths of space, but completely unravels towards the end; 'The Terrornauts' because it just didn't have the funds for slam-bang special effects at the finale, 'Sunshine' precisely because it did, and like so many movies these days ends up so bludgeoning you with visual effects you end up begging for it to stop.
Several earlier reviewers have compared 'The Terrornauts' (a totally meaningless title by the way) to 'Dr Who', but one thing it has that British TV then lacked was bright shiny sixties Eastman Colour (sic) - a first for this director - and as long as the action remains indoors it passes painlessly enough. (Respected British sci-fi author John Brunner - whose only film script it was - said that producer Milton Subotsky "was a very reasonable guy" and a pleasure to work with, that Brunner scrapped most of the original splendidly titled pulp novel 'The Wailing Asteroid' (1960) by Murray Leinster, and later got "a fan letter from someone in Indiana who'd seen it on TV and who said what a pleasure it was to hear the technical terms used correctly for a change".)
It all goes pear-shaped unfortunately when bug-eyed monsters and galactic battle-cruisers are finally called for.
