A nuclear showdown between the U.S. and the Red Chinese reaches a boiling point when spies discover that the communists have created a doomsday machine capable of obliterating the Earth. As the world approaches apocalypse, the Americans hastily launch a crew of male and female astronauts into space in a last ditch effort to save the human race. The orbiting survivors watch horrified as the Earth is destroyed. Adrift in their tiny, vulnerable ship, they must face their greatest fears and a very dark future of hardship, madness and death.

Also released as The Doomsday Machine, Escape From Planet Earth is one of the most unusual entries in the annals of B-moviedom. Director Herbert J. Leder (screenwriter of Fiend Without a Face) began work on the film in 1967 under the title Doomsday Plus Seven. He assembled an impressive cast including onetime Tarzan Denny Scott Miller, Broadway song-and-dance man Bobby Van, blonde bombshell game show favorite Ruta Lee, The Incredible Shrinking Man’s Grant Williams, B-movie queen Mala Powers, and Henry Wilcoxon, who’d played Marc Antony in Cecil B. DeMille’s Cleopatra (1934). Also featured in smaller roles at the beginning of the film are former MGM leading man James Craig, legendary DJ/voice actor Casey Kasem, and a pre-M*A*S*H Mike Farrell. Even more amazingly, Leder secured the services of acclaimed cinematographer Stanley Cortez (The Magnificent Ambersons, The Night of the Hunter.) Production stopped before filming could be completed, presumably due to funds running out. Leder’s footage gathered dust until it was purchased by exploitation producer Harry Hope, who hired director Lee Sholem (Superman and the Mole Men) to finish the film...without any of the cast. Thus, in the last ten minutes of the film, the astronauts’ helmets suddenly become opaque, with their voices dubbed by actors who aren’t even trying to sound like the people they’re impersonating. Hope and Sholem also inserted special effects shots from other sci-fi movies that were wildly out of place. Though the initial Doomsday Plus Seven concept might have made for a science fiction classic, the final product has to be seen to be believed.