Many of IMDb's favorable reviews of "Saturn 3" begin with "This movie scared the wits out of me when I was ten," or something of the sort. These reviews are always favorable. I suspect that these members' recent viewings are tinged with nostalgia. At any rate, here's a review based on an adult's first viewing.<br /><br />Much of this review focuses on the means used to bring the film's main physical threat, a robot named Hector, to the screen. This stems from the fact that the entire second half of "Saturn 3" is a simple monster movie: Hero saves passive woman from monster. Hero and passive woman run from monster. Hero kills monster. For any of this to be worth your time, the monster has to be scary. Hector--a pencil-necked, wobbling, clumsy, slow-coach stunt-guy-in-a-suit--is not scary.<br /><br />"Saturn 3"'s budget woes are well-documented. While they don't show up in its cast or set design, they do betray themselves in other ways. The biggest single problem is Hector. Hector is a guy in a robot suit. It's a cumbersome suit, tricked out with fluid-filled surgical tubes and rigid metal plates. In an ineffective attempt to persuade viewers that it isn't a guy in a suit, the suit's designers built up its shoulders so high that they enveloped the guy's head. They then stuck Hector's own "head" atop it. The "head" is an extremely fragile concoction, with two light-bulb "eyes" at the end of a miniature desk lamp arm. It's so fragile that, when it moves, the whole assembly shakes unevenly.<br /><br />Unfortunately, this means that when the script calls for the monster to stare, frighteningly, at the audience, the camera must zoom in on this stupid, fragile head and lavish attention on it. And that, my friends, is a giggle-inducing moment. It undercuts any remaining credibility this robot has as a threat. Instead, it establishes Hector as a pencil-necked geek. Through the rest of the film, whenever I saw Kirk Douglas struggling for his life with Hector. I wondered: "Why don't you just reach up and snap Hector's tiny little neck? He'll be left blind, and you can hunt him down at your leisure."<br /><br />We have plenty of time to wonder about this, because Hector is slooowww. That's because, after all, he's a guy in a cumbersome robot suit. Moreover, it's clear that Hector's mind isn't the only thing that's dangerously unbalanced; the suit is on the verge of toppling over more than once.<br /><br />By the time Kirk Douglas sacrifices himself to destroy Hector, you're so distant from the story that you notice, immediately, that he didn't need to kill himself in order to pull off the trick that kills Hector. It's a trope designed to manipulate the audience, divorced from reason and bereft of emotional impact.<br /><br />My score of 3/10 reflects Kirk Douglas' reliable work and the rather good set design. The sets are very effective in evoking a dark and claustrophobic mood, and with their vein-like tubes they quite plausibly represent a biological research station carved from lunar rock. The missing seven points are due to the risible robot, Harvey Keitel's wooden acting (perhaps aggravated by his unknown dubber), and shoddy visual effects (even for the period). To be fair, the VFX serve only to establish locations; but this _is_ science fiction. VFX are part of the draw, and they need to be at least serviceable.