During Act I, the opening narration is depicted with three fixed pictures of the same ancient Arena followed by a stock footage of the coming of the Roman Legion and a Boxing Ring combined with an actual footage of Mike Benson knocking his opponent (shot in low angle and in the twilight); the peak moment comes from the dark poker game scene (the use of a extreme wide angle lens in the pan shot of the round table is brilliant) with its gangsters slant—gunman Sharpie has a nervous facial twitch: he shakes the left side of his lip which makes move the lower part of his cheek. The main characters are stuck in "The Twilight Zone/Fugitive" social mold with their artificial pathos—Nick Adams' acting is too tight and univocal (and even Actor's Studio-like); there's one meaningful and noirish moment when Mike Benson suddenly wakes up in a cold sweat (as the character of Paul Cameron who locks himself up in a cheap Tijuana hotel in "Corpus Earthling" or Ethan Wechsler's Aabel-related nightmare in his prison's cell in "The Children of Spider County") from a real nightmare: Laura Hanley and what she represents and what he escapes from. Stefano's input about his own libinal obsession is too heavy and slows down the course of the action, especially with the case of Laura Henley as the frustrated separated wife. The Senator is the caricature (see the case of Caligula) of the Roman's decadence and its growing appetite for entertainment—Joseph Stefano’s criticism of the American society of leisure. The sadistic-moralizer Senator (aka Stefano's superego—which wears an Ebonite mask and uses the vicious neologism "to electroport") with its dry sense of humour ("Strange, yours are the only race whose members ask first if there are dead...") and, whose driving force is cruel play activity, is refreshing (and camp, owing to its curved fingernails and its slim stick to operate its machine) but the abduction scenes in the jungle planet—a few shots have a dreamlike Scandinavian forest texture owing to the foggy backligth—and the Calco primitives are deadly cheap. In order to break the drabness of this determined fight, the Senator intervenes to give Miss Hanley a chance—and explains his choice like this:"Oh, I can't let you kill her just yet. Ah-ah-ah-ah, she hasn't, begun to suffer!"—and the film editor makes a freeze frame on the Calco primitive who has been on the verge of throwing its double-edged boomerang (notice the wires). There's a camera-gimmick that is over-used: the stiff high angle shot of the banister. This one doesn't feature an end narration. TV Analogy: the main plot will be recycled in "Arena", one episode from "Star Trek". Notes: Theodore Marcuse is the Senator whose voice-over is by Robert Johnson and Vic Perrin is the voice of Sharpie. The Calco primitives are played by Bill Hart and Charles MacQuery.