Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet

This is a really odd one! B-grade horror/exploitation movie legend Roger Corman ('A Bucket Of Blood', 'The Masque Of The Red Death', 'The Wild Angels') and writer/director Curtis Harrington (of highly thought of cult movies 'Night Tide' and 'Games') take an obscure low budget Soviet science fiction movie, re-edit it, badly dub it, and add extra footage of faded star Basil "Sherlock Holmes" Rathbone and 'This Island Earth's Faith Domergue, and come up with... well, I don't know what you call it! Let's face it, this movie's a mess, but it's a strangely entertaining cheesy mess. The story concerns a mission to Venus that goes wrong. But I must say, even with 'Voyage To The Prehistoric Planet's the hokey dinosaurs, silly lizard-men, laughably inept robot ("Robot John"), bargain basement special effects, awful dialogue, and moments of NOTHING HAPPENING, I still enjoyed it much more than Brian De Palma's dull Hollywood "blockbuster" 'Mission To Mars'!

"Voyage to a Prehistoric Planet" should be excruciating, but miraculously it's a pretty fun flick - provided you're into the B movie thing (and if you aren't, why on earth are you looking this "masterpiece" up?)

First, a little historical note. Although the American version of the film features the great Basil Rathbourne and that monotonous beauty Faith Domergue, these two thesps were in fact added in to the original footage in order to increase its appeal for a U.S. audience (the movie is actually Russian - or maybe Swedish). They aren't supposed to be there, and you can sorta tell, since they never get involved in the action. Sadly, they end up dragging the movie down, since all they do is communicate with each other by radio, slowing the action to a crawl with lots of pointless dialogue like, "I hope everybody's okay down there on Venus. Keep your fingers crossed..."

Now for the rest. Just about every scene in the movie falls into one of three categories:

(1) Tedious (2) Silly Fun (3) Genuinely Interesting

For #1, you've got lots of milling around in quarries and spaceship sets. For #2, you've got cool rubber monsters and the world's lamest aircar, which waddles along slower than your granny could hobble. For #3, you've got some cool cryptic references to the Venusian civilization, which pretty much remains a mystery for the entire film. I was particularly impressed by the single, indistinct, mysterious shot of the native aliens, and by the carving hidden in a hunk of rock. Too bad the whole movie doesn't deal with tracking down clues about the alien civilization, but alas, it's mostly concerned with techno-talk and survivalism.

Overall - quite good, if you're in the right company.

Before you view this film, you should read some of the comments on it here on IMDb. Most of the film is lifted from Planeta Burg, a Soviet sci-fi film made around 1960 by none other than legendary American workhorse B film-maker Roger Corman. Corman added Faith Domergue and Basil Rathbone and some poorly dubbed English, but, thankfully, left the plot, soundtrack, visuals and most of the dialog intact. What's enjoyable about this film is the original film included within it.

The story line is pretty simple. A manned space flight to Venus encounters many unforeseen challenges, including a great diversity of life forms, including, possibly, intelligent beings. Braving the elements of this tectonically unstable planet, an unbreathable atmosphere and dangerous creatures are several cosmonauts and a powerful and intelligent robotic android (somewhat derivative of Robbie the Robot).

This is a nice piece of mid-twentieth century pulp sci-fi. While it doesn't carry the weight of many of its contemporaries - such as The Day the Earth Stood Still, or Forbidden Planet, etc - it's enjoyable for its clever low budget visual effects, eerie atmospherics, and inventive technological ideas. Great film for sci-fi buffs and film history fans.

This is a Roger Corman re-working of the Russian film PLANETA BURG (PLANET OF STORMS) which I saw at a science fiction convention around 1970 - in Russian, with no subtitles! This version has neatly edited in scenes featuring American stars to replace two of the Russians and dubbed the voices of the remaining Russian actors - this is a mixed blessing, since the dialogue is often contorted so as to match their lip movements, making for some banal conversations on the way to Venus. Once you get used to that, there are some interesting bits, including a great robot, a nifty flying car and an ending that retains some of the poetry of the original space epic. It's of interest mostly as a curiosity - and one day I'd like to see a subtitled version of the Russian original!

I'm of the opinion that film is powerful, powerful enough that large segments of our imagination is guided by cinematic relationships. That even the nature of reasoning is affected, even as deeply as how we reinvent practical logic. There are lots of examples to show and arguments to be made -- they are in a collection I am incubating.

Science fiction is a special case, at once more obvious. Not all as subtle as what I study. But surely it had as profound an effect on daily lives.

To understand this film, you need to know some history. Alas, many readers will not appreciate the cold war that was the overriding impetus for the two largest political entities from the 50s through the 80s.

Some dates for you. In 56, the US saw "Forbidden Planet," with a superintelligent robot, space travel and mind augmentation. It was based on Shakespeare's most interesting play and is still among the best scifi films.

In 57, Russia launched a satellite and declared that they "owned" space (and would put nuclear bombs over the US ready to "drop"). Also, that soon, they would have men in space.

In 58 one of the most successful Russian filmmakers (Klushantsev) made a film about "cosmonauts" and space travel that was enormously successful with the Russian public (and their captive peoples). That film was the beginning of a deeper than usual partnership between Klushantsev and the propaganda arm of the Kremlin.

In 1960, an unknown in East Germany made a film (Road to the Stars) about cosmonauts on Venus. It was a runaway hit. In the following year, Kennedy made his famous pledge to put an American on the moon by the end of the decade.

The Soviet moon program had some catastrophic disasters, in large part resulting from lies told to the old Stalin regime by Soviet scientists working on ballistic missiles supposedly (but not really) capable of destroying the US. Khrushchev had these scientists destroyed or imprisoned. That meant no moon program.

But the people already were convinced that Venus was the prize, so the space propagandists seized on this and retooled their manned program as a race to Venus, forget the moon. As a consequence, Klushantsev was given a (for the times and conditions) vast budget and told to make a film of the heroic Soviet nation exploring Venus. This he did in the 62 "Planet of Tempests," known in the US as "Planet of Storms."

The effects developed by this team would be used in strange circumstances for the next 8 years. This crew filmed fake footage of real spaceflights. The Kremlin was never so bold as to fake a success when everyone knew the missions ended in fiery death. But they did decorate their successes with these true-fake movies. The most famous was the 65 spacewalk of Leonov, wonderfully believable until you wonder who is holding the camera. Oddly, the propagandists assumed that the camera eye was such a magical omnipresence that no one would ask.

Anyway, that 62 film was somehow procured by the infamous Roger Corman. He shortened it and dubbed in English. He substituted the blank female (who says in an orbital craft) with an even more blank female. One wonders why; Faith Domergue had been hot 15 years earlier but here is wallpaper. And he adds an earthside leader who radios a few times, played by the already embarrassing Basil Rathbone. Something interesting could be said about his Sherlock Holmes here.

Kubrick's 1968 2001, used many conventions from this shop, even when they went against the science of the thing. And ever since, on through "Star Wars," we have that single vision of what space SHOULD look like.

Anyway, when you see this, you are seeing all these layers. Straight fiction, political fabricated truth, the unreal as more real than the real, the persistence of cinematic imagination, and the crass, stupid exploitations of the whole thing by Hollywood.

Ted's Evaluation -- 2 of 3: Has some interesting elements.