Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet
August. 01,1965In 2020, after the colonization of the moon, the spaceships Vega, Sirius and Capella are launched from Lunar Station 7. They are to explore Venus under the command of Professor Hartman, but an asteroid collides and explodes Capella. The leader ship Vega stays orbiting and sends the astronauts Kern and Sherman with the robot John to the surface of Venus, but they have problems with communication with Dr. Marsha Evans in Vega. The Sirius lands in Venus and Commander Brendan Lockhart, Andre Ferneau and Hans Walter explore the planet and are attacked by prehistoric animals. They use a vehicle to seek Kern and Sherman while collecting samples from the planet. Meanwhile John helps the two cosmonauts to survive in the hostile land.
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Reviews
I love this movie so much
Fantastic!
Clever, believable, and super fun to watch. It totally has replay value.
After playing with our expectations, this turns out to be a very different sort of film.
A pair of cosmonauts aided by a robot crash lands on Venus prompting their support crew to make a treacherous search and recovery effort. Both crews discover that Venus is inhabited by unwelcoming lizard-like creatures, and the constant vocal apparition of a woman, prompting them to search for signs of a prehistoric life above and below its surface.Re-edited Russian film features Rathbone and Domergue in unconnected footage as space station transmittance, while the original Russian cast do all the grunt work on the surface of Venus, aided by the "Robbie the Robot" esque "John". There's a couple of reasonable action sequences with prehistoric lizard beasts, some impressive scenery and moment or two of genuine intrigue as the cosmonauts are haunted by the possibility of life existing on the planet, but unable to make substantive contact.The film's climax and conclusion fit the somewhat sombre tone and while potentially not an audience-pleaser, is still passable. The original Russian movie "Planet of Storms" looks to be a competent sci-fi film in itself (forgiving some crude special effects, e.g. the aquarium footage), the US-shot inserts of Rathbone and Domergue, while adding some marquee quality, aren't really needed to bolster the original format. A bit ponderous at times with the laboured 'are we alone' dialogue, it's more coherent than its second revision, Peter Bogdanovich's abysmal "Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women" a second attempt to re-edit the original, and an abject mess.
You've gotten hold of a bunch of really cool footage from a Russian sci-fi epic about cosmonauts exploring the surface of the planet Venus. What do you do? Why, you cannibalise and re-dub it to make at least two completely different films, that's what you do! Yes, just like "Queen of Blood", the dream team of Roger Corman, Curtis Harrington and Stephanie Rothman crank out another epic space B-feature in under a week and for about $8. And it's great fun into the bargain.Basil Rathbone, on what looks like the same lunar base set from QoB, and playing pretty much the same character under a different name, is a scientist heading the first mission to land men (and a robot - but not women, she has to stay up in the orbiter and mind the store) on Venus. Faith Domergue, her starlet days over, is the 'astronette' stuck in orbit like a female Michael Collins - the space guy, not the Irish Republican Army one. Both of these performers appear courtesy of new footage shoehorned into the original movie, and therefore communicate only via radio with the main cast and John the Robot, a much more impressive piece of tech than the grating Robbie of "Lost in Space" fame. If only Robbie had tried to fling Will Robinson into an extraterrestrial lava flow like John attempts with two of his erstwhile friends here.Great pulp SF fun ensues, with great spacesuit and robot design, plus a cool hover car that beats Luke Skywalker's by a mile. Our cosmonaut pals battle with lizard-men, a flying reptile something like a Ramphoryncus / pteranodon hybrid, and the previously benign John, who goes from toppling rock towers to fashion bridges for his compadres to giving up halfway through piggybacking them through magma and deciding to chuck 'em in. Mental stuff, well worth a laugh when drunk, along with the pseudo-serious meditations on survival and evolution, and the possibilities of a Venusian civilisation.I'm a fan of these hybrid re-edit movies, cf: any Hong Kong ninja movie made by Godfrey Ho, and this one is done particularly well - even the dubbing on the Russian footage matches up with the actor's lip movements. To be honest, if i didn't already know the film's background i probably wouldn't have guessed at all. Highly recommended to those with a love for the backwaters of SF cheese and a sense of the absurd.Now to track down "Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women", which i am told uses some of the same footage but with the added incentive of Mamie van Doren in a bikini. Sounds like trash movie heaven to me. I'm in.
this film should probably be taken more seriously than it is usually taken. it is way ahead of it's time in terms of thinking and in special effects and sci fi photography. it's robot is way advanced for that time period and even pre-dates that Val Kilmer sci fi film about the Red Planet.this film is one of the more vivid memories from my childhood. along with the creepy finger hats from '5,000 fingers', the memory of the robot stuck in the river of lava has always been a image that made a indented impression on me. i hadn't seen the movie in over three and a half decades and was curious to see if it would still hold up. i was surprised to find out it was better than i remembered and that the outstanding horror director Curtis Harrington was involved. who would have thought since this doesn't really seem typical of Harrington's type of thing.people who fancy themselves to be great know it alls forget that part of the art of critical sensibility is understanding something about origin and where technique started. uh, that's called history or something. everything has it. it makes for better learning if you truly try to study it. to make a better critic and to have better understanding of the truth it's good to note the origin of things and where they began and how they got started. so many people are into pointing out limitations in movies like this without ever realizing the advancements that were made in cinema at the time. in many ways even 'Forbidden Planet' feels somewhat clichéd and typical in comparison to what this movie did at the time.as far as fun goes, this film certainly delivers. a lot of it, attacking dinos, man eating plants, bikini clad prehistoric girlies, is pure retro, kitschy fun, other things, like the hovercraft and the robot are pretty good science speculation. whatever, fact or fiction, this movie delivers interesting imagery.don't listen to the naysayers on this one. they didn't stop to think. a lot of this movie is probably a lot more plausible than the sci fi silliness of a over blown junkie fix like 'Avatar'.
Well, having now explored a bit of background for this film, much has now been explained like the words not moving with the lips of the actors and the planet, costumes, and special effects of the astronauts on Venus being so much more superior than the scenes with Faith Domergue and Basil Rathbone in white lab coats and little else of any cost. Quickie director/producer and later mogul Roger Corman lifted a Soviet science fiction film and then made a few adjustments and added some "American" scenes with Domergue and Rathbone under the direction of Curtis Harrington. I agree with many of the reviewers that the Soviet film is rather good. I would have enjoyed seeing it in its natural form. That film, based on what I saw here, had vision. But this film is not Corman's nor Harrington's but rather nothing more than stolen(whether it be legally or not) property. And let's face it - Harrington's additions are so poorly crafted and acted that they detract from the film rather then add to them. Basil, only a couple of years from death, looks soooo tired. Faith has all the vitality of cardboard in her scenes. She is the epitome of wooden acting -and it is easy to understand why as she has no one to really talk to or act off. The film in this form has only maybe six or seven brief scenes with Harrington's additions. The rest is a fairly innovative Soviet film definitely worth a peek. but let's not give undue credit to anyone who is not Soviet here just for taking another's product and repackaging it. You also must realize that the silly dialog and loose ends this picture have are due to the film being "squeezed" into something it was not meant to be.