As I mentioned in my review of Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women,
Roger Corman had gotten the rights to a Russian film and hired two directors
to shoot some new material and then edit that into the Russian film and create
two new films! This sort of thing happened a lot back then - many of the
Kaiju films - and it is kind of reprehensible. Maybe one of the few signs
that humans have gotten smarter since then is that as far as I know these
weird mutations don't happen any more. The Internet has probably killed that
off. I have to wonder if audiences went to both films (three years apart)
and thought, haven't I already seen this? What I didn't realize while watching
the other film is that they both used the same dubbed print - so much of
the film is exactly the same - though in some instances the dubbing was changed.
Bogdanovich edited the first film and added nine nubile blonde females while
in this one Curtis Harrington added Basil Rathbone and Faith Domergue. Neither
director put their names on the film. They wanted a future.
Harrington does a much better job of integrating the two films. Rathbone
is a scientist back at the space station and Domergue is one of the astronauts
who is left up circling the planet. They are both in it for about 5 minutes
each basically communicating with the men going to Venus. Three space ships
head to Venus to explore the planet. One gets knocked out by a meteor and
another crashes upon landing. That ship had two men and a Robbie the Robot.
The other ship decides to land and rescue them. On the planet they come across
a few prehistoric monsters as well as a sound that seems to be a woman wailing.
Sadly, no blondes in white Levis. So for the most part we get the Russian
film without the blonde distractions but being dubbed it is hard to know
how close to that film this one really is. So the next step is to watch that
one. This is bad but not nearly as bad as Prehistoric Women. Check out my
review of Planeta Bur in the International section for a review on the original
film. It is actually a good film.
