Voyage To The Prehistoric Planet

Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet (1965)

Runtime: 73 minutes

Directed by: Curtis Harrington, and also Pavel Klushantsev

Starring: Basil Rathbone, Faith Domergue, John Bix, the cast of Planeta Bur

From: Roger Corman

What a time in the film industry when people could take footage from foreign films, dub it over, and typically add new footage that barely matches, if at all. This is a prime example of that, as I explain: 

Last March I watched and reviewed the early 60's Soviet sci-fi movie Planeta Bur, commonly known in English as Planet of Storms. That was a fine experience. Roger Corman likely acquired the rights to the movie on the cheap, and he certainly showed his mastery of pinching pennies so hard that Abraham Lincoln yelps in pain... he managed to make THREE movies out of footage from Planeta Bur, this being one of them. It was dubbed over (and what a job they did there, as I'll elaborate upon later) and some Americans were hired to act in scenes created for this film.

The laughs begin with the opening credits, where the Soviet actors are given English names and the writer/director (Curtis Harrington) is credited as JOHN SEBASTIAN. The plot for those that don't remember or never saw me talk about Planeta Bur: a spaceship lands on Venus, where some dudes and a robot walk around and encounter all sorts of wackiness. The Soviet actress playing the one woman on the spaceship was replaced via editing by American actress Faith Domergue, and once you know that you'd have to believe in magic to not notice that the new footage looks completely different from the original Soviet footage.

Any charm to the movie is from Planeta Bur, where you see weird sites, including dinosaurs. The barren Soviet Union location that represented Venus was eerie and the creatures and other oddities they included were all interesting to look at; hell, there's even what could have been the inspiration for the land speeder from Star Wars. The American dubbing is quite bad. Note that one of the lines is obviously blown and yet there was never a take 2 to fix it. What was said made the story a lot a lot more juvenile and silly, with plenty of wisecracks (rarely are they funny) and bleh. The original had talk of such things as evolution and interesting discussion of ancient civilizations, aliens visiting centuries ago and space travel; when that is present here it is dumbed down. You don't have to ask if you ever have to make up your mind between the two films: don't see this as Bur is easy to find on certain streaming video websites.

Oh, and the one big name that Corman added in the new footage was Basil Rathbone, who certainly was in paycheck mode here, and is only on screen for like 3 minutes. Even at 74 minutes, your mind may daydream; there is really no need to ever watch this.