Voyage To The Planet Of Prehistoric Women

Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women (1968)

Runtime: 80 minutes

Directed by: Pavel Klushantsev... and Curtis Harrington... and Peter Bogdanovich! (RIP)

Starring: A bunch of Soviet actors plus Mamie Van Doren plus Bogdanovich providing narration

From: AIP

About as “good” as you'd expect a movie with such a title. To address the elephant in the room, there are several movies from 1968 I'd like to see soon, so I decided to watch them all in a row. The only reasons why this was picked: it recently joined Prime & I had seen its previous iterations before. It's only a sad coincidence that I saw this and hours later its director (believe it or not, Peter Bogdanovich) passed away. Don't worry, later in the month I'll view a more dignified film in his honor.

To elaborate: there's the 1962 Soviet sci-fi picture Planeta Bur, i.e. Planet of Storms. It's a serious thoughtful tale of some comrades & their adventures on Venus that include a giant robot and all sorts of bizarre creatures. Roger Corman bought this footage so he could manipulate it to make some cheap drive-in fare. A few years ago I experience Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet, which really dumbed down the dialogue and it became a silly picture instead; that was directed by Curtis Harrington. A few years later, Corman wanted a new version that was basically Prehistoric Planet with some new scenes shot of attractive women for the lonely man audience... as Bogdanovich worked for him at the time he was given this task so that was his first-ever movie he directed. He also narrates the main character, which he is credited by name but the director credit is a pseudonym.

No wonder then that this is such a mess. The movie is even dumber than Prehistoric Planet; a character in Prehistoric was named Marcia and instead of just including another actress by that name, they had Mission Control be called Marcia! I don't get it either... but the nadir is that Venus now has several lovely ladies, led by Mamie Van Doren playing MOANA-yes, that's her character's name. These Venusians-dressed in silver pants and seashell bras-either lay around on rocks, stand around looking stoned, or demand the gods rain down punishment on the astronauts. Movies like Planeta Bur or Nebo Zovyot (which Coppola also purchased footage of) are good and I should see more Soviet sci-fi from decades past; movies like this are dreck and are only good for campy laughs. Not even a clever ending that made me chuckle is enough to ever make me recommend this to everyone unless you want to watch everything done by a famed director.

Don't worry, the other 1968 pictures will be better than this one.