Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women (1968)

Not copyrighted by Roger Corman Productions. U.S. release through American-International Pictures: 1 August 1965. 85 minutes. SYNOPSIS: Landing on Venus, astronauts encounter numerous adventures amongst pre-historic animals.NOTES: Assembled from the Russian film, Planeta Bur ("Planet of Storms" or "Storm Planet"), made by the Leningrad Studios of Popular Science Films in 1962. Kyunna Ignatova played the Marcia character but her footage has been completely replaced by Miss Domergue. In 1968, Peter Bogdanovich re-cut the movie yet again, this time removing all the Hollywood footage of Rathbone and Domergue and replacing it with new material featuring Mamie Van Doren. This cut was released as Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women.COMMENT: Now that the full-length American version is finally available on DVD, we can appreciate the original's imaginative expertise and rather intriguing special effects, despite the loss of some color definition from the Sovcolor sequences. I must admit I'm a sucker for robots. And this movie contributes a particularly fascinating creation. One really outstanding scene with the robot ferrying the cosmonauts across a lava flow is worth the cover price alone. Despite his prominent billing, Rathbone has only three or four brief scenes and looks both tired and dispirited, though his voice is as powerful as ever. On the other hand, Miss Domergue (wearing a very peculiar bee-hive hair style-surely totally unsuitable for space travel!) has quite a lengthy role by comparison but appears to have lost all her heyday appeal. Although the script fails to build up as much tension as it should (we really don't know the characters well enough to be completely absorbed in their fate), Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet offers more than just a simple curiosity interest.AVAILABLE on DVD through Alpha. Quality rating: seven out of ten.

****SPOILERS**** Actually a composite of three different movies spanning almost ten years the film "Voage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women" was famed film director Peter Bogdanovich's first film that he also narrated. It has to do with a manned mission to Venus that got stranded together with its US crew that crashed on it in the near future, some 30 years after the movie was made, in 1998. With a rescue crew of astronauts sent there on a rescue mission they run into a number of obstacles including this flying prehistoric reptile, Terah, who's considered by the local population, sexy and mostly blond well endowed young women, as a God.With the help of their all purpose robot, Robot John, the rescue crew finally track down the missing astronauts,Kern & Sherman, that planet Venus blows it's top. With Robot John after heroically rescuing the rescue crew, Andre Ferneau & Hans Walter, parishes in a lava flow from an erupting nearby volcano. As for the women lead by beach blond Moana they soon realize that their God Terah, who was killed by the earthling astronauts, was a false idol and destroy, by stoning it, the graven image that they constructed of it.Very confusing at times with all the added footage added on to it the film "Voage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women" dose keep you entertained in how cheesy, especially in its special effects, it is as well as the skimpily clad women, lead by Mamie Van Doren, using sea shells as bras in it. There's also the annoying narration by Peter Bogdanovich who instead of making some sense of the story confuses it even more by not letting the actors in it speak their lines by over-talking them. It's also confusing when we see the spaceship that the US astronauts are traveling in having the Soviet Union Red Star painted on it in footage, inserted into it, from the 1962 Soviet sponsored movie Planeta Bur. P.S Re-released years later as "THe Gill Women".

The second time at bat Hollywood director, Peter Bogdanovich took a story written by Henry Ney and created a movie entitled " Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women. " Upon viewing it, try not to laugh too hard at the many fallacies and inaccuracies in the movie. The star of the movie is one time sex goddess Mamie Van Doren who turned many a males' heads in 1968. The story is of a dreamy eyed astronaut who joins a rescue ship to the Planet Venus. Upon landing they immediately destroy a flying reptile whom the primitive women worship as their god. Thereafter the men are plagued by incessant rain, volcanoes, lava and floods. The team never meet the prehistoric woman, clad only in Bell-bottom skin tight pants and sea-shell bras. However, they do hear their siren call and continue to seek their comrades with a poor man's idea of a robot as a space aid. The movie is low grade and originally made by the Russians and were it not for the hot previews which promised it was for adults only, few would have attended it. As it is, the film is recommended to anyone too board to sleep and wants to stay awake. **

Well... where to begin? Any remarks about the bulk of this film's content, i've already made in my review for "Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet", for in true no-budget tradition, Roger Corman and chums basically rereleased the same movie (which was in itself a redubbed cannibalisation of the Russian space opera "Storm Planet"), with some newly-shot additional footage.This new stuff entirely concerns the titular (in every sense!) women, the scrumptious Mamie Van Doren and assorted other leggy lovelies, lounging around the rocky shores of Venus in shell bikinis, eating raw fish, and emitting a curiously familiar siren song. If i were in a kinder - or drunker - mood, i might try to compare the way in which this film occurs 'in the wings' of the earlier movie to Stoppard's "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead". But i won't, for that way lies madness.This was all enjoyable enough, if very familiar apart from the half-baked clam-shelled clambake. However, i became unduly concerned towards the films conclusion when Ms. Van Doren psychically told her telepathic friends that their heretofore deity, the great dinosaur god Ptera, was no longer good enough, because "there is a greater god!". As they hurled stones and tore down their effigy of the late pteranodon lord, i got a sinking feeling. Surely brief exposure to human (Russian dubbed-as-American) spacemen hadn't suddenly converted the Venusians to the Judeo-Christian god? The idea of them "seeing the error of their ways" and becoming merely spaceborne Americans had me groaning internally. If they were to suddenly convert to an Earth religion, why not Buddhism, or Shintoism? Or, indeed, any at all?I need not have worried. As they pulled the magma-petrified remains of John the Robot from the mud and set him up as a shrine, i began to smile. One god's as good as another, after all. As another spaceborne robot, Marvin the Paranoid Android, said at the end of "So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish":'You know... i think i'm quite happy about that'.