We're doing a bit of sequence-breaking here, since the next film we watched after The Phantom Planet was actually Killers from Space (to be featured in our next post). Here's the story:
Back around September 2008, while we waited for our Mill Creek 250-pack to arrive in the mail, we went ahead and watched a couple movies we knew were on the box, using copies downloaded from the Internet Archive. (Hey, we were impatient.)
Of those two motion pictures, one is among those reviewed below. The other was actually from Nightmare Worlds, and we're saving it for our very last review from the 250-pack (unless we go back and watch the box set's crappy prints of Metropolis or Night of the Living Dead for some reason).
Thus, there's a logic to going out of order for these three films: in a way, this review isn't early, but is instead (gulp) over ten years overdue!
...wait, did we say three films? Well, that's a complicated question, thanks to Roger Corman, Peter Bogdanovich, and the magic of editing.
Back around September 2008, while we waited for our Mill Creek 250-pack to arrive in the mail, we went ahead and watched a couple movies we knew were on the box, using copies downloaded from the Internet Archive. (Hey, we were impatient.)
Of those two motion pictures, one is among those reviewed below. The other was actually from Nightmare Worlds, and we're saving it for our very last review from the 250-pack (unless we go back and watch the box set's crappy prints of Metropolis or Night of the Living Dead for some reason).
Thus, there's a logic to going out of order for these three films: in a way, this review isn't early, but is instead (gulp) over ten years overdue!
...wait, did we say three films? Well, that's a complicated question, thanks to Roger Corman, Peter Bogdanovich, and the magic of editing.
[aka Planeta Bur, Планета Бурь]
Grade: B-
Grade: C-
Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women (1968)
Grade: D
What exactly should one call this cinematic set of Soviet space sagas? It's certainly not a trilogy in the usual sense of the word, so that's out. Is it, in effect, a single film -- call it Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet of Prehistoric Women and Also Storms -- that should be treated as such?
Maybe that's the best fit, since if you watch all three back-to-back, it starts to feel like a single text in which you get three different perspectives on the same events. We're not talking Rashomon here, but the effect is still palpable: will it ever again be possible for us to watch Planet of Storms without imagining that, somewhere off-camera, Mamie van Doren is wearing a chef's hat and controlling the weather and seismology from afar?
Either way we'll use the original, i.e. Planet of Storms, as our source for all screenshots of the Soviet material -- not that it won't be obvious from the subtitles, which are generally well-done but sometimes get a bit goofy.
Planet of Storms supplies the basic story that runs through all three films: expedition goes to Venus, brings a robot. Two teams land in different spots, spend the bulk of the film trying to reunite. Along the way, weird animals, natural disasters, and haunting vocalises abound.
One could easily dub Planet of Storms the "planet of dank analog synths", since we get some seriously spacy, Louis and Bebe Barron-esque effects once the crew lands on Venus. Other music includes an orchestral cue that gets repeated three or four times, and a patriotic song of triumph and thanksgiving that pops up toward the end of the film to hilarious effect.
Otherwise Planet of Storms is appealingly sparse in its soundtrack and, overall, is more understated than we might have expected. Then again, we don't have a lot of touchstones for Iron Curtain cinema beyond "propaganda piece" and "weird Czech animation" -- and, now that we mention it, some of the set design could easily have been repurposed as the background for a stop-motion film out of Prague.
Left alone aboard the Vega in orbit around Venus, it's her job to mind the store, maintain contact with Earth, and worry herself sick.
Even though she never gets to do much except emote, we suppose Masha's inclusion as part of the crew speaks well of Planet of Storms. Then again, when her colleagues think she's messed up a big decision (spoiler alert: she didn't), they don't exactly mince words:
That's Planet of Storms, an imperfect but engaging little film. So what did Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet add to it? Well, one thing is obvious from the get-go:
If you're going to rip off someone else's work -- we assume Corman didn't pay a licensing fee to the Soviets -- then there's nothing like hiring a semi-washed-up "name" actor to add a veneer of respectability to your project. Here Rathbone plays Professor Hartman, supervising the Venerian expedition from a lunar base the filmmakers expected us to build by 2020 (sigh).
Though he gets top billing, the added scenes with Rathbone are even briefer than we remembered: maybe 5-6 minutes, tops? He does little but expostulate, bark at his subordinates to repair things, and perch awkwardly on chairs.
The other big change is the complete excision of Masha -- why, Roger Corman, why? -- in favor of Faith Domergue as Marsha, the new communications officer or whatever she is.
If you're a big Carey Lowell fan -- and you know what we mean (moo) -- then you might prefer Ms. Domergue (whose surname is pronounced "bouquet", we're quite sure). For us, the swap was a real downgrade, and felt totally unnecessary.
On top of that, the character herself gets downgraded: whereas Masha came to the correct decision on her own, Marsha has to be told by the Professor. And when she recounts that to the crew, her tone is that of a submissive Stepford Wife who's been reminded of her place:
"He ordered me to wait no matter how I felt. He made me realize my responsibility...I'm very grateful to him now."
Ah yes, happiness is slavery. On the other hand, at least one of her colleagues reminds the Professor: "Didn't anyone ever tell you ladies are tougher than men?" So, mixed messages, we guess.
Otherwise the main thing Voyage brings to Planet of Storms is of course the English dub, which is reasonably faithful: other than purging the Soviet references, it sticks pretty closely to the facts of the original script. True, the characters are more petulant at times, and a bit less philosophical overall; true, there are some awkward turns of phrase dictated by the mouth movements in the original.
But it was still neat to see that many of the film's little quirks -- like the way Robot John played music while they crossed the rope bridge -- were actually in the original. When we watched Voyage in 2008, we almost certainly assumed the dubbers were taking liberties in that scene, but it's legit.
That said, there's a subtle thread of dark humor throughout Planet of Storms, and the Voyage dub loses a lot of that. The most striking difference is in the scene where Robot John gives antibiotics to two crew members: in the original, it's essentially silent, and John's blundering attempts to help the desperately ill Dr. Kern (Georgiy Teykh) are grimly funny.
In the dub, though, John gets play-by-play instructions over the radio that walk him through the whole thing, right down to being told to pour water all over Dr. Kern's face. It completely changes the meaning of the sequence, and pretty much ruins it -- though you wouldn't know what you were missing unless you'd seen the original.
On the plus side, John gets a nicer and more emotionally complex send-off in Voyage with the addition of a key line that wasn't in the original. Kern, his creator, quietly weeps when John is lost, and maybe it's not a coincidence that we only noticed that when watching the Voyage dub.
Finally, there's Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women, a project for which Peter Bogdanovich wisely used a pseudonym. (Joke's on you, Peter, since now we have IMDb.)
He handles most of the narration, though he's not the deep-voiced narrator of the opening segment, which splices in meaningless footage of various prototype spacecraft --
-- as well as scenes "borrowed" from another Soviet film, The Sky Calls, which is apparently about the race to Mars.
As a side note, isn't it felicitous that all the Cyrillic letters in this next shot are also present in the Latin alphabet? Even casual viewers probably raised an eyebrow at the "СИРИУС" and "ВЕГА" visible in exterior shots of the rockets, but this one works out seamlessly.
Speaking of viewers, it bears mentioning that both Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet and Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women were done for TV, though Women appears to have had a theatrical run at some point. Women is derived from Prehistoric Planet, and uses the same dub, though a significant amount of it is edited, lost under voiceover, or otherwise removed. It also moves the timeline up to 1998, which is even more depressing, especially if you work for NASA.
And the biggest change of all? No more Masha or Marsha!
Instead, Bogdanovich blandly informs us that "The code name for Earth Control was MARSHA", and that's that. We capitalize this because it's begging for a bacronym -- something like, I don't know, Mission and Rocketry Space Headquarters America? -- not that Bogdanovich sees fit to bother.
In fact all the added footage from Prehistoric Planet is gone: no Rathbone, no Domergue. Was it for cost reasons (i.e. no residuals)? To make it easier to trick TV stations into buying a film 85% identical to one they'd already run? Or, with a strict length requirement no doubt in effect, was it because they wanted to be sure to insert as much of this sort of thing as possible?
In truth there's something sort of clever about the way Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women integrates the new footage -- if you can call anything about long sequences of telepathic beach bunnies clad in seashell bikinis "clever", that is.
Between their outfits and the way they swim, the Venerians are clearly meant to be something like mermaids with legs, which most of us call "women". And in case their bleached hair and total silence aren't enough to communicate their otherworldliness, we're clued in when one takes a big bite out of what appears to be a whole, ungutted, raw fish. Yummy.
All the prehistoric women's dialogue is in voiceover, which would normally lead us to assume that many of the actresses were Europeans hired more for their waist-to-hip ratios than their English-language skills. But the names given in IMDb are pretty much Anglo all the way around, and very few of them have more than one acting credit, so who knows: chances are, they were just models who needed a paycheck.
Anyway, the basic conceit of Prehistoric Women is that the women worship the pterodactyl-like creature that, at one point, attacks the characters in Planet of Storms. (Cue a not-altogether-convincing rubber replica, presumably made by Bogdanovich's team, that the women carry around reverently to comic effect.)
Once their god is slain (which happens offscreen and is unique to Prehistoric Women), they summon natural disasters to punish the invading cosmonauts, but fail to kill them. Soon, they realize they've been worshipping a false god, and guess who shows up to replace him?
Watching Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women is sort of like reading Harry Potter fan fiction. Everything feels messed-up and askew, but there's more sex -- and if you really want to spend extra time in that universe, it offers the illusion of a fresh perspective or alternate narrative.
Even so, if you're the kind of person who'd far rather have a Masha on your screen than nine sub-Daryl Hannah simpletons, Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women has few rewards -- and certainly isn't a patch on the source material. It's a garbled, mangled version of a pretty good film, and the traces of the original's quality are beginning to fade at this point.
But, OK, this one was kind of cute:
By the way, did we mention there was a brontosaurus in this movie? To paraphrase Gordon Sumner, we're sure there's a lesson for us.
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