Masha, Marsha, MARSHA

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.

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Planet of Storms (1962)
[aka Planeta Bur, Планета Бурь]

Grade: B-

Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet (1965)

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.

For a film that's ostensibly about a bunch of manly men doing exploratory things, it's interesting how much Planet of Storms is dominated by characters who fall outside that definition. One example is Robot John, whom we already knew from our 2008 viewing of Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet.

For a being that speaks only in an electronic monotone, he takes on a surprising number of dramatic roles: savior, unwitting villain, comic relief. Tears are even shed for him when he falls (hardly a spoiler since the film foreshadows the hell out of it).

And then there's Masha (Kyunna Ignatova), who -- like so many women before her -- has to stay home while the boys go out to play.

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.

Despite her frumpy Soviet outfits -- or perhaps because of them? -- there's something quite magnetic about Ms. Ignatova. In both appearance and demeanor, she reminded us of a reality show contestant from a few years back, who had much the same mournful air...and paradoxical allure.



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.

Bleached blondes and space sprays

Easy enough to find a theme for these next two, as they apparently shared a double bill back in 1961. That's not all they share, though, as both films have a bunch of other things weirdly in common:

• spaceships with supply lines that get cut or disconnected;
• astronauts endangered by fast-moving meteoroids while on a space walk;
• mutually-hostile male characters who find themselves on opposite sides of a love triangle, only to later join forces;
• and, above all, major characters with incongruously bleached hair.

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Assignment: Outer Space (1960)
[aka Space Men]

Grade: C+

There are some things we expect in the opening moments of a science-fiction film from 1960. For instance, an assortment of goofy meters, as seen above. Or maybe, if the film gets to the action right away, you'll have people in spacesuits.

One thing we didn't expect, though, was this:

Unless you count some earlier shots of the back of a person's head, the first character onscreen in Assignment: Outer Space is ace pilot Al, played by Archie Savage. Now, between Savage's bizarre platinum dye job, the print's faded colors, and sheer disbelief, it took us a moment to process that a film of this vintage had a black man not just as a prominent character, but in the leadoff spot.

He's not the protagonist, mind you; that role falls to spunky reporter Ray Peterson (Rik Van Nutter), whom Ray wakes from hibernation in the opening sequence. But, still.

And do you know what the other characters say about Al's race? Absolutely nothing. It's literally never once remarked upon, or even alluded to in the vaguest way. He's just a crack pilot and an affable (but heroic) guy, and a key member of their team.

Of course, the folks aboard spaceship BZ-88 (and space station ZX-34) don't mince words, and even genial Al has no hesitation about referring to Peterson as a "parasite". Fair enough since, while Ray does supply the film's narration, he's not of much use otherwise. He even screws up an important refueling operation --

-- much to the displeasure of station commander George (David Montresor), a melancholy and put-upon soul who kinda looks like the drug dealer in Day of the Panther.

Otherwise Peterson has little to offer beyond the repeated, extreme close-ups we get of his star-struck gaze -- which we're guessing is actually the same shot recycled over and over again. Its first appearance is when Al unceremoniously kicks him out into the "terrifying void" of space, spawning this exchange:

Ray: "A chilly sense of...emptiness. D'you understand me, Al?"

Al: "Sure I understand. Every baptism has its mystery, even out here in space."

Ray: "I've never felt so lonely."

If you're familiar with 2001: A Space Odyssey, some bells might already be ringing. Crew members waking from hibernation? Close-ups of awestruck eyes? And what if we were to tell you that there's even a computer gone wrong that has to be deactivated, while the body of a crewman who died in hibernation lies silently nearby?

In fact it seems to be more or less established that Stanley Kubrick was well aware of Assignment: Outer Space, specifically took inspiration from it, and even tried to hire director Antonio Margheriti to handle the visual effects for 2001.

It's not difficult to see why, as Assignment: Outer Space captures the heaviness, isolation, and coldness of space travel, much as in Kubrick's opus. Characters move in a measured, self-conscious way, carefully proceeding through rooms (or the exteriors of spaceships) as though they really were navigating an altered environment, while high-G maneuvers in flight put visible strain on the actors.

And while others have poked fun at the special effects in Assignment, the film's ships and rockets at least have the solidity and weight of real objects, and there's something disarmingly ingenious about them. Someone who can do this kind of work with a budget of essentially nil? That's the kind of guy you want to hire, because he won't go overbudget when you give him more to play with.

There is one moment where any sense of disbelief comes to a bizarre, screeching halt, as a crew of redshirts meet their death in a fiery crash on Phobos. The pilot desperately tries to regain control, his voice echoes in terror, and then we get this:

That's...a street, and power lines, and a car (we're told it's a Chevy). Once we were done laughing, we had to wonder: what gives?

Well, apparently this shot wasn't in the original Italian film, nor is it to be found in the English dub seen here (with much better color quality than the Mill Creek print). In those prints, though we zoom in on the Martian moon's surface, the ship's impact isn't shown.

So we can only assume some American distributor felt the moment wasn't sufficiently "impactful" (ugh) and decided to add an explosion, any explosion that was available. And now poor Margheriti (whom we already knew from Battle of the Worlds and The Long Hair of Death) gets the rap for it! Does that seem fair to you, Ray?

Anyway, none of this is to say that Assignment: Outer Space is a masterful work of cinema, because it certainly isn't. It's talky, the plot is often too opaque for its own good, and the romantic subplot with navigator Lucy (Gaby Farinon) is hardly convincing -- even if it's amusing to watch the camera zoom closer and closer in on the duo, as the sexual tension mounts...

...until Ray suddenly brings up Christmas out of the blue and the score starts playing "Deck the Halls", to utterly bizarre effect. (At least it's not "Jingle Bells".)

Still, Assignment: Outer Space is a work of hard SF that never relies on woo-woo physics or deus ex machina to justify its plot points, and we have a lot of respect for that. The ships go a bit fast at times (though well under the speed of light), but otherwise everything that happens is entirely within the realm of practical human achievement, and is explained in those terms.

And it feels real, in a way that so many slicker productions don't -- but 2001 did. For those reasons, and for its remarkably forward-looking racial politics, Assignment: Outer Space deserves more credit than it's gotten in most quarters.

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The Phantom Planet (1961)

Grade: D

The opening minutes of The Phantom Planet bear more than a slight resemblance to various elements from Assignment: Outer Space. For instance, we've got redshirts who are scarcely introduced before they promptly crash into a celestial object.

We've got valuable, pressurized fluid spurting into the void thanks to a cable issue -- and no, we're not talking about the scrambled Playboy Channel.

And of course, we've got a skilled pilot with weirdly tinted hair:

For his role as Capt. Frank Chapman, Dean Fredericks apparently decided to keep the bleached-blonde look he'd picked up when playing Steve Canyon for NBC, even though that TV series had ended a year or two before The Phantom Planet started filming. Though not nearly as disconcerting as Archie Savage's snow-white mane, it still doesn't look right on Fredericks.

Anyway, Capt. Chapman is sent out by the Air Force brass to check out what happened to those redshirts, and for a while it looks like we're going to get another hard SF tale with a plot heavily shaped by military hierarchy, orders that are followed or not followed, and so on.

Chapman and his philosophical co-pilot Lt. Makonnen (Richard Weber) have a refreshingly honest conversation about the stresses of taking off in a giant exploding space dildo:

"That does it, Captain. We can relax a bit now."

"Takeoff's always the same...my heart pounded like a sledgehammer."

"Yeah, mine too."

It's nice to see a film where space travel isn't treated as something absolutely routine.

Soon, in another echo of 2001, they're called to exit the craft to deal with a technical issue, whereupon things go very wrong.

Given that the film's title and MacGuffin are one and the same, it's no surprise that their rocket soon crash-lands onto the large asteroid seen in the first screenshot above -- a prop picked up on some holiday trip to the Great Barrier Reef, no doubt.

But then things take a turn for the weird:

Like, really weird:

From this point on, the touchstone that comes to mind for The Phantom Planet isn't 2001, but The Twilight Zone, as we leave hard SF behind and are instead handed a premise that'd be more at home in the presto-change-o, ain't-life-strange-o vistas of Rod Serling's brainchild.

At least they mumble some technobabble about the space between electrons being decreased on this asteroid -- known as Rheton -- and, unlike "Rascals" on Star Trek: TNG, Chapman's outfit doesn't change size too. Fortunately, the mysteriously humanoid, English-speaking inhabitants of Rheton have no trouble finding something for him to wear.

Actually, much as there is something Twilight Zone-ish about the direction, it's probably Star Trek -- the original, we mean -- that's the better touchstone. One example: when Chapman is immediately put on trial for roughing up a member of the welcoming committee, the jury for this dashing spaceman is made up entirely of nubile young women, including two real-life Playboy Playmates of the Month (!). 

Speaking of the Shat, one of those women is (blink and you'll miss her) Allyson Ames, aka Kia from Incubus. Bucking the trend she appears here as a brunette, i.e. without the bleach job she had in the Esperanto epic.

Other name actors include Richard Kiel (we'll get to him later) and Francis X. Bushman as Sessom, the kindly elder who runs Rheton. Hard to imagine what was going through his head when he was asked to play an imaginary theremin while delivering lines like "This planet is slowly using up the energy that holds the atomic particles together", but he never seems to think himself above the material.

The rest of The Phantom Planet plays out a bit like a mediocre episode of TOS, and is largely dedicated to Chapman's efforts to answer common Captain Kirk questions like:

"How can I escape this cult-like society, which has me imprisoned in subterranean caverns and unable to communicate with my allies?"

"How shall I use these women's obvious attraction to me to my advantage?"

"How should I handle this ritualized fight to the death against a hotheaded, competing male?"

"How might I best defeat this hilariously goofy-looking alien in physical combat?" (Enter Richard Kiel.)

"How should I handle my own star-crossed attraction for a woman who, now that I think of it, bears an odd resemblance to Elizabeth Taylor?"

"And how should I address the obvious sexual tension between that Japanese-American crew member and their commanding officer -- if at all?"

"Eh, never mind. I think we're done. How about some end credits?"

"...Let's get the hell out of here."