No such place

We can muster enough suspension of disbelief to get through most movies, no matter how thoroughly science may have refuted their premises. No one will be walking around on Venus anytime soon; wasps don't make royal jelly; there isn't an island where tigers and lions coexist; you can't freeze a turtle in ice and bring it back to...

...uh, never mind on that one.

Still, these next two films -- which also happen to be the last two black-and-white movies we watched in 50 Sci-Fi Classics -- really pushed our limits by setting their action in places that literally, paradigmatically don't exist. (At least you can land on Venus.)

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Planet Outlaws (1939/1953)

Grade: D+

Planet Outlaws isn't just the last of the B&Ws, it's also the last example on the 250-movie pack of that beloved format, the edited serial. Sigh.

At least it's not coy about its origins:

Someday we'll learn to keep Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon straight -- and it doesn't help that Buster Crabbe played both roles, of course.

At least now we've got the basics down, and know that Buck was the one who got hit with knockout gas in the 20th century and woke up in the 25th: hence Duck Dodgers.

We first encountered Sherman S. Krellberg when he brought us The Lost City via his company "Super-Serials", which now sounds like a line from an episode of South Park but whatever. To freshen up this 14-year-old release, Krellberg decided that a wraparound narration would be just the thing -- isn't it always? -- and that he was just the guy to do it.

(IMDb doesn't make it 100% clear that it was him, but here's a picture of Krellberg with, we kid you not, Budd Rogers. Looks like the same guy to us.)

So there he sits, intoning banalities about UFOs, Jules Verne, da Vinci, and atomic power on the way in, while wrapping things up with a rousing "God bless America!" at feature's end. Heavy duty.

It's not really fair to judge a serial that's been hacked down from nearly 4 hours to 71 minutes -- and "hacked" really is the word: Planet Outlaws moves along at a pace so blistering that transitions are sometimes botched completely, as if the film were skipping forward (but it's not).

End of a music cue from the previous scene left in? Dialogue chopped out mid-sentence? No problem!

Even in this chopped-down form, though, it's evident that the original Buck Rogers serial had one hell of a lot of repetition. Some of that is inherent in the format (since people need to catch up), while some was no doubt done to save money.

The most amusing sign of the film's economizing ways: we don't just get scenes where actors watch previously filmed material on a screen, as recently seen in The Lucifer Complex. We get scenes where actors watch screens that show actors watching other actors on screens.

Yes, it's literally a case of "As I watched 'as I watched'..." -- which we don't envy Google Translate in its attempt to render for our non-English-speaking visitors.

In Planet Outlaws, Buck's main task is to broker an alliance with the Saturnians, in hopes that they'll help the beleaguered forces of the Hidden City to defeat evil dictator and "super-racketeer" Killer Kane (Anthony Warde).

Among Kane's many crimes, perhaps his most heinous is placing his enemies under permanent mind control, using specially designed helmets to turn them into "living robots, men robbed of all willpower". He pronounces it ro-bits, natch.

So Buck flies to Saturn, dodging blockades and security forces along the way...

...and then, later, he flies back to Earth...

...and that's pretty much how this thing goes. Back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, with every trip bringing a new stratagem to evade Kane's goons -- except the stratagem is usually just "steal a ship and hope they let you through the perimeter".

If we were ten years old in 1938, and seeing Buck Rogers in its original format, this might be exciting. Compressed down to a little over an hour and seen in one sitting, the formula becomes painfully repetitive, like one of those video games where you spend 75% of your time backtracking through landscapes you already know well.

Speaking of landscapes, apparently Saturn has a surface that looks a lot like a California state park, and you can live and breathe there without protection. Who knew?

In fairness, we're not sure when it became clear that Saturn was a gas giant, or that there was no solid surface to stand upon. Were these things known in 1938? We don't know. (This book, though interesting, doesn't help much.)

On the other hand, the Saturnian Prince Tallen doesn't carry any ethnic stereotype baggage, even though he's portrayed by Korean-American actor Philson Ahn. He's just a good guy from another planet. So in that way, Planet Outlaws is refreshingly not of its time, whether you define that time as 1939 or 1953.

Even knowing this version is hopelessly compromised, we can't say we're too excited by what the Buck Rogers serial appears to have offered. We probably shoulda just played it on the Co-lee-co, but we were too busy with a certain boy and his pancake. $500 and it's yours.

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Unknown World (1951)

Grade: D

Look, we know Unknown World means well. We're sure it does. But before committing this particular journey to the center of the earth (ahem) to the screen, couldn't you people have talked to a geologist -- or a coal miner?

Even if the screenshot above were referring to 2500 meters below sea level (and it ain't), we'd be talking about one hell of a temperature increase. The TauTona mine goes to about that depth (from a starting point of 1500 meters above sea level), and it's over 130°F down there without air conditioning.

So, Dr. Morley (Victor Kilian), if your mission is to find a place where people can live and thrive while a nuclear holocaust goes on somewhere over their heads --

-- then 2500 meters underground isn't the place to do it. And 2500 miles underground certainly isn't the place to do it, not even if you're a Horta.

Funding denied! There'll be no saving civilization for you!

The end!

...well, except it's not, since Unknown World uses the Citizen Kane trick of starting out with a lengthy newsreel item about its own characters.

So when the cash runs out, who do you turn to?

Why, everyone's favorite, of course: the good-looking, dissipated heir with a heart of gold (Bruce Kellogg). Always up for a lark, millionaire playboy Wright Thompson Jr. sponsors Morley's expedition -- as long as he gets to come with. He's got a buck or two to spare, and after all, having adventures is exactly what the buck is for, right?

So it's off to the fictional Mt. Neleh, which is apparently near Mt. Lefat...and the cryptic crossword solver in us immediately wonders: did screenwriter Millard Kaufman have a crush on a woman named Helen Tafel?

There seem to have been a number of Helen Tafels out there, and we found at least one obituary with an age-appropriate birth year attached. So maybe she was the one: ah, lost love!

Even though we're sympathetic to tales of subterranean exploration, we don't feel especially inclined to recap the slow, dull journey that Morley's team makes as they progress from the chilly surface -- see, it's windy --

-- into the bowels of the earth. Spoilers would be inevitable, you see, and we'd prefer to evit them.

At least their vehicle is a wacky combination of tunnel-boring machine (bet you wish you had that Horta now, huh?) and submarine -- though it looks more like someone hybridized a kitchen implement with a particularly baroque sex toy.

The tedium is alleviated here and there by a few decent scenes -- like when the contamination of the team's water supply makes them exceedingly grateful for some drippy stalactites.

By the way, the actor playing Dr. Morley is uncredited thanks to the blacklist, making it NO KILIAN I for him.

Nuclear wars that have no victor, and blacklists that assuredly did have a Victor: these were some of the threats facing the American 1950s, when everything so often seemed to be hanging by a thread.

Isn't it nice that we've moved past those days of political persecution and pointless saber-rattling?

Haven't we?

...oh, James Seay, did you do it again?

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.