Mom, I want my own production!

Mention "director William Wilder", and people will think you're referencing the man behind Some Like It Hot, etc., while being weirdly formal about it for some reason. Right?

But no, Billy's real name was...Samuel! Meanwhile, his elder brother was also a director, whose first name was indeed William -- but he went by W. Lee Wilder.

To recap, then: Samuel is Billy, whereas William is W. Lee. And there's no Bimmy, but Mark Dacascos is lurking around here somewhere (holding up a sign saying "Will 'BE-E-E-ER!' for food").

So, it's a case like that of George Waters and Roger Barrett, wherein two closely related artists swap names for some reason (to annoy their biographers, probably).

That said, Roger and Syd have roughly equal claims to fame, while -- as we'll see in this next pair of films from spa-a-a-ace -- one of the Wilder brothers was the dramatically more accomplished of the two. Still, the "other brother" had his charms!

---

Killers from Space (1954)

Grade: D

It became a dire cliché within a few years, but it's forgivable for a 1954 film to begin with stock footage of a nuclear test. Certainly it was timely, and how else to depict such a thing without CGI (or water tanks and upside-down cameras)?

Still, having your main title come out of the mushroom cloud is probably gilding the lily:

So we have Dr. Doug Martin (Peter Graves), a scientist aboard the unfortunately-named Tarbaby Two, whose job it is to take aerial radiation measurements near the test site. Things are going fine when suddenly, his plane loses control and plummets straight into the ground.

There's no way Dr. Martin could live through a crash like that. When his wife asks if there's any hope, Col. Banks (James Seay) has to tell Mrs. Martin (Barbara Bestar) -- and her unfortunate nose (also Barbara Bestar) -- that there isn't.

But his body is nowhere to be found in the wreckage: what gives? And wait, who's that stumbling up to the guard house?

Yes, it's the man who survives the unsurvivable, revives from the unrevivable, but (to paraphrase one of the greats) "comes back different". A bunch of movies in this box set have already used this trope -- Night of the Blood Beast and The Man with Two Lives come to mind -- but the approach in Killers from Space is a bit more Manchurian Candidate meets Freejack, if you catch our drift.

Either way, as his friend and doctor Major Clift (Shepard Menken) notes, "Your plane was completely demolished, the pilot burned to death -- and you show up, the picture of health!" In fact, the only outward evidence that anything at all has happened to Dr. Martin is a brand-new, yet well-healed surgical scar on his chest. 

One nice thing about Killers from Space is that the other characters aren't idiots. They haven't even seen The Twilight Zone, yet only 10 minutes into the film, they're already asking questions like "Did you ever stop to think that perhaps...this Dr. Martin isn't really the Dr. Martin?"

How many times have we seen movies -- or episodes of Star Trek -- where we tore our hair out at characters' contrived obliviousness to such things? Not so with Killers from Space.

Still, Doc Martin seems like himself, knows all the right things to say, and is one of the two key men on this nuclear test project. Couldn't we just reinstate him? What do you think, mysterious googly eyes that just materialized on Venetian blinds for some reason?

The best part of Killers from Space happens over the next 20 minutes or so, as Dr. Martin's behavior becomes more and more erratic, starting with night terrors...

...and ending in acts that could easily be prosecuted as treason, or at least espionage.

In another film, or a half-hour Twilight Zone episode, Dr. Martin's spiral of self-destruction would take up most of the running time. But we're not even halfway through Killers from Space when Dr. Martin is cornered, captured, given sodium amytal, and asked to recount the events before and after his plane crash.

Now, if you call your movie Killers from Space and don't want to get hunted down by angry filmgoers, sooner or later you're obligated to fulfill the equation. You could throw in meteors, alien microbes, UFOs, whatever you like, even total and obvious nonsense. But it has to be "from spa-a-a-ace".

So, what do F. Lee Wilder and his scriptwriter son Myles have in store for us? Check it:

It's the Marty Feldman family reunion...in spa-a-a-ace!

Well, no, it's actually underground, and (if you haven't guessed it already) this is where things get very silly. At first it's the good kind of silly, because you get things like the above, or this:

Or this:

And heck, if all this amounted to Googly Eyes: The Movie!, then fair enough. By this point the film's already put googlies on a car accident, so doubling down on the proposition would seem reasonable.

But instead, Killers from Space decides to throw its lot in with another, less noble trope of 1950s science-fiction movies...

...the "let's use close-up footage of a common animal or insect, and pretend it's a giant beast" one.

We've seen this sort of thing before, of course (sad little mushrooms that we are), but Killers from Space provides the most interminable example we've ever seen. It's hard to believe the core sequence only lasts about 5 minutes -- because those were some long, long minutes.

In many ways the second half of Killers from Space bears an odd resemblance to Teenagers from Outer Space. Just as in Tom Graeff's film, we've got hospitals, giant arthropods, and power stations as keystones in our plot.

But without charismatic leads or a sweet sensibility, there's nothing to sustain Killers from Space once its plot deflates. It's far from the worst, but just doesn't pay off on what could have been an intriguing premise.

By the way, anyone notice that W. Lee Wilder (or his cinematographer) really has a thing for Venetian blinds? They're literally in the last shot of the film, which makes for a nice symmetry with its beginning.

---

Phantom from Space (1953)

Grade: C-

OK, we complained about the "giant" footage in Killers. But Phantom from Space begins with 20 of the most unpromising minutes we've ever encountered in a film, at least since our Umbrellahead journey began.

Once again, we start out with stock footage and voice-over narration -- the perennial sign of a director whose acquaintance with "show, don't tell" is limited to strip joints -- and then throw in some compasses pirouetting around maps, for kicks.

The MacGuffin, such as it is: an unidentified UFO has streaked across the Pacific Northwest, and is now interfering with radio and TV reception. Send out the mobile units with their detector dishes!

Show their parked cars at bizarre angles for absolutely no discernible reason!

One of the mobile units is flagged down by a distraught woman, Betty Evans, whose aging husband and (ahem) "friend" were just attacked by a mysterious, helmet-wearing man.

Mr. Evans dies, but the friend, Pete, pulls through with merely a bump on the head...and investigators suspect that sketchy extracurriculars are going on between him and Mrs. Evans.

And maybe they are! To the film's credit, it never does rule that one out -- and, if they hadn't been already, there's pretty much no chance they don't start banging after this.

The cops go after Pete aggressively, especially once he claims the occupant of the helmet appeared to have no head. Handed a fish story like that, they feel comfortable writing the whole affair off as "one of those things...pretty girl, older husband, young boarder."

But then new bodies turn up, and new testimonials confirm Pete and Betty's story. Hmmm, could all this have anything to do with the UFO? And what are "Ten-Ring Tips", anyway?

(Answer: it's a Smith & Wesson poster, apparently very collectible nowadays.)

What's the logical next step? Bring in the military and the scientists, so they can speculate at each other in claustrophobic rooms with (once again) lots of Venetian blinds, and offer up lines like "This guy's walking around in a monkey suit...killing people."

All this had us groaning in dismay, and bracing ourselves for yet another mind-numbing cheapo with tons of talky exposition and very little action -- you know, like The Snow Creature (also a W. Lee Wilder joint).

But then something happened that was totally unexpected: Phantom from Space became...engaging. Not good, exactly, but taut enough to hold our interest and keep us from guessing exactly where the narrative was going next.

And the dialogue had a few crisp moments, like the moment when scientist Dr. Wyatt (Rudolph Anders) introduces sexy scientist Barbara Randall (Noreen Nash) to Lt. Bowers (Harry Landers). Noting Bowers's Tex Avery-like response, Dr. Wyatt adds a quick and pointed addendum:

"I don't believe you have met my assistant, Barbara Randall...(pause)...it's Mrs. Randall, Lieutenant!"

And that's the end of that: no subplot, no sexual tension, no convenient killing of Mr. Randall by the monster. Who knows if Bowers had a chance if things were different, but they're not, and that's kind of refreshing.

On the other hand, Major Andrews (James Seay again!) certainly doesn't have a chance if -- as IMDb's "Goofs" page suspects -- he unleashed a silent tide of flatulence on-camera. That would explain why, in the middle of an innocuous scene, Noreen Nash suddenly shoots him a series of very dirty looks. James Seay, disappointer of women and their noses.

Unfortunately most of Phantom's intriguing threads turn out to be little more than shaggy-dog stories...

...like the rhythmic, coded tapping of a pair of scissors, which had us guessing: is it the atomic number of an element? A known mathematical series? A mangled version of the intro to "YYZ" by Rush?

Alas, the film never bothers to tell us -- which adds an element of realism, we suppose, but also makes for a less satisfying story.

Still, at least we get some more weird-ass camera angles.

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.

---

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.