Bargain Bin Movie Review

Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet

(1965)

Location: Best Buy

Price: $ (included two other films, "Warning from Space" and "Assignment: Outer Space")

How many hands in how many pots by how many cooks on how many stoves in how many countries does it take to ruin a movie? I think the answer is not very much, as the classic Manos: Hands of Fate showed us. However, the makers of this film, and there were many, decided to test going the other direction. This movie has had more hands on it than Paris Hilton.

Portions of this movie were originally known as "Planeta Burg" (Russian for "Planet of Storms") and had a cast of several almost not so bad Russian actors. This footage, captured with state of the art communist photo machines, is almost not grainy. In fact, on the Beer Scale of Footage Quality, this ranks "Killian's Irish Red" meaning the footage is slightly more clear than looking through a pint of Guinness.

But that's not even the best part, the best part was the footage that was spliced in when the film came to America. There are crystal clear shots of Basil Rathbone and Faith Domergue added. You can see Faith Domergue in "This Island Earth" that was so successfully riffed as the feature of "Mystery Science Theatre: 3000 The Movie."

Also, there are some scenes spliced in with American quality special effects (America was even ahead of the USSR in Z-film movie quality). From this mish mash of cinematography, the producers decided to find complete idiots to do the voice dubs of the Russian actors. At least I hope these people are idiots, they may just in fact be people with profound mental retardation, in which case their efforts are laudable.

A funny note here, the dubbing of the film was pretty bad, but what makes it hilarious is the fact that the Rathbone and Faith Domergue lines are not dubbed at all.

So, the Russian Director, the U.S. director Curtis Harrington, and the fall guy Roger Corman all added their individual specialties to this work of a thousand authors, and the result? Mud.

Wait, that's an insult to made, at least mud is consistent.

Oh yeah, I didn't even mention silly things like plots and performances and neat stuff about this film...

Maybe because there were none.