You stick out your thumb and you never know what’ll pick you up.
Some stories are complete in and of themselves. Some stories are deficient in some way, but still worthy of a view for reasons peculiar to each: quirky characters, special-effects, philosophical underpinnings, whatever it might be.
And then there’s those stories that require the audience to bring something to the party in order to rise above the muck. In all likelihood, that addition, augmentation, whatever you want to call it, is going to involve alcohol and a finely tuned sense of snark.
That’s the category Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women (1968) falls into. This is the sort of movie the viewer must charge into with a desire to critique, preferably loudly, with the remote in hand. That sense of the aesthete, the critic, will be all that saves the sanity of the viewer.
Shall we begin? Since this claims to sail from the science fiction harbor, we’ll have to say the science is execrable, as they appear to be making the trip from Earth to Venus in the matter of a couple of hours, and while they may get props for actually having a space station to stop at, the space station appears to be defying the laws of physics: it spins as one might expect, but the people do not go flying off as they should.
This guy’s even worse when dead! And don’t try to eat him, he tastes like … rubber!
The special effects are spotty, although I must admit I had to stop the movie to exclaim in delight over the forty tentacled plant that tried to eat a handy astronaut. Like many movies of this sort, more money is spent on the special effects than on the story or actors, and it can show. But other special effects, such as the dead pterosaur, were little more than unconvincing rubber.
But, really, the worst were the actors and script. The script sends these actors wandering all over the landscape, as the rescue mission stops off at convenient locations to explore various ruins, and despite all this moseying about, somehow these sometimes horny astronauts never meet up with the half-naked native ladies. There’s no conflict, none of that stuff that makes stories like this compelling, interesting, or even vaguely worthwhile. Frankly, the astronauts are more or less repellent and wooden, although we didn’t cheer for them to actually die. Our incredulity may have been interfering with a full snark display. And this script employs narration, presumably to cover up a host of sins. It made my eyes water, figuratively speaking.
And the color palette! We speculated it was an artifact of age interacting with the film, but perhaps not: maybe everyone’s hair was supposed to be green on Venus.
Mom always said I should find something nice to say, so I’ll say that John, the Robot, undoubtedly a distant cousin of the better-known Robbie the Robot, is really sort of cool. We think the best art student intern working on this project did John. Too bad John’s “self-preservation unit” ultimately did him, excuse me it, in.
And, finally, what’s this bit about “fighting mathematics?” Why is it important to fight mathematics? Or so captioning claimed it said; it’s a little garbled in this Internet version that I found, and for that matter the original on Amazon. Oh, I’m not recommending you see this piece of trash, but if you do watch it, the mathematics remark is at 31 minutes in, more or less.
