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Beneath was the best Planet of the Apes film bar none. Everything was bigger and better this time around: bigger sets, more gorillas, the whole of New York instead of a mere Statue of Liberty, and, best of all, faceless, telepathic mutants than can kill with the mind. Yes, I was once ten years old.

Watched again with many years of hindsight, it's clear that, while entertaining, Beneath was produced without anything approaching artistry. The ultimate in sequels, it tries to tell the same story twice as big, but with only half the success. Until Battle came along and picked the flesh off Apes' rotting carcass this was the worst sequel because it did nothing new with the format. Even the working title - Planet of the Apes Revisited - betrays the lack of thought and the desire for finance that went into this one.

A virtually identical plotline rattles along at a fair pace, meaning all subtlety is jettisoned. The allegories are also confused by not really being allegories at all. Look at the metaphor for anti-war protestors by casting chimps as ... er, anti-war protestors. A look at how man often judges another man on the colour of his skin is alluded to ... er, by having an ape judging a man on the colour of his skin. (On this note, perversely for a film that purports liberal satire, the only one of the mutants to demonstrate real cruelty was Don Pedro Colley, the sole black character in the film. And despite its worthiness, I don't think I've ever seen another film where a man's credit is given as "Negro"). However, I did have to smile at the chimp that punningly complains about "gorilla brutality".

The decreased budget (a sensible studio idea to cut the finance of the sequels to a hit movie) shows with some of the ape extras having decidedly ropy masks in the crowd scenes. The opening of the picture also recaps the first, cannily highlighting the glaring difference between Roddy McDowall's and David Watson's performances as Cornelius. Watson, standing in for an absent McDowall, does reasonably well but really doesn't look anything like him, even under latex. Note too how all the ape masks give the actors lisps, something I never noticed before. Never mind apes, anyone would think James Franciscus had landed on the planet of the Pertwees. There's also some abysmal back projection work when Franciscus is wrestling on top of the horsedrawn carriage. The mutants are pretty good, though their prayers to "The Holy Fallout" are a little silly. Why do they wear human masks anyway? Where do they make them? I dunno, I don't make the rules up, do I?

Of course, the main problem is the pointless game of one-upmanship it plays with its source. There's no longer any element of surprise that this is Earth, so the ruined monuments, nice as they are, no longer have any great effect. It misses the point, also: the Statue of Liberty is not just a relic, but a symbol. New York Subway is just where people caught trains. And as impressive as the effects are, if not directed well – which they aren't, particularly – then it becomes fatuous.

It's weird how all four sequels were made within a year of each other, yet at least two of them tried something new. Beneath came two years after the original yet has a rehashed "in it for the money" feel all the way through, right down to its abrupt, slightly unsatisfactory climax. Yet despite the many, many faults I've levelled at it, Beneath the Planet of the Apes is still a very enjoyable film. Not in the sense of the first, which genuinely had something to say, but in the guise of pulp SF then this sequel is well worth seeing. In fact, despite the slating I've given it, I still awarded it 6/10.

James Franciscus gets top billing on this sequel, but producer Arthur Jacobs fortunately entrusted this (and the instalment that came after) to the sophisticated imagination of writer Paul Dehn, who nearly twenty years earlier had already shared an Oscar for his previous nuclear nightmare 'Seven Days to Noon'; and also wisely brought in Leonard Rosenman to write the new score.

'All Things Bright and Beautiful' will never be the same again once you've heard it chanted by the telepathic, cave-dwelling, bomb-worshiping mutants ("Glory to the Bomb and the holy fallout") who bear an eerie similarity to the ghouls Charlton Heston soon afterwards had to deal with in 'The Omega Man'.

Direction is by Ted Post, who also a good job on the underrated Harry Callahan dystopia 'Magnum Force'; while Linda Harrison once again resembles Raquel Welch's chic sixties cave girl in 'One Million Years BC'.

Beneath the planet of the apes is a continuation of the first.Astronaut Brent is sent on a rescue mission to find Taylor and his whereabouts.Brent ends up on the same strange planet that Taylor did and is captured by the apes and suffers the same faith as Taylor did only in a shorter version.Brent also discovers a mysterious under ground place where mutants worship an atomic bomb as their god.Little does Brent know the ape army is trying to track him down and kill him.Brent gets reunited with Taylor but the ape the ape army are getting closer and time is running out.

Some bad acting and stupid parts of this film made me give it a 6 rating.This is a classic but to me its losing some of its magic.Recommended to Planet of the Apes fans,sci-fi fans and people who finds Planet of the Apes interesting.This is enjoyable to some but not all.I hope the next sequels are as good as this.

In terms of follow ups to surprisingly great films that should never have had a sequel, Beneath the Planet of the Apes is almost the exact kind of movie that it should have been to come after Planet of the Apes. It expands the world of the film in a new and interesting direction, continues the feeling of weirdness that helped the original, and even moves the thematic ideas of the original into even darker directions. However, to even get to that the movie repeats the original, almost beat for beat, in its first half, introducing a new, not terribly necessary, protagonist, and spends so little time actually establishing the conflict that defines the second half that it all feels like wasted potential more than anything else.

The problems originated from the fact that Charlton Heston gave a flat refusal to starring in the sequel, eventually being talked into working on the film for two weeks total as long as his character of Taylor died. So, the writer and director decided that the best way forward was to give us a new astronaut, Brent, who had followed Taylor into deep space and ended up in the same place at the same time. That means that all of the revelations about the planet need to happen again to a character who's a full movie behind the audience. He finds Nova, follows her to Ape City where he discovers the upside down nature of the place, meets Zira and Cornelius for reasons, and then escapes again. At the movie's halfway point, he ends up in an abandoned New York City subway station and has his revelation in much smaller and less visually impressive environs than Taylor got at the end of the previous film.

Along with this action is some really ill-defined brewing conflict between the apes led by Dr. Zaius and General Ursus, a gorilla, and the Forbidden Zone. There's a line of dialogue about how scouts had gone missing which seems to be the sole motivation for taking an entire army into the Forbidden Zone, and it's thin stuff. The thing is that Dr. Zaius spoke in ways, at the end of the first movie, that seemed to indicate that the ruling class of the ape society knew a lot more about history and the Forbidden Zone than they told everyone else. It would have been easy enough to make the connection that Zaius knew of the mutant humans under the ruins of New York City, but not in any great detail, and assumed that Taylor was part of them, creating the argument that the mutants were expanding into ape territory, providing the impetus for the entire action. As it is, we spend so little time with them and so much time with Brent discovering what the audience already knows, that it all ends up as thin as possible.

The movie doesn't even really feel like a sequel until the second half once Brent and Nova go deeper into New York City through the subway. It feels like that's the actual beginning of the movie, and it should have been Taylor going in instead of this new character Brent. And the second half of the film has a bunch of stuff that I love. The mutants who worship an atomic bomb? Yes, please. I love that. They're wearing masks that look like real skin to hide their mutated selves beneath? It doesn't make a whole lot of sense, but I love it. The religious ritual that's held in the remnants of St. Patrick's Cathedral and uses Catholic prayers with bomb and fallout replacing any mention of God? I love it even more. It's the exact kind of twisted stuff that 60s and 70s science fiction excelled at. Another thing that that era of science fiction loved was nihilism (which made Star Trek stand out because it was hopeful in a sea of nihilistic science fiction), and the movie ending with Taylor blowing up the world because screw it, it all sucks, is something I love.

Not everything in the second half is great, though. The use of Brent requires a late introduction to Taylor that feels out of place. There's a fight scene that doesn't really work for me. And, most important of all, the conflict between ape and mutant was so thinly established that when the gorilla army shows up and attacks, it feels really empty. There are some surprisingly great visuals here like when the gorilla army is marching into St. Patrick's with the sole remaining mutant standing before the golden doomsday bomb, but they're empty because, again, the conflict itself is empty.

And, to top it off, I think that the inclusion of Brent wasn't just unnecessary from a storytelling perspective, but it was unnecessary from a production perspective as well. Some judicious use of body doubles and scheduling could have gotten Charlton Heston to carry his part of the movie completely in just a couple weeks of filming. The thing is that the ape society stuff needed to stand on its own without a human involved, having Taylor get lost in the mutant city early, spending time with Dr. Zaius to convincingly build the conflict with the mutants in the Forbidden Zone, and then leaning into the conflict as a continuation of the damnation of humanity that is the first film. I think it could have worked really quite well if there wasn't a need to remake the film unnecessarily in the first half.

Oh well, it's a mixed bad, but it definitely has stuff that works. Unfortunately, that stuff is outnumbered by the more mediocre material that supports it. It's far from one of the worst sequels to a great film ever made. It has too many interesting ideas and visuals to dismiss it completely, but it could have been better.

This film is a direct follow on from the original as we follow the journey on horseback by Charlton Heston (Taylor) and Linda Harrison (Nova). At the same time, astronaut James Franciscus (Brent) and his captain crash land on the Planet of the Apes, also in the Forbidden Zone. Only Franciscus survives to explore the territory and meets up with the solitary Harrison. They ride together as we see flashback memories from Harrison as to the fate of Heston and Franciscus discovers where he has landed and sees the local residents. This duo are captured but eventually discover another society living beneath the Planet of the Apes.

I like how this film follows on directly from the original but it doesn't make sense for Franciscus to be part of a search party looking for Heston. I assumed he was part of a fleet that set off at the same time as Heston. That's the way it would make sense. In this film the gorillas take charge from the orangutans (or however you spell it) and force a military campaign. The chimpanzees, who were the intelligent group of doctors and scientists in the original, have now been down-graded to student-type time-wasters who carry out sit-down protests. That was obviously meant to mirror the anti-Vietnam war protests going on in real life at the time, but I found it a crass touch to be put into this movie.

However, the ending, once again, makes you think. Whilst the original film left you wondering about the origins and timeline of mankind, this film guides you specifically to what our destiny is. It has a very strong impact, especially in these times with lunatic leaders like Putin and Little Rocket Man from North Korea in possession of nuclear missiles, and other societies like Pakistan on the verge of developing them for themselves. I'm afraid the outcome for the human race is inevitable as, in time, it just takes one maniac to take everyone out. I just hope it is not during my lifetime.

I watched this film and then realized there is no point in denying yourself things that you like or that you may never get the opportunity to experience again. So, I immediately ordered a Chinese take-away as I like the crunchy water chestnuts that you get. It could be my last!