Women of the Prehistoric Planet

The chance to comment on this film(?) finally made me register.

I saw this late at night and watched with delight, wondering just how bad it could get. That was thirty years ago, so if you're looking for accurate scene descriptions and dialogue quotes, don't expect them here. But here's my hazy, loving memories.

1. Wendell Corey, playing the captain of the space ship, half plastered and obviously paying off a bet with a one afternoon performance, standing in front of a blank wall with a porthole in it while someone on the other side waves a sparkler.

Corey: "Looksh like another meteor shtorm..."

2. The spaceship crashing in the swamp... The miniature they used must hve been about the size of a pencil stub, since it went "bloop" and tossed up one single drop of water which on that scale would have been considerably bigger than a bungalow.

3. The prehistoric woman herself, a dark, hirsute beauty, wearing a bearskin teddy and looking hopefully at the director for direction after each line of dialogue.

4. One set, obviously built while they still had twenty seven dollars to burn, that consisted of a cave full of giant toadstools and human skeletons. After sneaking around outside for what seems to be several days, a patrol from the spaceship enters.

The patrol leader's perplexed comment: "There's something suspicious about this place..."

That's where I lost it completely and rolled around on the floor.

Well, you had to be there.

With a title like "Women of the Prehistoric Planet" I envisioned a Lost World type movie in which scantily-clad amazonian beauties ride dinosaurs, fight against half-animal savages and a harsh, unforgiving environment. But with only one women, some forced perspective lizards that com-bust on impact, and a bunch of white guys straight out of the U.S. Navy, one can only wonder what the creators of this movie were thinking when they came up with the title.

To be fair, there are some legitimate scientific ideas that are dealt with in the movie, even if the writers don't understand how they really work. For example, the writers were correct in saying that when you travel near the speed of light time slows down, so that a three week journey for the astronauts aboard the spaceship is perceived by those on the planet as taking eighteen years. However, the perception of the people down on the planet has nothing to do with the speed of the planet's rotation but the way in which the planet's matter distorts the space time continuum.

The real plot of this movie is that a spaceship (Cosmos III) is hijacked by the primitive Centurions (a.k.a., non-white people) who probably perform menial domestic services for the crew aboard the spaceship. The ship crash lands on an unexplored planet with only a few survivors. Another ship in the vicinity (Cosmos IV?), moving at nearly the speed of light, travels to rescue the survivors (a three week journey on the spaceship, but an eighteen year wait on the planet). Once on the ground a group of idiots looking like U.S. Navy officers are dispatched to find the crash site. Meanwhile, a beautiful Centurion girl (the ultra-sexy Irene Tsu as Linda) wanders off and encounters a mysterious stranger named Tang who is also a Centurion. Obviously, he's the son of the survivors of the crash eighteen years earlier.

The story of Linda and Tang is probably the most interesting aspect of this movie. Through their adventures together they fall in love but must still deal with the tension of growing up in two very different environments. The other aspect of the plot has to do with clumsy idiots falling off logs into acid pools and shooting at anything that moves with their ultra high tech .44 pistols. The ending of this movie will surprise no one.

There's only one woman featured prominently in this movie...and she isn't from the prehistoric planet. What a rip-off!

There are a couple of hokey effects but you'll want to hit the fast-forward button to see them. The majority of this film, like so many bad sci-fi movies of the 50's and 60's, is extended walking sequences! No one ever imagined that a prehistoric planet would be this boring. Never did a film need process shots of alligators and lizards more. Or women, for that matter!

However, it is worth noting that this is the movie that started the popular "Hi-Keeba!!" catch phrase on MST3K.

There's also twist ending in this movie that the average viewer will be able to spot about 2 minutes into the film. John Agar's in this film, too. 'Nuff said.

And it's a real pity that it was in the first national, Comedy Channel (pre-Comedy Central) season of MST3K (before Josh Weinstein left to work on THE SIMPSONS, and before Mike Nelson signed on as a utility actor), so it presumably won't be reissued on home video in their version, while my off-cable VHS tape is on its last legs. The cast makes the film, as several have noted here, as does the twist ending you know M. Shyamalan is waiting to spring on us again any film now...I won't reveal it, but its probably the oldest cliché in bad written SF, so ridiculously hack that even the usually shameless film industry hasn't bothered with it much over the decades.

However, quite aside from seeing Stuart Margolin beginning his long, deft, typecast career, and Robert Ito with surely no inkling of his similarly long television career to come, for this viewer, the female cast, led in this regard by Irene Tsu and Merry Anders, is remarkably lovely. Arthur C. Pierce, truly an undersung contributor to the Whacked tradition of film-making, provided us with so much in his few mid-'60s features. It's a pity we haven't given him more attention...or, perhaps, not. But these are wonderfully weird (not least in their utter lack of realization of how schlock they are), and often hard to find, films.

One of the pleasures of watching cheap sixties sci-fi movies was that they did the future so much better in those days, as witness the snug ski pants and stylish hairstyles worn by the women in this glossy colour quickie with cardboard sets and hilarious monsters that must have cost several dollars and evokes Maria Montez rather than Stanley Kubrick.

It's pretty awful and the special effects may not be very special but it's always a pleasure to see the lovely Merry Anders while the discussion of the effects of time paradox display at least a rudimentary knowledge of science fiction concepts on someone's part.