Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women

Like many of the reviewers, I watched this after the "Prehistoric Planet" film. I was astonished that there were no changes to any of the previous footage, other than the Bogdanovich voice over and the disappearance of Faith Domergue (Marcia). What has been added is a set of blonde women who hold sway on Venus and worship a Pterodactyl. They have scallop shell bras and hip hugger pants with bell bottoms made of a sheer material. I do remember that Mamie Van Doren was really quite a good looking lady and these really are some attractive women. But they never really speak. They are telepathic. They are there to show that they actually caused much of what happened to the Astronauts in the previous movie. This had to be made for the drive-in crowd to neck and ignore, simply to fill space on a triple feature. It certainly wasn't worth much time and effort.

Soon after landing on Venus a team of American astronauts are attacked by a creature resembling a pterosaur. In order to do defend themselves they kill it. However, Venus is inhabited by a race of women who worshipped the flying creature, and who decide to kill the astronauts in revenge.

This movie started life as a 1962 Russian film called Planeta Bur. US producer Roger Corman got hold of it and decided to overdub it with American actors for a US release. His first attempt met with a very limited success so he tried again. This time he hired a young Peter Bogdanovich to shoot some extra scenes, telling him "AIP won't buy it unless we stick some girls in it." So, Bogdanovich hired blonde bombshell Mamie Van Doren, plus half a dozen or so other blondes, and shot their inserts over five days (their roles mainly involving reclining on the shoreline of a Venusian ocean, whilst posing in skin-tight pants and tops made-up of two strategically placed seashells). Because of this there is no direct onscreen interaction between the women and the astronauts, and as a result the film inevitably feels very disjointed. In its favour, there is a strange dreamlike quality to the scenes on the planet surface, that put me in mind of Mario Bava's (obviously much better) Planet of the Vampires. And the apparent free availability of modern-day hair products and makeup on Venus is worth a laugh every time we get a closeup of one of the centrefold-Venusians. That said, it's a poor movie, and really worth seeing only as a curio. Despite her limited 'role', Van Doren was front and centre for all marketing for obvious reasons. 3.5/10.

This film is so awful it's brilliant.

The film is actually a re-edit of a Soviet science fiction film with extra footage of young American girls. Very low budget. The two sets of actors never actually meet.

All the voices are dubbed on afterwards. This covers up the fact that the astronauts are speaking Russian. The "Prehistoric women" communicate through thought waves, so none of them have to talk and act at the same time! I watched this on Sumo TV in the UK. The version I saw still had all the cinema adds spliced in. The adverts for ice cream, popcorn and hot chocolate were still there. There was also an advert for CocaCola.

The whole thing looks like someone had filmed the thing from the stalls on an old Cine camera. Picture blurred and fuzzy, colour almost bleached away.

Unfortunately none of the US actors ever went on to do anything of any significance. The leading lady, Mamie Van Doren, seems to have built her reputation around being a former Hollywood starlet who was supposed to be the next Marylin Monroe and spent five years dating Howard Hughes, from the age of 15! Directed by Peter Bogdanovich (Famous director and also Dr. Elliot Kupferberg in The Sopranos TV series)

Any prospective actor/producer/director should see some of this.

In 1965 Roger Corman produced Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet, and in 1967 he produced (uncredited) Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women (VPPW). But the similarities do not end there. Both films are essentially recycles of Planeta Burg, a great Soviet sci fi adventure from the 1950s. Most of the footage from both films - and ALL of the coherent and interesting footage - comes from the original Soviet film.

VPPW is Peter Bogdanovich's first directorial effort, and unlike some of his later films, it's entirely disposable.

It is not the first, nor the last, time that an American director essentially plagiarized a good foreign film, but it is among one of the worst examples of Ameicanization I have ever seen. Even compared to what was done to Gojira, La Femme Nikita, Wings of Desire and Open Your Eyes, this is close to an all-time low.

Like the previous Voyage to a Prehistoric planet, but less seamlessly, Bogdanovich simply took a little new footage and added it to the original film. The story is essentially an adventure set on the planet Venus, where two cosmonauts and a robot await rescue, and follows the cosmonauts and their rescue team through a series of harrowing adventures involving giant carnivorous plants, lizard men, and geological hazards. Planeta Burg also introduced a little mystery by showing some evidence that Venus may once have been inhabited by an intelligent species capable of producing works of art.

The most interesting aspect of Bogdanovich's retelling of this story is his exploration of this mystery. It seems that the last remnants of Venusian civilization are scantily clad telepathic women who worship, among other things, a Pteradactyl which their earthling visitors have murdered. These women have apparently figured out how to reproduce without men, and to produce cotton pants and hats for themselves out of Venus' barren wastelands, but are otherwise quite primitive. Remarkably, despite the fact that there do not appear to be any Venusian men, the gods the women worship are referred to as "him". You get the picture, yes?

The basic idea of examining the Venusian perspective on the events depicted in Planeta Burg was a good one. But this was, apparently, the only good idea involved in the design of this film.

This film is worth seeing if you ever felt compelled to see Mamie van Doren chewing on a freshly caught raw fish, or if you are a fan of Planeta Burg and just have to see how it has been butchered in this final act of cinematic violence. Otherwise, I can't recommend it.

The special effects are way below the quality of those which appear in the 1950s film, the added content is poorly acted, badly edited, and adds very little to the film.

Director Peter Bogdanovich had to start somewhere; following second unit work on Roger Corman's "The Wild Angels," Corman allowed the hardworking novice an opportunity to do a feature film utilizing the exact same Russian stock footage used by Curtis Harrington for his 1965 "Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet," a 1962 entry titled "Planeta bur" (Planet of Storms). It's no stretch to assume that the first-time director just didn't have his heart in his work, as all of his newly shot footage features a dozen bikini-clad models not required to speak, everything narrated by Bogdanovich himself. There is no integration between the alien mermaids and the Russian characters, so the whole thing just sits there, aimlessly meandering from one crisis to another. Granted, I had just viewed Curtis Harrington's work on his "Voyage," so all the Soviet footage was already familiar to me, but at least Harrington had Basil Rathbone and Faith Domergue actually communicating with the Russian astronauts, their scenes already dubbed into English. The blame here simply lies with Roger Corman, who felt the need for another retread rather than something truly original. "Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women" carries a 1967 copyright, and at least Corman was satisfied enough to grant Bogdanovich the freedom to do a feature starring Boris Karloff, who supposedly owed Roger two days work on a previous contract; we can all be grateful that the result was the superlative "Targets," shot in Dec 1967, an achievement that even "The Last Picture Show" couldn't top (some may feel free to disagree). Pittsburgh's Chiller Theater aired "Prehistoric Planet" only 3 times, "Prehistoric Women" 4 times (maybe it was the bikinis), all from July 1969 to July 1972.