Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women (1968)

Absolutely brilliant

I like movies that are aware of what they are selling... without [any] greater aspirations than to make people laugh and that's it.

It really made me laugh, but for some moments I was tearing up because I could relate so much.

Let me be very fair here, this is not the best movie in my opinion. But, this movie is fun, it has purpose and is very enjoyable to watch.

****SPOILERS**** Actually a composite of three different movies spanning almost ten years the film "Voage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women" was famed film director Peter Bogdanovich's first film that he also narrated. It has to do with a manned mission to Venus that got stranded together with its US crew that crashed on it in the near future, some 30 years after the movie was made, in 1998. With a rescue crew of astronauts sent there on a rescue mission they run into a number of obstacles including this flying prehistoric reptile, Terah, who's considered by the local population, sexy and mostly blond well endowed young women, as a God.With the help of their all purpose robot, Robot John, the rescue crew finally track down the missing astronauts,Kern & Sherman, that planet Venus blows it's top. With Robot John after heroically rescuing the rescue crew, Andre Ferneau & Hans Walter, parishes in a lava flow from an erupting nearby volcano. As for the women lead by beach blond Moana they soon realize that their God Terah, who was killed by the earthling astronauts, was a false idol and destroy, by stoning it, the graven image that they constructed of it.Very confusing at times with all the added footage added on to it the film "Voage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women" dose keep you entertained in how cheesy, especially in its special effects, it is as well as the skimpily clad women, lead by Mamie Van Doren, using sea shells as bras in it. There's also the annoying narration by Peter Bogdanovich who instead of making some sense of the story confuses it even more by not letting the actors in it speak their lines by over-talking them. It's also confusing when we see the spaceship that the US astronauts are traveling in having the Soviet Union Red Star painted on it in footage, inserted into it, from the 1962 Soviet sponsored movie Planeta Bur. P.S Re-released years later as "THe Gill Women".

The second time at bat Hollywood director, Peter Bogdanovich took a story written by Henry Ney and created a movie entitled " Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women. " Upon viewing it, try not to laugh too hard at the many fallacies and inaccuracies in the movie. The star of the movie is one time sex goddess Mamie Van Doren who turned many a males' heads in 1968. The story is of a dreamy eyed astronaut who joins a rescue ship to the Planet Venus. Upon landing they immediately destroy a flying reptile whom the primitive women worship as their god. Thereafter the men are plagued by incessant rain, volcanoes, lava and floods. The team never meet the prehistoric woman, clad only in Bell-bottom skin tight pants and sea-shell bras. However, they do hear their siren call and continue to seek their comrades with a poor man's idea of a robot as a space aid. The movie is low grade and originally made by the Russians and were it not for the hot previews which promised it was for adults only, few would have attended it. As it is, the film is recommended to anyone too board to sleep and wants to stay awake. **

Well... where to begin? Any remarks about the bulk of this film's content, i've already made in my review for "Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet", for in true no-budget tradition, Roger Corman and chums basically rereleased the same movie (which was in itself a redubbed cannibalisation of the Russian space opera "Storm Planet"), with some newly-shot additional footage.This new stuff entirely concerns the titular (in every sense!) women, the scrumptious Mamie Van Doren and assorted other leggy lovelies, lounging around the rocky shores of Venus in shell bikinis, eating raw fish, and emitting a curiously familiar siren song. If i were in a kinder - or drunker - mood, i might try to compare the way in which this film occurs 'in the wings' of the earlier movie to Stoppard's "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead". But i won't, for that way lies madness.This was all enjoyable enough, if very familiar apart from the half-baked clam-shelled clambake. However, i became unduly concerned towards the films conclusion when Ms. Van Doren psychically told her telepathic friends that their heretofore deity, the great dinosaur god Ptera, was no longer good enough, because "there is a greater god!". As they hurled stones and tore down their effigy of the late pteranodon lord, i got a sinking feeling. Surely brief exposure to human (Russian dubbed-as-American) spacemen hadn't suddenly converted the Venusians to the Judeo-Christian god? The idea of them "seeing the error of their ways" and becoming merely spaceborne Americans had me groaning internally. If they were to suddenly convert to an Earth religion, why not Buddhism, or Shintoism? Or, indeed, any at all?I need not have worried. As they pulled the magma-petrified remains of John the Robot from the mud and set him up as a shrine, i began to smile. One god's as good as another, after all. As another spaceborne robot, Marvin the Paranoid Android, said at the end of "So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish":'You know... i think i'm quite happy about that'.

Roger Corman's skills at quick-buck film-making are legendary and need no introduction to B-movie fans, but still, you have to particularly admire the tricks that ole Roger pulled off to make this one come together. Back in the '60s he bought the rights to a Russian made sci-fi film that nobody saw called "Planet of Storms", cut it into bits, added some new shots and dialogue, and re-edited the whole mess into two separate movies!! 1968's "Voyage to the Planet of the Prehistoric Women" (phew, that's a mouthful isn't it?) is the second of two films using "Planet of Storms" footage (the other being "Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet," without the "Women") and it tells the story (told via flashback) of an ill-fated space voyage to Venus, where one set of astronauts crash lands on the planet; they (and the second team sent to rescue them) are then beset by volcanic eruptions, floods, man-eating plants and giant lizard attacks. These pheonomena are apparently controlled by the "Prehistoric Women," a group of pterodactyl-worshipping, scantily-clad blondes who sit atop a mountain causing all of the "invaders'" woes via telepathy. Since the astronauts' footage all comes from the Russian film (hence the film being told in voice-over/narration style, which covers up the fact that all of the actors were speaking Russian), they are never seen on screen at the same time as the Prehistoric Women, whose scenes were shot and inserted into the existing film by then-newbie director Peter Bogdanovich under a pseudonym (Bogdanovich, of course, would go on to direct such acclaimed, high brow classics as "Paper Moon," "The Last Picture Show" and "Mask" during the '70s and '80s - but hell, I guess everybody has got to start somewhere!). The end result may not make a whole hell of a lot of sense, but it's actually quite clever how Corman was able to tinker a whole new story out of two separate sets of film. The "Prehistoric Women" (a group of seven or eight Space Babes led by then-fading '60s blonde bombshell Mamie Van Doren, who still looks quite fetching here in a seashell bra and tight white slacks) only appear in about a quarter of the film's run time, yet they got top billing because Roger knew that teenagers were going to be sucked in by the promise of T&A in the title...the clever bastard!!! Whatever it cost to make this movie, I'm sure Roger made it back in one weekend on the drive-in circuit. I wonder what the makers of the original Russian film thought of the "re-editing" of their work, but then if the film hadn't passed through Corman's and Bogdanovich's hands we probably wouldn't be talking about it today. Slow moving and awkward as it may be, "Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women" is still an enjoyably terrible slice of Z-Grade cinema at its best (or worst, depending on how you look at it). The film is available on DVD at a dollar store near you in a scratchy, washed out public domain print (the color on my copy is so bleached that the movie nearly looks black and white), which only serves to increase the surrealism factor of this odd little movie. God bless Roger Corman, and God Bless America.