In the mid-1960s, Roger Corman got hold of Pavel Klushantsev’s Russian science fiction film Planeta Bur/Planet of Storms (1962), strip mined it for its effects sequences and fashioned two entirely new films from it with newly added footage shot by interesting directors who wisely hid behind pseudonyms. This one was overseen by “John Sebastian” – actually Curtis Harrington who shot his new material at the same time as was making Queen of Blood (1966), which itself pilfered another Soviet SF film, Mechte navstrechu (1963), for effects. The similarly titled Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women was credited to “Derek Thomas”, actually Peter Bogdanovich, and followed in 1968.
In the year 2020, a three-ship mission to the planet Venus is struck by tragedy when one of the craft is destroyed by a meteorite. The mission is being overseen by Professor Hartman (Basil Rathbone) from moon base Lunar 7. Despite the accident he orders commander Brendan Lockhart (Vladimir Yemelyanov) to continue the descent to the planet’s surface, leaving Dr Kern (Georgi Teikh) and Marsha Evans (Faith Domergue, replacing Kyunna Ignatova who played the similarly named Masha in the original film) to monitor things from orbit. On the surface, the explorers, accompanied by their robot, John, encounter man-sized lizard monsters, giant dinosaurs, carnivorous plants and a flying monster that resembles a huge pterosaur. All the while they hear a mysterious, Siren-like song coming from the distance and find evidence of a long-lost civilisation before they are forced to retreat during a violent storm and a volcanic eruption.
Make no mistake, Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet is a pretty poor film but it’s not as bad as you might have expected, due entirely to the quality of the original Russian footage. It’s a silly but surprisingly quite engaging film. The Planeta Bur footage looks like money well spent and there’s a nicely old-fashioned pulp SF magazine story feel to it all. The newly shot footage looks like it was shot in the corner of Corman’s office and dressed with whatever hardware, props and old bits of set they had lying around from Queen of Blood where poor Basil Rathbone, Faith Domergue and a handful of extras, who all worked for just half a day to film their scenes, work hard to fill in the gaps in the plot by explaining to each other what’s going on via radio. And yet it sort of works after a decidedly low-rent, unambitious and somewhat ramshackle fashion.
The English dialogue is mostly awful (“I can’t imagine anyone in their right mind exploring Venus”) and the dubbing of the Russian footage is predictably atrocious but at least we get to see most of Planeta Bur with is splendid design and effects – Robot John is a wonderfully clunky bit of kit that looks like the not-quite-finished prototype for Robbie from Forbidden Planet (1956). The surface of Venus of course looks nothing like what we now know it to really be like (details of the planet’s surface weren’t fully understood until the 1970s when radar scans revealed what lay beneath the planet’s thick blanket of clouds) but it’s a nicely rendered alien landscape nonetheless, a primal hellhole constantly shrouded in mist, populated by a wild menagerie of lethal flora and fauna and about as bleak and uninviting a world as you’ll find in any 60s science fiction film.
The credits are chock full of fake names to conceal its true parentage, the two film stocks rarely match and it’s not just imagery that was recycled – part of the score comes from Dinosaurus! (1960) and the sharp of ear will recognise a few sound effects on loan from Star Trek (1966-1969) and The Outer Limits (1963-1965). But despite all this, stick with it and you might find something to enjoy here. The story is no great shakes – it’s mostly just a group of men arriving on Venus, wandering about a bit and then going home – but the sights they see along the way are often endearingly silly, from the man-eating plants to the brontosaurus-like dinosaur which, with its stilted and aching slow movement, gives the impression of being a model that no-one could actually get to work. The final shot is genuinely haunting and hints at a much bigger story that was never satisfactorily explored.
Perhaps the greatest worth of Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet is that it will pique your interest in seeing Planeta Bur which tells largely the same story but without the constant cutaways to Rathbone (nearing the end of his career) and Domergue (a long way from This Island Earth (1955) and It Came from Beneath the Sea (1955)) and looking bored most of the time – and she probably was) it’s a more atmospheric film. All the best things about Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet are inherited from Klushantsev’s film and it’s certainly a lot better – and more faithful to the source material – than the terrible Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women.
Raiding Soviet Bloc films for stock footage was a bit of a thing for low-budget film-makers in the mid-1960s as Hollywood took note that some visually impressive films were being made behind the Iron Curtain, films that were unlikely to find a receptive audience in a States in the grip of anti-Communist paranoia as the Cold War got frostier by the week. Rados Novakovic’ Operacija Ticijan (1963) from Yugoslavia for example was also recycled twice, first by producer Jay Roades as Portrait in Terror (1965) and again by directors Jack Hill and Stephanie Rothman as Blood Bath (1966), a new film overseen by an uncredited Corman. He also had a hand in Battle Beyond the Sun (1959) which was an Americanised variation by “Thomas Colchart” (Francis Ford Coppola) on Mikhail Karzhukov and Aleksandr Kozyr’s Nebo zovyot (1959).
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