Wednesday 20 November 2013

Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women (1968)



This is the second English language adaptation of Soviet film Planeta Bur. It's also right after the first adaptation in my SciFi Classics boxed set. Not sure that was such a great idea on the compilers' part.

Anyway, this version re-structures the narrative a lot more than the previous adaptation. We now have two astronauts and their robot lost on Venus, and another team sent along later to rescue them. A lot of the 'talking to mission control' scenes are dropped this time, and the time taken up with numerous scenes of attractive blonde women in skimpy tops. These are the Venusians you see, psychic aliens who interpret the astronauts as hostile and try to use their powers to drive them away, even going so far as to trigger a volcanic eruption. The addition of a motivating force behind the planet's various dangers makes a significant improvement to the film, in my opinion. It makes events much less happenstance. Even watching this right after the first adaptation, with which it shares some 50% of its footage, I enjoyed this more.  That's not to say that it is good, however.

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