Movie Review: Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet (1965)

Synopsis: In 2020, after colonizing the moon, mankind has its eyes set on exploring more of the solar system and launches a 3-ship mission to the planet Venus. After one ship is destroyed enroute and a landing party loses communication, another crew is sent to the planet's surface on a rescue mission. There they encounter dangerous prehistoric creatures.

Who's in it? The movie stars Basil Rathbone, Faith Domergue, John Bix, Georgi Zhzhyonov and Gennadi Vernov.

Review: As I was scrolling through movies last night in search of something to watch this morning, I couldn't decide between a comedy, mystery or science fiction and ended up picking the last category at my wife's suggestion. I chose Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet and, after watching it, regret not choosing another genre.

Let's start out by saying this movie, which was originally filmed in the Soviet Union then edited and dubbed in an attempt to hide that fact, was clearly filmed in the Soviet Union and edited and dubbed. Quite a bit of the movie seems just a bit disjointed and, even before I looked up the movie's origin story, I could tell the English-speaking stars, like Rathbone, recorded their scenes separately.

Also not helping this movie were the cheesy special effects. Look, it was the 1960s and there were practical limitations as a result of that, I get it. However, other movies from this era still managed to work around that in a way that made it easy to overlook some of the flaws. This movie failed. I mean, maybe it was just my imagination, but I'm pretty sure I saw a dinosaur (AKA a man in a dino suit) skipping through the fog.

I probably would have been able to overlook all of the above had the movie even remotely been interesting, but it was kind of dull on top of it. It's a 74-minute movie and it takes nearly a quarter of that runtime just to get the characters on the planet. A large portion of the remainder of the movie was the planetary explorers working with or repairing various pieces of equipment. In other words, other than a couple close encounters scattered in between, the movie barely acknowledged the prehistoric dangers they faced.

Even John the Robot (Bix), arguably the most interesting character of all of them, was surprisingly boring. He clunks around, does various chores and answers questions when asked. Let me put it this way, if there ever was a movie in desperate need of a robot turning evil, this was the one.

Final Opinion: The phrase "so bad, it's good" gets thrown around a lot when it comes to movies. That phrase does not apply to this one. It's just bad.

My Grade: F

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Here are some reviews of other (better) Basil Rathbone movies:

Movie Review: Son of Frankenstein (1939)

Movie Review: The Mark of Zorro (1940)

Movie Review: The Spider Woman (1943)

Movie Review: Comedy of Terrors (1963)