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Greetings, and welcome to VIEWING THE CLASSICS. Here you'll find capsule reviews of vintage movies from the early days of cinema through the 1970s, with a special emphasis on sci-fi, horror, and mystery movies. Be sure to check out the Pages links, where you can find a Film Index of all my reviews, links to the reviews organized by cast members, directors, and other contributors, and links to my reviews of the films of talented young director Joshua Kennedy.

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Sunday, February 24, 2013

Voyage To The Prehistoric Planet (1965)

Starring Basil Rathbone, Faith Domergue, John Bix, Robert Chantal, Kurt Boden
Directed by John Sebastian
(actor & director credits courtesy IMDB.com)

A spaceship lands on Venus to come to the aid of another ship's crew on the planet, but on their way to rendezvous with each other, they encounter dangerous perils and hostile prehistoric creatures.

Despite Rathbone and Domergue headlining this movie, according to Wikipedia, this is actually a Russian sci-fi film known as Planeta Burg, redubbed in English with additional scenes with the two actors added.  So the strength of the film depends largely on the quality of the Russian film footage, which creates a believable primordial alien world, but the special effects are rather limited, with barely animated dinosaurs, a flying car that seems to be driving over the ground, and contemporary fish and lizards standing in for alien ones.  John Sebastian is credited as writer/director here, but IMDB indicates that is a pseudonym for filmmaker Curtis Harrington, who made Night Tide and later Queen Of Blood, another movie utilizing Russian sci-fi film footage, but to a much lesser extent.

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