It's time for another campi 60s B Movie. And my God I was so with this film in the beginning.
The slow forming ship slowly making their way to Venus in the future year of 2020
The stagnant but amusing performances of all the different astronaut men (and the one woman) discussing and debating just what it'll be that they should discover on the planet Venus. This whole slow and simple atmosphere that felt like something out of an old submarine flick.
Then they make their way onto the planet and it all starts to fall apart.
The boring tracks through the same two or three set pieces of boring grey-rock, the ridiculously fun and silly monsters that become predictable as the film goes on. The story that devolves to a bunch of weirdos discovering an offshore island with a possible Lost Civilization but trying to pretend like they're still on Venus.
A lot of it could have worked but it just lingers on for a long time and like so many other films they just don't give any room to character development.
So everybody's just kind of bland and indifferent. I'm not even saying you can't make that work. Take a 'Foundation' route and make it a long-winded story about the planet itself and the creatures living there. Go on about the previous civilizations and give us a big long-term view of the colonization of the lands.
Anything that's not just two groups of astronauts wandering aimlessly around the planet being assisted by a woman communicating their progress back to home base and the world's worst robot who's supposed to be helping them with Medical Aid or combat assistance whenever the big creature show up.
Anything that's not just two groups of astronauts wandering aimlessly around the planet being assisted by a woman communicating their progress back to home base and the world's worst robot, who's supposed to be helping them with Medical aid or combat assistance whenever the big creature show up.
Now to be fair some of the problems of this film are not the mistakes of the movie itself.
The copy of this movie I possess has this weird saturation where everything looks more grey than it actually is.
And it really brings down the atmosphere of what is otherwise a doll but probably far more colourful movie.
Although the horrible ADR they have overall the actor certainly doesn't help.
It sounds like it's a foreign film but I don't think it was. It just didn't have proper sound equipment to capture all the actors performances so they had to redo it in set or the performances were so badly done that they had to redo everybody's lines anyways. Either way it doesn't bode well for the movie.
So I decided to look into this movie a little bit just to figure out why the voice editing was so bad. I was expecting an Italian made film or just a badly put-together American Film. But it turns out this is a Soviet movie which explains why everybody has German names. They clearly don't want to use their actual names because Cold War biases.
Now I'm just really confused.
Why would you want even trying to adopt a soviet-made movie. It's not like you have a shortage of other b-movies to try and make you can plop anything together in about three months and make a film that'll get a couple of bucks.
But now we're stuck with this half put together American retelling of a Soviet film and it's the strangest thing. I may have to look up the Soviet version just to see if the story and proves any. I imagine it has to as anything must be an improvement over this.
This also explains why half the characters look so freaking tired. Americans had this big fear of looking tired back in the sixties and they still kind of have it today.
They take their actors in enough makeup that you'll never see a single wrinkle under their eyes. Where as half the people here's look absolutely exhausted half the time. Which would make sense for a long drawn-out space exploration adventure.
I think the worst thing about all of this is how stupid I feel now.
I'm looking at all these people's faces earlier in the movie and thinking ''they don't look like your conventional Hollywood American''
But then I'm also thinking that they might have just plonked out a bunch of weird kids from a bunch of the Midwestern high schools and then just shove them into a random movie. Remember when Ed Wood did that with his 'Plan 9 from Outer Space' film.
Half the people there look like they belong on a haunted house flick but they popped up in this weird science fiction movie anyways.
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