thinker1691 The second time at bat Hollywood director, Peter Bogdanovich took a story written by Henry Ney and created a movie entitled " Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women. " Upon viewing it, try not to laugh too hard at the many fallacies and inaccuracies in the movie. The star of the movie is one time sex goddess Mamie Van Doren who turned many a males' heads in 1968. The story is of a dreamy eyed astronaut who joins a rescue ship to the Planet Venus. Upon landing they immediately destroy a flying reptile whom the primitive women worship as their god. Thereafter the men are plagued by incessant rain, volcanoes, lava and floods. The team never meet the prehistoric woman, clad only in Bell-bottom skin tight pants and sea-shell bras. However, they do hear their siren call and continue to seek their comrades with a poor man's idea of a robot as a space aid. The movie is low grade and originally made by the Russians and were it not for the hot previews which promised it was for adults only, few would have attended it. As it is, the film is recommended to anyone too board to sleep and wants to stay awake. **

siderite Humans decide to explore the planet Venus, something that looks like Earth on steam. They conclude the planet is "definitely prehistoric", which actually makes no sense, because it resembles early Earth, but with sexy singing women and rubber dinos.I've watched a bunch of old movies these days and I can tell you this one is a lot more entertaining, although probably inadvertently. The dialogue is cheesy and stereotyped, the scientific view of the world is ridiculous (actually, I am now beginning to understand that regular folks in the 60s and 70s were completely out of sync with what science means, even if they sent people to the Moon in the same period), the robot, something that was probably made of cardboard covered with metallic paint, was incredibly clumsy and the "functionality" was hilarious. I especially loved the scene where it requested help because he found a waterfall and its systems were in danger.Bottom line: I couldn't watch it till the end, but there are some scenes (ex: an eerie song is heard and one of the guys says "It sounds like a woman!" and the other guy says "Perhaps. A woman or a... monster") that are really funny. I don't know what they were thinking when they made the movie, probably that it could be good, only it resulted in a sort of Ed Wood thing.

Paul Andrews Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women is set in the future year 1998(!) where space travel is no longer a barrier, a spaceship blasts off from Earth with two astronauts Captain Alfred Kern (Georgi Tejkh) & Howard Sherman (Yuri Sarantsev) heading for the distant planet of Venus. The spaceship crash lands on Venus & is damaged beyond repair, together with a large robot named John(!) the two astronauts explore the surface of Venus & find rough terrain, hostile monsters & adverse whether conditions. Back on Earth with no radio contact mission control prepare a rescue mission, another spaceship with three astronauts Commander William 'Billy' Lockhart (Vladimir Yemelyanov), Andrea Freneau (Gennadi Vernov) & Hans Walters (Georgi Zhzhyonov) leaves Earth & heads for Venus. Once their they also encounter monsters, hostile plants & erupting Volcanoes in their bid to find & save their stranded astronaut friends...This cheaply produced cut & paste job from Roger Corman was directed & narrated by Peter Bogdanovich who made this only a couple of years prior to his Oscar winning drama The Last Picture Show (1971), Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women was fourth film produced by Roger Corman that he made on the cheap by using special effects footage from various Russian sci-fi films which started with the Francis Ford Coppola flick Battle Beyond the Sun (1963), then came Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet (1965) before using effects shots in Queen of Blood (1966) & finally making this. This is an odd film to watch & rate, Bogdanovich probably only shot twenty odd minutes of new footage with the rest of the film entirely made up from the Russian sci-fi film footage. The 'Preshistoric Women' of the title never meet the astronauts (since they were filmed years apart, obviously) & it's hard to take them seriously anyway. They speak to each other using telepathy but otherwise just sunbathe on rock all the time wearing Sea Shell bras! The Russian footage is much, much better & is what ultimately saves Voyage to the Planet of Preshistoric Women from being a total flop. Much of the film is narrated & some of the Russian footage is used more than once but at just under 80 odd minutes long at least it's fairly short & there's enough going on to sustain ones interest.The original Russian films that Corman brought all have far superior production values to the Bogdanovich footage & American sci-fi in general at that period in time. The films used are called Nebo Zovyoy AKA The Heavens Call (1962) & Planeta Bur AKA Storm Planet (1962) while the narrated prologue footage from Coppola's film Battle Beyond the Sun was also used here, also as a prologue funnily enough. The Russian footage is quite good actually with better than usual model effects, a pretty good planet surface including an erupting volcano & some some decent props & costumes. The big robot John is just cool, I want one & what can I say about the flying futuristic car? Perpare to be amazed... No-one dies & it's not very scary or gory or violent although there is one scene in which a woman bites the head off a fish, it's more of a sci-fi adventure than sci-fi horror despite the monsters to be honest.The acting is poor in the newly shot American insert footage while all the Russian scenes were obviously dubbed & it's left to Bogdanovich the narrator to try & make a cohesive story out of it with his monologues.Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women is a strange mix of good Russian sci-fi film footage & cheap awful Roger Corman footage neither of which compliment each other particularly well. At least has plenty of robots, monsters, futuristic spaceships & scantily clad Venusian girls to keep one entertained. A bit of a patchwork mess but there's just about enough cheap sci-fi thrills here to keep one watching.

Neil Welch Yes, it is interesting to read the story of how surplus footage of a Russian sci-fi movie got inter-cut with newly shot footage and capped with a voice-over from Peter Bogdanovich (also directing, and then starting to make his way in this world which we call the biz of show).Yes, it is enterprising, and shows the ingenuity with which someone can take some source material which is perhaps unusable on its own but which has some potential and, thereby, moves towards making a whole which is greater than the sum of the parts.Yes, it explains why what is obvious some fairly well financed production values sit in a movie which is equally obviously dead cheap. It explains why there are some well matched sound effects but no synchronised dialogue: the story is told in voice-over. It may even (though not necessarily explain why the print which appears on TV contains just enough colour value to leave you with the thought that perhaps this was once a colour original.But make no mistake: no matter how ingenious, how fascinating the story behind this film, the movie itself is perfectly, absolutely, irredeemably dreadful to the point of unwatchability (unless you like watching interminable hours of indentikit blonde women in slacks swanning about on rocks as waves break behind them. And believe me, the appeal palls quickly).