THE PHANTOM PLANET is another low budget, endearingly cheap US science fiction movie of the early 1960s. This one could easily have been made a good decade previously because it feels very dated for its era. The story is about a ship of astronauts who find themselves on a miniature world in which the inhabitants are menaced by ugly alien creatures and the like. It's a film full of cliffhanger action, dated but effective special effects, and a cool-looking man-in-a-suit alien played by a youthful Richard Kiel. Sometimes, it's the dated films which are the most fun, and so it proves with this simple but effective slice of US sci-fi cheese.

I saw this film on the show, Mystery Science Theater 3000. Had I not seen the film on that show, I probably would have never viewed it as I cannot recall ever seeing it on television. Not the best science fiction film ever, but not totally horrible...just bad. It also would have been kind of boring without the riffing of MST3K because it is a film that features a lot of talking, more talking and even more talking. In between though, you do get some okay effects that make things look small and large, a few action scenes and Richard Kiel as the really tall alien guy...a role that he would do on more than a couple of occasions.The story has a team of two astronauts flying through space and they encounter something. There is a base on the moon that sends Frank Chapman and his amazing copilot who talks about the good and the beautiful. They end up having a problem and the guy who talks about the good and beautiful kind of floats off while Frank ends up landing on an asteroid that looks just like a fried piece of chicken with absolutely nowhere to land on it. No place on it certainly looks like the place Frank lands and immediately stumbles and falls down at. Meanwhile, the moon plans to send out yet another two team into space to rescue the rescue team. One must wonder, when would they have stopped if that rescue team had failed? Well, Frank ends up shrinking down in size and having an adventure among the citizens of this phantom chicken...I mean planet. A place that if you attack one of their own they make you a citizen and give you your choice of women, but if you have a disagreement you must fight to the death! So Frank tries to find his way home, but also finds the love of his life and becomes friends with the citizens of this phantom planet.This made for a funny episode of MST3K...it is definitely a film though that I would not want to see without their assistance. It is not totally horrible, not like Monster A-Go-Go, but it is not what I would call a good film either. Too many idiotic plot points in this one and just so much talking. Thankfully, the gang of MST3K are able to turn this long sessions into rather funny moments.So I did not care for the movie as a whole. Not super terrible, but it just a film that could have had more to it than it did. It had several scenes that were simply filler as there was not really a need for two flashback scenes, they literally flashback to a scene that happened less than two minutes prior at one point. You would see a rather good set piece featuring the large spacesuit, but then all you would see is this super advanced people living in the most barren planet possible. Seriously, you cannot create such scientific achievements while sleeping on a slab!

I'm giving this four out of ten because it has that certain "so bad it's entertaining" quality to it.I remember seeing this on our local UHF station back in the 70s. Strangely enough, it aired just a couple of weeks before "Star Wars" premiered. I was struck at the time that the sound effects for screaming Solarites and attacking Tie fighters were uncannily similar, plus the shots featuring Solarites piloting their fighters presaged the view of Darth Vader in his fighter. It was a bit jarring to note any similarity at all between a fifteen-year-old B-movie and George Lucas' epic.If you have an hour and a half to set aside to enjoy a bad movie being a bad movie, this one will fit the bill. In the pre-opening-credits segment, a doomed scout ship pilot logs that he is 21,000 miles from his base on the moon, as if that is some great distance. One can overlook cheesy special effects and cheap monster suits much more readily than glaring faults in scripting. One means you didn't have money to burn, but the other means that you just didn't care. Watch for actors displaying unnaturally slow reaction times in fight scenes and the like, which screams "not willing to shoot another take", so an actor will just space things out until the other actor gets into position. I have not seen the MST3K send-up of this movie, but other people say they do a nice job of puncturing the pretension.

Watching bad movies is a hobby of mine. While this isn't the worst movie I have ever seen, I will say it is the most boring movie ever! I have seen monster a go go, the beast of yucca flats, pod people, plan 9 from outer space and many others. None of them are more boring then this.To sum up why this movie is so awful is because nothing happens. The sets are all the same, and everything is identical to each other. The visual effects are so bad it looks like it was from the 1920s.The plot is fairly bad. Some astronauts go into space to figure out where some pilots have been disappearing. The co pilot dies, and only one guy is left. OK now their get sucked in by the giant ball of popcorn which is supposed to be an asteroid. He meets some aliens there that are tiny, so they shrink him down to their size. Apparently there is an entire civilization on this asteroid though we only see about 5 different characters. There's a love triangle or something going on in the story, some alien race that looks like they are dogs, and some other bad set designs. Either way this movie drags on for a very long time. I actually had to watch this movie in several parts since it was so boring. Usually I can watch a bad movie or two in one sitting.Either way avoid this movie...