I'm not real sure how to feel or what to think about this film. It's drab, very slow and not all that grand. There is something kinda good about it that I like because it's different, silly, kinda campy and a little bit interesting. I was guessing the film would be a bit faster paced than it is and it wasn't but somehow that's exactly what this film needed: a slower pace.If you are watching for Basil Rathbone then don't expect to see much of him because he's hardly in the film - just the beginning of it really.The robot doesn't do much of anything except do what it's told to do - really realistic that way but he's not much for a science fiction film, it seems he should have had a little special quality about him so he could stand out more in the film.The movie is nothing to brag about and can be a snoozer - a bit boring at times but I still kinda liked the film a little bit.4/10

Voyage To The Prehistoric Planet has British Basil Rathbone and American Faith Domergue in a cast of mostly Russian players given American names about the first exploration of the planet Venus. Venus proves to be one giant steam bath of a planet with volcanic activity and all kinds of exotic prehistoric like animal and plant life. There are traces of a human civilization, but the Venusians are real shy around us earthlings.For those of us who saw The Aviator and for some like myself who are old enough to remember her, Faith Domergue was one of Howard Hughes's celebrated protégés. She was an exceptional beauty no doubt and she may have even had some talent, but unlike Jane Russell who managed to emerge from the shadow of Hughes, Domergue never did.As for Basil Rathbone he's seen briefly talking to the astronauts from the Lunar station on the moon from whence the expedition came from. The film is not as bad as I thought it would be, the recreation of the director's conception of Venus isn't too far off the mark as far as what we've been able to determine as to terrain. No exotic life like what is shown here though.And in fact this is supposed to have taken place in 2020 and I doubt seriously if we'll get to Venus by then.

You've gotten hold of a bunch of really cool footage from a Russian sci-fi epic about cosmonauts exploring the surface of the planet Venus. What do you do? Why, you cannibalise and re-dub it to make at least two completely different films, that's what you do! Yes, just like "Queen of Blood", the dream team of Roger Corman, Curtis Harrington and Stephanie Rothman crank out another epic space B-feature in under a week and for about $8. And it's great fun into the bargain.Basil Rathbone, on what looks like the same lunar base set from QoB, and playing pretty much the same character under a different name, is a scientist heading the first mission to land men (and a robot - but not women, she has to stay up in the orbiter and mind the store) on Venus. Faith Domergue, her starlet days over, is the 'astronette' stuck in orbit like a female Michael Collins - the space guy, not the Irish Republican Army one. Both of these performers appear courtesy of new footage shoehorned into the original movie, and therefore communicate only via radio with the main cast and John the Robot, a much more impressive piece of tech than the grating Robbie of "Lost in Space" fame. If only Robbie had tried to fling Will Robinson into an extraterrestrial lava flow like John attempts with two of his erstwhile friends here.Great pulp SF fun ensues, with great spacesuit and robot design, plus a cool hover car that beats Luke Skywalker's by a mile. Our cosmonaut pals battle with lizard-men, a flying reptile something like a Ramphoryncus / pteranodon hybrid, and the previously benign John, who goes from toppling rock towers to fashion bridges for his compadres to giving up halfway through piggybacking them through magma and deciding to chuck 'em in. Mental stuff, well worth a laugh when drunk, along with the pseudo-serious meditations on survival and evolution, and the possibilities of a Venusian civilisation.I'm a fan of these hybrid re-edit movies, cf: any Hong Kong ninja movie made by Godfrey Ho, and this one is done particularly well - even the dubbing on the Russian footage matches up with the actor's lip movements. To be honest, if i didn't already know the film's background i probably wouldn't have guessed at all. Highly recommended to those with a love for the backwaters of SF cheese and a sense of the absurd.Now to track down "Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women", which i am told uses some of the same footage but with the added incentive of Mamie van Doren in a bikini. Sounds like trash movie heaven to me. I'm in.

Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet (1965) * 1/2 (out of 4) Silly AIP film about a group of scientists in 2020 landing on Venus and finding strange dinosaur like creatures. As to be expected, this film has a very small budget, which really hurts the film because it's certainly trying to be something bigger than it actually can be. The low budget makes for some very bad special effects and none of the stock footage helps the film as it just makes it look even cheaper. The film is also way too talky with none of the dialogue being very interesting. Basil Rathbone appears in the film but it's rather sad seeing him have to do junk like this.