 |
 The United Nations sends a team to explore Uranus and they find a "small Danish village filled with voluptuous women!" Behind this set up though is a force that is using the memories of the crew against them so it can take over their ship and fly back to Earth. 1959, 77 minutes, Widescreen DVD
If you're ever forced to listen to one of your wispy college educated acquaintances extol the virtues of one world government while you're at your local watering hole and you aren't already so far in the bag that you don't immediately punch his Godless arse back to Geneva, you can calmly point to this movie as precisely what's wrong with the concept. With Journey To The Seventh Planet, we are in the far flung past of 2001 where everything is just peachy now that the United Nations runs the world (I'm assuming all real Americans are either dead or in internment camps in Siberia). So now that this socialist utopia has finally been forced upon us, what do they squander all our precious resources on? A manned mission to explore Uranus!
Studiously avoiding all the rectal humor such a movie inevitably provides (everyone seems to conscientiously pronounce the seventh planet as You-Ron-Us), the idea that we would need to send a spaceship out there to check for life is only slightly less ridiculous than the idea that we would send a crew made up of ugly Scandanavians and an aging John Agar who doesn't seem to really believe that he got tricked into appearing in this. Shoot, John isn't even the commander of the mission! That role went to beefy Danish superstar Olaf Olafming or Sven Svenson or Bjorn Nitmo or someone like that. John gets his revenge though by turning in a performance so unappealing and inappropriate that you can't help but find it quite appealing and perversely appropriate.
At first when I got a gander of what John's character (Don) was going to be all about, I groaned as I realized that the bottom of the barrel Invisible Invaders also featured on this double feature DVD from MGM would be the movie that was least like listening to a fork being raked across a chalkboard. What was my problem with Don? Nothing except that the way he was salivating over his pin up picture he brought with him on the big space flight, you would have thought that he was under the mistaken impression his last name was Juan. Don is headed out to Uranus for one thing - space booty! Now, he doesn't exactly put it in those terms and there wasn't anything in their mission briefing (a single type written piece of paper that Don dramatically read from), but the way he was carrying around with the rest of the crew, I think that if you checked the limited amount of personal items he brought aboard, you would have found a cache of condoms, flavored lotions, and roofies.
The commander finally snaps the crew back to the task at hand and things proceed uneventfully to the seventh planet with the exception of a few bad special effects. You also get your share of dial reading, button pushing, and porthole screens opening. There is also an invasion by a fearsome alien presence, though it manifests itself as a lame yellowish light effect and baritone voice over. The alien delivers the typical pre-match interview where it goes on about how it's going to control minds and read minds and probe minds and I was pretty sure that if the alien hadn't used its power to render the crew unconscious, that his trite threats what have accomplished the same end.
Once the alien releases its hold on them and they wake up, they realize that they're missing some time and one guy seems a bit put out that his apple rotted during their down time, but what are you going to do? Let's see your precious U.N. do something about that! As they land on the planet, we see the landscape changing from the cold barren stuff they expected to a forest that looks remarkably like it was in Denmark where the movie was shot. In fact, one of the characters says that it's just like the forest where he grew up (must have been raised by wolves or something) and to prove this, he predicts that there will be a stream with a big rock in it. And guess what? In the forest is a stream. And there's a rock in it! If I had still been watching this instead of outside checking my birdfeeders I would have gotten chills!
But this forest isn't exactly like the one where he grew up because they quickly discover that it's all fake! The trees and bushes don't have any roots, apple trees appear where there weren't any before, and there's a mysterious barrier that surrounds the forest. One of these highly trained astronauts announces that he'll find out what's up with this barrier and tries to walk on through it. He ends up with his arm frozen for his troubles. I was guessing that his arm had pierced it and been exposed to the super cold temperatures of Uranus' real atmosphere, but later on the other crew members mention that the guy's arm thawed right out and he was okay so who knows what was going on.
With all this suspicious and unexplained activity going on all around them, these guys do the only thing any of us would do in such questionable circumstances. No, they didn't go back to the ship and fly home to get some back up. They built a fire in the fake forest and sat around it listening to the commander reminisce about where he grew up. As he described his house and the windmill nearby it, these things appeared behind him. Further investigation revealed it to be exactly like where he had grown up and it doesn't take long for everyone to figure out that something on the planet is reading their minds and making their deepest desires reality.
You can imagine where this leads Don. There's a scene where he's standing outside the spaceship and he imagines his pin up queen and BAM! There she is! He makes some small talk, paws her a little bit and eventually has to be hollered at to get back up into the ship. Never mind the fact that there is something sinister and alien about all this. The commander also dreams up a hussy, though this is even creepier because as he admits to his crew, he's never been in love and she represents his ideal woman. I think we all remember what happened when Lt. Geordi LaForge used the Holodeck for this purpose in the classic Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Booby Trap."
Don and the gang manage to find some time to go and investigate what lies beyond the barrier which allows us to see what space suits will look like in 2001. Basically you've got blue jump suits, yellow helmets with bulky Plexiglass fronts, and red gloves with yellow gauntlets. I got the idea looking at this mishmash of colors that someone in the Danish costume shop must have been under the mistaken impression that this movie was going to be shot in black and white. Going beyond the barrier in their ugly suits, the crew encounters the type of filler dangers you would expect. One guy tries to drown in a bunch of snow that someone wittily dubs quicksnow since you know, it was like quicksand, but, um, snow.
The find a cave and encounter a hideous one-eyed dinosaur. By hideous, I'm referring to the artistry behind it, not its scare effect on the audience. After shooting it in the eye (didn't we see this in another Ib Melchior penned flick, The Angry Red Planet?), they escape and one of the guys explains how sorry he is because whatever alien is using their thoughts against them took advantage of his unnatural fear of rats and created that monstrosity. That's great, except that that thing was a freaking dinosaur, not a big rat!
It turns out that the alien behind all this inconsistent mind control (sometimes he gives you pretty women, sometimes he gives you tinted stock footage of the giant spider from Earth Vs. The Spider) is a rather large green brain with an eye in the center of it that lives in the cave we just explored. The brain eventually lets us in on its grand scheme for world domination. It's going to go back to Earth by possessing one of the astronaut's bodies. Then once it's on Earth it's going to, you know, dominate us and stuff. Somehow.
Determined not to be out-stupided by a giant alien brain, Don and the rest of the crew come up with a plan to destroy the creature that involves going to the fake village and using the fake blacksmith's shop there to help them build a really big acetylene torch to roast this thing. For a creature that can probe man's deepest thoughts, it doesn't seem to be paying too close attention to what everyone is up to. Luckily though, he's only up against a paycheck cashing John Agar and some otherwise unemployable Danes. Even though they somehow manage to make their torch without interference from the brain, they decide that the final battle can wait until morning, so they all go off to get some rest and leave one guy on guard duty!
The brain apparently finally wakes up from its nap and sends a couple of broads to entrance the guard so that the torch can be replaced by a fake torch. Sure, I guess you could have done all that instead of just taking control of all their minds and making them haul your big brained behind back to Earth. More lame action follows as the astronauts decide to freeze the brain once the problem with the fake torch is revealed and the commander demands that they bring his dream girl back to Earth with them, even though he knows she's not real!
The idea of an alien intelligence using our memories, wishes, and fears against is nothing new (I seem to recall one of the stories that make up Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles using this concept), but boy was this executed badly. Aside from the cheap sets and nonexistent acting, the brain's intermittent use of its powers defied logic and seemed to wax and wane whenever the plot demanded it. As worthless as all this was, the viewer is "rewarded" for sitting through this movie with a theme song over the end credits sung by a Scandinavia lounge singer about the "Journey to the Seventh Planet" while a poorly animated spaceship flies past junior high level artwork of the various planets in the solar system. With this movie and Reptilicus, director Sid Pink cements his status as the preeminent director of embarrassing Danish monster movies starring Carl Ottosen.
Reviews © 2004
MonsterHunter
|
|
