Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women (1967): watch free, legally

Venus and unseen worshippers

Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women is a 1968 American science fiction film built around astronauts who land on Venus. They encounter and kill a flying creature resembling a pterosaur, without knowing that a small group of blond Venusian women worships the creature as a god.

The astronauts and the women never meet. The women regard the killing as an act requiring revenge, while the astronauts face danger on the planet. Their damaged robot is caught in a flow of volcanic mud, and the human crew eventually shuts it down. The Venusian women are given “South Sea movie names,” a choice Peter Bogdanovich said “seemed right.”

Five days of new Venus scenes

The film was one of two productions using footage from the 1962 Soviet science fiction film Planeta Bur, also known as Planet of Storms. Alexander Kazantsev scripted the Soviet film from his novel, and Pavel Klushantsev directed it. Producer Roger Corman had called the dubbed English version Storm Clouds of Venus. Footage from Planeta Bur had already been used in Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet in 1965, and this film contains no Planeta Bur footage that had not appeared in that earlier version.

Peter Bogdanovich made the adaptation but chose not to take a directing credit. He later said Corman asked him to shoot footage with women because American International Pictures would not buy the film without “some girls” added. Bogdanovich worked out how to include them, shot for five days, and cut the material into the existing footage. He said he directed only 10 minutes of the film and did not claim credit because such a small part was his.

Bogdanovich hired Mamie Van Doren and several other blonde actresses as Venusians because he thought everyone on Venus should be blonde. He dressed them in rubber suits with bottoms only and shells over their breasts, then filmed inserts at Leo Carrillo Beach that might relate to Venus. During water filming, an actress afraid of sharks was thrown a rubber fish. According to Bogdanovich, she became hysterical, grabbed it, and bit off its head.

He also said the new sequences initially confused people, so he added narration. Bogdanovich wrote and voiced it, choosing the best-looking astronaut as the narrator, and said this was the only credit he accepted. He had the red star painted out of the spaceship in every frame, replacing it with an obscure symbol that might pass for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. His then-wife, Polly Platt, worked as production designer. The film was at one stage called Gill Women of Venus and was the last film made by Filmgroup.

Later assessments of the adaptation

British director Alex Cox, writing retrospectively about Soviet science fiction film, compared the picture with Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet and called both versions “equally classic.” Filmink magazine judged Bogdanovich’s film far superior to Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet, saying it was simply better made despite the two films using much of the same footage.

FilmFanatic.org called it “a jarring mish-mosh of scenes” and “frightfully sub-par,” while also saying that the storyline moves quickly enough that viewers would likely not be bored. Nigel Honeybone of HorrorNews.Net described the Mamie Van Doren scenes as “Peter Bogdanovich’s stag film” and wrote that Corman had made the Russian footage “crappier.”

Film details from the Wikipedia article “Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women”. Text adapted under CC BY-SA 4.0.