The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
Venus is the second planet of the Solar System. In science-fiction films up until the 1970s, it was thought to be an Earth-like world, open to exploration and usually inhabited by humanoid aliens. It was not nearly as popular a destination as Mars, although appeared in several films, and produced occasional alien visitors and invaders.
Since then, science has revealed the realities of Venus’s inhospitable atmosphere with a heavy carbon dioxide atmosphere including clouds of sulphuric acid, a surface pressure 92 times that of Earth and a temperature of around 450 degrees C. So far nobody has ventured to make any works attempting to explore this environment.
Abbott and Costello take time out from comic hijinks with the Famous Monsters to go to Venus (despite the title) and engage in various datedly sexist gags with a planetful of women
Genre-bending film that mixes B movie space opera cliches with rock’n’roll and a David Lynch-ian sense of surrealism. Interesting but the film left me scratching my head trying to get a handle on it
Gravity presaged a big upsurge about scientifically realistic space films. Coming out only a few months before, this concerns a lone astronaut on a space mission to Europa that goes wrong
A Soviet space exploration film from East Germany concerning an expedition to Venus. This was the first film to depict an international space mission but proves stolid dramatically
Full-length comedy from The Three Stooges where the idiots are janitors at a space centre who accidentally launch themselves into space. One of several Space Age films where popular comics where launched into space
An anthology that adapts three stories from Ray Bradbury’s short story collection but does so with singularly heavy-handed regard. The best aspect of the film is the framing story with a brooding Rod Steiger in the title role.
Absurd space exploration fantasy where men encounter an all-women planet and proceed to put them in their place. The film has a Plan 9 from Outer Space-level badness and the appallingness of the sexual politics makes you do a double-take today
Modestly effective Soviet SF film about an expedition to Venus where the cosmonauts encounter a wild and colourful planet of plants and prehistoric wildlife
A British-made ripoff of The Day the Earth Stood Still. Slow, plodding and talky without the action ever seeming to move beyond the confines of a country pub
An entry from the 1950s alien invader film fad. This starts well with survivors finding themselves in a deserted city but takes a nosedive with the introduction of a clunky robot
One of the film from legendary stop-motion animator Ray Harryhausen, featuring one of his finest creations The Ymir, an alien monster from Venus that rampages throughout Rome
Another Roger Corman film made up out of footage recycled from Russian SF films and pseudnonymously directed by a young Peter Bogdanovich in a rather silly plot about astronauts encountering dinosaur-worshipping women on Venus
Roger Corman had a good deal of success in the 1960s by buying up footage from Soviet SF films, shooting English language inserts and reissuing them. Bar a handful of scenes with some Hollywood actors, this is almost the whole of the Russian film Storm Planet