Movie: Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women

So in Peter Bogdanovich's introduction to Renoir's "The Rules of the Game," he mentions an early movie he himself directed, "Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women."

Wait a sec, says I.  Years ago a cinemaphile friend of mine sent me a DVD of that movie, a factory DVD but no cover.  I stuck it away in a pile of garbage discs because, well, wouldn't you?  But hey if it's an early Bogdanovich (directing under the pseudonym Derek Thomas) maybe it'd be worth pulling out and screening.

Reading up on it online, it's not really a film directed by Bogdanovich.  In 1963 Roger Corman bought the rights to a bunch of low budget Russian sci-fi movies, and proceeded to re-edit them with American titles to disguise their origin.

Pavel Klushantsev's 1962 film Planeta Bur (Планета Бурь) was recut by Corman in 1965, with some footage added featuring Basil Rathbone and Faith Domergue, and released as Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet.  It played the TV circuit.

In 1968 Corman gave the footage to his 29-year-old intern Peter Bogdanovich, who recut it again, added a bunch of women in tight pants and clamshell bras, and called it Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women.

Peter Bogdanovich wrote:

[Planeta Bur] was a Russian science-fiction film that Roger [Corman] had called Storm Clouds of Venus that he had dubbed into English. And he came to me and said, "Would you shoot some footage with some women? AIP won't buy it unless we stick some women in it." So I figured out a way to work some women in it and shot for five days, and we cut it in. I narrated it, because nobody could make heads or tails of it. Roger wouldn't let me add any sound. It was just a little cheap thing we did, and people think I directed it when I really only directed 10 minutes of it.

Ain't cinema grand?

One of the women Bogdanovich added was Mamie Van Doren, who was only eight years older than him but already at the end of her career.

Wow. I tried to watch this last night.

Unfuckingwatchable. The scenes with the Venusian girls (standing on a rocky shore in white pants and seashell bras???) are in color, while the scenes with the astronauts in a desert are in sepia tone black & white. The two never have any scenes together of course. The girls talk to each other via telepathy (overdubbed voices) so nobody's lips have to move. The astronauts are dubbed into English so their lip movements never match. There's a plot about a flying rubber bird puppet being their god which the astronauts kill, but the thing is only a couple feet long and very obviously made out of rubber. It has painted-on eyes.

There are movies that are so bad they're fun. And then there are movies that are so bad they're unfuckingwatchable.