Not many science fiction pictures seem to make it the seventh planet of our solar system a destination. That is a shame, because a film like 1962’s Dutch-American co-production Journey to the Seventh Planet should provide many opportunities to feel smug amusement over characters pronouncing its name as “yer anus”. But the movie couldn’t stoop to provide this opportunity for mockery, with everybody here saying it in a manner previously unheard by myself, and that is “yer ah-nahs”. That’s a new one on me, and I was irritated to be deprived of an easy opportunity to mock this picture. Fortunately, there are still a great many other aspects of the film which are deliriously bad.
Let’s start with the cast, the leads being John Agar and four nearly identical fellow astronauts, none of whom I had heard of previously. My guess is the ones who aren’t Agar are Danes, judging from the names on IMDB. Their voices are artlessly dubbed by obvious Americans. Their characters are so nondescript that there are three of them I couldn’t tell apart. The only reason I recognized the fourth, Carl Ottosen, is because he looks older than the rest of the crew. He also gets more to do than the doppeldanes, even more than Agar. Still, even with how dull astronauts of that era tended to be in real-life, these guys have a presence so slight that one feels they are in danger of evaporating.
While I wasn’t surprised the acting ranges from perfunctory to pathetic, I always seem to be taken aback by the lame dialogue typical of fare like this. Consider this line, something unnecessary which is delivered in the most unenthusiastic manner possible: “Well, there she is, Karl: the universe.” If there is one purpose that line serves, it was to leave me breathlessly laughing at how bad that is.
Agar manages to stand out not just by being the most recognizable actor here, but because his character is such a relentless horndog. You see, like Solaris from a decade later, the planet is materializing people and places from the memories of the spacecraft’s crew. Unlike Solaris, the only people fabricated are comely young women, providing perhaps the ultimate form of masturbation. And Agar gets two women, while the other guys have to settle for one. Even then, I’m not entirely sure two men of the crew get to experience the ultimate test of whether something is real or Memorex, to quote an 80’s ad slogan.
One of Agar’s is Greta Thyssen. I don’t know who that is, but she was apparently supposed to be a thing at one time, as she plays herself. In a film full of flat-out bad performances, hers is notable for making me wonder if there was a fourth Gabor sister I didn’t know about. And all three of the known Gabor sisters could act a Uranian ring around this faux Gabor (or Fauxbor, if you will).
The young woman from Ottosen’s memory (Ann Smyrner) is the most interesting person in the cast, and that’s because she has a knowing creepiness. Consider this conversation between him and Smyrner: “Where did you come from?” “Here.” “Who else lives here?” “No one. No one you don’t wish to be here.”
Well, there is something he’s going to wish wasn’t there and that is a giant brain with an eye in the middle of it. Like every other alien from the sci-fi films of the 50s and 60s, it wants to take over the Earth. It resides in a cave under the crust of the true Uranus, which is beyond the force-field surrounding the Earth forest it recreated from one of the astronaut’s memories.
I’m guessing three of the men provoked it by shooting what looks to be green oatmeal threatening to overflow a crater. I have no idea what the correlation is between that and the brain, and I bet the filmmakers don’t know, either.
While the effects are largely horrible, I will give some credit to a couple of stop-motion sequences. Neither is very effective, but both are startling in their strangeness. The first is when a forest suddenly grows out of the barren planetary landscape around the rocketship the instant it lands. The other is a one-eyed dino-rat thing, and I felt sorry for it when our heroes incapacitate it by shooting its eye out. Guess the astronauts are packing Red Ryder laser BB guns. For that matter, why is the only equipment that seems to be a constant in such movies of this time are guns?
Despite all this, there are some genuinely effective moments. The one that stands out in my mind is when the guys are around a campfire as Ottosen tells them about the small village in which he was raised. We see silhouettes of the various buildings of that burg materialize behind him as he recalls each. Another touch I thought was interesting is all the plants in the forest are rootless. Then one of these dopes sees an apple tree and just grabs one and starts chowing down on it.
And yet, I should have expected such behavior from the overgrown boys that Journey to the Seventh Planet. I’m not sure which is worse, these boneheads who try to defeat the giant brain with something from a blacksmith shop it made from one guy’s memory, or that alien not just unmaking those same items it conjured up for them. What I will never quite get over is how they want to make time with these space women even after they realize their enemy made them and they are, therefore, an extension of itself. It is one thing to bite into an apple of mysterious origin. It is a whole other matter to want to put your wang into something unknown. For all we know, the brain might have put teeth down there.
Dir: Sidney W. Pink
Starring John Agar, Carl Ottosen, Ann Smyrner
Watched on Kino Lorber blu-ray