I wonder what Coleen Gray did to piss off Hollywood? In the late 1940’s, she was in films like the astonishing Nightmare Alley. By the late 50’s and early 60’s, she was in TV fare and garbage like The Leech Woman and 1961’s The Phantom Planet.
Typical of low-budget fare, this is not a long film, but it feels sluggish throughout its runtime. It especially takes a while to get going, and I was starting to think we would never get past a moon base and a couple of rockets with which its operators communicate. One character even says something which feels like a meta comment on the movie itself: “A person can lose their mind out here waiting for something to happen”.
And yet, initially, the film had shown some signs of promise. The inside of rocket control rooms are small, unlike many pictures of the era, where you could maintain a small herd of cattle such spaces. Also, the instrument panels tend to be packed with what look like actual buttons, knobs and gauges. That design approach always makes the world more real to me, as every inch of a spaceship’s interior would be at a premium.
These rockets are dispatched from our moon base in the then-distant year 1980. I also like the model of their moon base, but I am always partial to miniature work. Looking at this installation and the associated rockets, I wondered if this is what Trump had in mind when he founded the Space Force.
Vessels are forever dodging asteroids of look a bit…um, dodgy and I started feeling less generous towards the film. These things mostly looked like clusters of Grape Nuts, which the ships usually evade by doing a U-turn. Yes, a U-turn. In space. Other space rocks look like popcorn, which makes me think a great tagline for this film could have been, “In space, nobody can hear you pop.” Failing that, I’d like to recommend it for use to promote a sci-fi porn film.
The plot Earth on the defensive from the titular planet, which appears seemingly at random and is destroying our space fleet. It looks far more like an asteroid than a planet to me and, even then, the closest thing it resembles is a chicken nugget. Later, similar “planets” will be on fire and I guess those are flamin’ hot nuggets. So, I’m betting Trump dreams of protecting the world from hot space nuggets, possibly by zooming around in space with his mouth open and trying to eat as many as possible.
One such rocket is captured by the planet and gently lowered down to its surface. Astronaut Dean Fredericks survives and isn’t conscious when he starts shrinking within his space suit. No really, we see what is obviously a photo of his face reducing in size until it goes under the bottom edge of his faceplate before disappearing completely. When this guy comes to, he has been reduced to maybe around six inches in height. He emerges from the spacesuit as it if was a giant cave, which I guess it is at that point, and I wondered what it was like to be swimming in your body funk.
He has been shrunken so as to be the same size as the residents of this rock, which they call Rayton, which sounded to me like an exciting polymer for the world of tomorrow. Conveniently, everybody speaks English, though really there is some sort of translation device that automatically converts his language to theirs and vice-versa. So, basically an early version of the TARDIS or a Babel Fish.
Fredericks is put on a trial and sentenced to…live on this planet. That seems pretty fair to me, even if they seem to be a rather humorless bunch. One character makes a dig at people having too much free time, when they should be working more, so I guess he’s stuck on the planet of the tiny Space Amish. Too much free time is how I happen to watch so many films like this, so maybe that guy was onto something.
A perk of being stuck here is our hero has his choice of two women eager to be his wife. One of them is Gray. Despite this being a black-and-white film, I suspect she’s a red head at the time. Together with her primitive costume, one only needs to put a bone in her hair and she would visually be the perfect Wilma Flintstone. The other is the mute Dolores Faith, who looks like a clearance rack Elizabeth Taylor.
There will be some conflict between our protagonist and Anthony Dexter, who had been making time with Gray before the Earthman arrived. Naturally, there will be an external threat of a rival bunch of aliens, which then brings together the men on the same side of that battle.
That enemy is from a “sun satellite”, which I believe would mean they live on a planet. I’m pretty sure we only ever see one of these creatures, and it is Richard Kiel, in his feature film debut, entirely obscured by a goofy costume that would have been derisible even a decade earlier.
One of the more endearing of this film’s goofier aspects is how the alleged good guys can control the flight of the entire planet, making this rock rather unlike a planet. The way the navigation is conducted through the gentle waving of hands in the open air, so it appears alien ships are controlled by theremins.
Speaking of that instrument, there is a curious credit in the titles for “Interplanetary Sound”. That’s because the soundtrack employs a cue from Forbidden Planet ad nauseum with potentially, depending on your tolerance for such fare, extra nauseum.
There’s one scene in The Phantom Planet which I want to single out is an interesting bit early in the film where Fredericks and Richard Weber are on the wing of this rocket, making a repair. Micro-meteorites starting whizzing past, causing chaos which results in Weber floating in space like Frank Poole in 2001. As he drifts away to his death, he hear on the soundtrack him reciting the Lord’s Prayer in his head. It is a curiously disturbing, and even touching, moment in an otherwise ineffective and unremarkable picture.
Dir: William Marshall
Starring Dean Fredericks, Coleen Gray
Watched on Thunderbean Animation BD-R