Rating: *
Review Date: 1/1/10
Producer: Roger Corman (uncredited)
Cast: Mamie Van Doren
Wow. Inconceivably awful. Honestly, how does this crap get made? Reportedly, Roger Corman hired Peter Bogdanovich to film scenes of Mamie Van Doren and eight other girls in hip-hugger pants and shell bras on the sea shore, and splice them together with a Russian sci-fi film called "Planeta Burg." The result is incomprehensible. Narrated by a young love-struck astronaut named Andre, the film is about three manned expeditions to Venus. The first was destroyed by a meteor, the second crashed on the planet, and the third was sent to rescue the crew of the second expedition. Apparently, it only takes a couple of hours to reach Venus, which makes me wonder why the Venus program was plagued with so many problems. Anyway, once on Venus, Andre hears the siren call of young women and sets out to investigate. He gets attacked by a tentacle monster and is rescued by his crewmates, but that doesn't stop him from trying to find his alien dream date. Meanwhile, the crew from the second mission is attacked by man-sized Godzilla creatures that bounce up and down, and then they get trapped in a lava flow that they were too stupid to avoid. The rescue crew shows up in the nick of time to save them, and then they all blast off to return to Earth. Poor Andre pines for the Venusian girls that he never got to meet and swears to return. Huh? What do the girls have to do with any of this? Absolutely nothing, as far as I can tell. They only serve to disrupt continuity and eliminate any sense of linear storytelling. Perhaps the filmmakers were hoping that showing scantily clad women would keep the audience from realizing how bad the film actually is. Absolutely terrible.