Journey to the Seventh Planet (1962)

Journey to the Seventh Planet (1962)

Directed by: Sidney W. Pink

Starring: John Agar, Carl Ottosen, Peter Monch

Ooh, the Seventh Planet! That sounds so mysterious and… Wait, that’s just Uranus. What the hell are you trying to pull here, movie? Then again, I guess “Journey to Uranus” wouldn’t look that good on a poster… or maybe that was already taken by the porno they made after this one. Did they make spoofish pornos in the early 60’s?

In Journey to the Seventh Planet, a group of astronauts go to Uranus. When they land, they find themselves strangely in a forest and not at all on the freezing and toxic surface of Uranus. After they get out of the ship and wander around for a bit, they notice that places from their memories start popping up around them and that the entire forest appears to be surrounded by a sort of force field that separates their oxygenated fantasy forest from the cold harsh surface of Uranus. While exploring a newly created barn, they find a woman from the captain’s past and ask her about her… I mean, about Uranus. Well, not really, I’m just trying to see how many times I can say “Uranus” in this review. Tee hee.

No, instead of asking the obviously fake woman about what’s going on, they all run back to the ship for no reason. On their way back, man about town John Agar meets another two women from his past and refuses their sexual advances, though he also fails to even ask why they’re on a different planet and/or appearing out of nowhere. The astronauts suit up and explore outside the force field where they run across a blob of green goop that keeps narrating about how he’s going to do stuff but then never really follows through, and apparently only the audience could hear it because our stalwart crew of idiots never notices. When they get attacked by an admittedly cool stop-motion giant cyclopean rat, they finally realize that something is reaching into their brains and coming up with their darkest fears (apparently one guy has pretty cool fears)… and their deepest fantasies! Which is, to anyone of sentience, incredibly obvious, and has been for the last thirty minutes.

Finally the crew of morons design a large acetylene torch with which to destroy the evil brain that their laser guns don’t effect. Of course, the evil brain creates a woman to distract them while it replaces the torch with an imaginary one and the guys fall for it hook, line and sinker. When they get to the brain and their weapon disappears, they just throw the tank of liquid oxygen that they were using as fuel at it and run away. On their way back, one of the imaginary women meets them and they bring her with them as they escape the planet. So even after they’ve FINALLY realized that these women aren’t real and that they’re constructs of the thing they’re trying to kill, they still rescue one of them as they go back to Earth. If there is a message to this movie, it’s that men are INTENSELY STUPID, and if people actually were that easily duped, then evil space brains pretty much deserve to rule the world.

This was a tough one to rate, since just by the caliber of the writing and the strangeness of the poor dubbing and the terrible love song at the end about Uranus… well, all that and more would lead me to rating it a one. But some of the effects were actually pretty cool, and very surprisingly so. Average out everything awful with some cool effects, I guess it gets a two. It’s almost worth seeing just for how terrifically thick the main characters are, and of course the song over the end credits. Never heard a love song about Uranus before. Don’t make any jokes about that.