Journey to the Seventh Planet

Poster tagline: HOW DEEP WITHIN EACH OF US IS HIDDEN OUR FORBIDDEN DESIRES? OUR UNBEARABLE FEARS? WHAT IS THE TERRIBLE MYSTERY OF THIS WORLD BEYOND OUR WORLD? Sidney Pink and Ib Melchior (the latter in particular) were experts in producing extremely cheap sci-fi B-movies, which they could shoot in 5 days and with a budget of a few tens of thousands of dollars. Here they shared the work of writer, editor and director, and to save even more money, they put everything together in Denmark, Melchior's native country. Thus, the complete film crew, including the actors (with the honourable exception of Agar) were Danes and later dubbed. It’s amusing from the very beginning, when the narrator tells everyone that in 2001 man has learned to live with himself, without wars, only with the desire to conquer the universe. For the first half hour, the film makes do with one room as the interior of a spaceship and a few artificial trees in a studio, representing a wooded landscape with a mill and a stream on Uranus (hence "the seventh planet"), which is actually a holographic projection of an evil monster with the appearance of a big brain with one eye. The second half is already more visually arresting, all prickly frozen trees with "ammonia snow" (exact quote), a giant rat with a cyclops head, and a giant tarantula whose attack is so poorly composed and edited that would make even Bert I. Gordon blush. There was no money for special effects, so the laser beams from the guns look like haphazardly sketched brushstrokes, the force field is simply a blacked-out half of the picture that the actors climb into, and there is the necessary female element – three Danish photo-models – as an illusory projection to fool our lovely heroes. But what made me honestly happy was to see B-movie legend John Agar again after a long time. He had turned a little grey and saggy, but it was still him, the guy with the mischievous smile. (2015-09-08)