JOURNEY TO THE SEVENTH PLANET
"B-movie stalwart John Agar stars in this campy fantasy epic as the leader of an ill-fated United Nations space mission bound for the planet Uranus."
Journey To The Seventh Planet takes place in the far-flung future of 2001, and there are no more wars of traffic accidents, and everybody is happy and listens to old Frank Sinatra records every Saturday night at their local malt shops. The United Nations, now the world's only governing body, is dispatching crews of brave astronauts to the other planets in our solar system in an effort to find extraterrestrial life.
John Agar leads an expedition of Danish men who claim to be from any country other than Denmark to the planet Uranus, which apparently is not a gas giant at all, but rather a big snow ball suspended between Saturn and Neptune. Their rocket lands, and they're surprised to see stock footage of a lush forest outside their portholes, so they investigate, and there's an alien brain under the frozen surface that is trying to manipulate the astronauts into doing something, I guess.
This entity is powerful enough to create a perfectly inhabitable forest around the rocket, as well as anything else that pops into the heads of our stalwart crew, including old girlfriends and a giant Cyclops rat monster, and it explicitly states (to the audience, in a weird fourth-wall-breaking moment) that it wants to possess the minds and bodies of the crew members, using them to hitch a ride back to Earth so that it can destroy the human race and remake the planet in its own twisted image. But it doesn't do much of anything to anybody, really. Yes, it makes a rat monster to attack the crew, even though it wanted the crew alive, but the astronauts shoot it in the face, and then they run away, perfectly fine.
The astronauts later use the materials provided in a village the entity created to make a freeze-gun they intend to use to destroy the entity, and instead of using its prodigious powers to just wink the freeze-gun out of existence, it creates a sexy lady to distract the worthless German crewman for a few minutes while another sexy lady sneaks into his bedroom and steals the freeze-gun, replacing it with a counterfeit freeze-gun that doesn't work. That's what the entity does!
After the freeze-gun doesn't work and the German guy freaks out and gets eaten by the entity, John Agar just throws a tank of liquid oxygen at the thing, freezing it, then his pals shoot it a few times and it dies. So this malign alien entity was not terribly bright, despite being a literal brain the size of a box truck. The rocket takes off, with John Agar absconding with his imaginary girlfriend, and after she disappears moments after the rocket leaves the surface of Uranus, she fades away and John Agar looks sad, then the stupidest theme song starts playing and the end credits commence.
Was John Agar expecting his girlfriend, who was created by the entity solely as a means to control and confuse him, to just stick around after he killed the damned thing? Why did he look so sad and confused when she disappeared? Who cares? The movie had the decency to end in less than ninety minutes, and that's good enough for me.
Journey To The Seventh Planet, which couldn't be called Journey To Uranus because nobody would be able to say "I'll take two tickets for Journey To Uranus, please" with a straight face, is a cheap-looking motion picture with a good idea at the center of it, but both budget and lack of imagination prevent that idea from being fully realized. I still liked it, though. It was harmless fun, and it held my interest. Writer/producer Ib Melchior and writer/director Sid Pink make a pretty good team. Thanks for not greatly upsetting me, Journey To The Seventh Planet!
YOUR TIME IS RUNNING OUT!
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