Beneath the Planet of the Apes

This Poster was sold by Mondotees at a special Ape Marathon at the Alamo Draft House in Austin. They make awesome posters and you can follow Mondo news updates here for future movie poster sells.

By Mr. Tropnevad

Summary

Astronaut Brent (James Franciscus) crash lands on a strange planet. Upon arrival he meets Nova and learns that Col. Taylor is on this strange planet. He ventures into Ape City where he learns that Taylor is in the Forbidden Zone where mutants with telekinetic powers live. Meanwhile the apes learn that a special type of human are living in the Forbidden Zone and proceed to wage war on the mutants.



Bad

When Charlton Heston was asked to reprise his roll as Taylor in Beneath the Planet of the Apes he told Twentieth Century Fox to shove it. Then the producer asked him to reprise his role and Heston said he would but on the condition that Taylor dies in the end. In my opinion that alone should have been a reason not to make this movie or even continue the series. This is when Hollywood sees its first instance of whoring itself out to make more money. Since Heston refused to be in the entire movie we find a man named James Francisucs who plays our new savior of humanity, Brent. So this man is informed that he has to live up to Heston in every way including sound and act like him. He is usually overacting or trying too hard to live up to Heston. I would say this role killed his career but I think he did that before this movie and not to mention he wasn’t in anything after this that would have gave him a household name. He has no memorable lines and if you remember from the last review how I said the dialog was cheesy throughout the film…somehow this is worse and I actually not only blame the character but writer Paul Dehn. Don’t strike me down for calling out Dehn but how could you write the screenplay for Goldfinger and many other movies and then write all of the Apes movies. To give you an idea of how bad the script is Brent says something along the lines of oh my god (he looks at the date on his computer in the spaceship) and says everyone I knew is dead. My immediate reaction to this was “You signed up for a space mission that makes you travel light years! Do you not understand what light years means?”

Heston is not in this movie except for the a few minutes in the beginning and at the end. We see him and Nova riding on a horse and out of nowhere horrible special effects lightning appears. Taylor hops off his horse and tells Nova that if he does not return to go find Zira and then he walks through a rock. Wait so he knew to walk through the rock. When I saw this part I was like wait you didn’t even act this scene. Come on Heston you signed up for a movie at least act. The special effects throughout are atrocious. When the apes search the Forbidden Zone for the mutant humans there are several scenes of terrible looking fire effects and a fake statue. When I saw this I was thinking did Roger Corman have his hand in this movie because I would have expected something this bad from him but not other directors.

I have to point the obviousness out of how stupid the story for this movie is. The mutants have telekinesis right. So they can do things with their minds which they even say they have killed ape spies. In otherwords they don’t have to do anything but stand around. So this makes me think wait so you guys pray to a nuclear bomb and then you have crazy super powers and you live in some ruins and are worried that the apes are going to kill you. Any smart person would say why don’t you go sneak inot the trees near the ape village and then just start using your powers on them while they are sleeping. You don’t have to do anything but watch them die.Even in the end when they are attacked they do nothing but stand there and take it. Seriously guys even back in 1969 and 1970 someone should have questioned this. I can deal with a lot of things but when your story falls flat due to characters having awesome powers and barley using them then you have no excuse.

The Good

If you remember in the last review I mentioned how racism plays a part in the films, well apparently it’s an ongoing thing. We get to see how the three races of apes interact with one another and we soon learn that the gorillas are warmongers. They want to end all of the humans. We even see more of how the gorillas use the humans for military use by using them as targets. While I was grateful to see this I was really wanting to see more of this in the last film. This film was written after the first one was made so they really didn’t plan on this turning into a series. Hollywood was just greedy for money.

The mutant hideout which happens to be an underground subway tunnel actually looks good. The problem is the set pieces for all of the underground sequences look better than any of the set pieces that are above ground and not to mention far superior than the first movie. The reason for this is that the film makers reused some of the set pieces from Hello Dolly to make the underground sections and then several years later one of the set pieces made it into another movie Last Action Hero.

Overall Thoughts

Beneath the Planet of the Apes is by no means a good movie and it will make you question why they continued making three more movies. Should you watch this one and continue the series? Personally this one is interesting to watch just to see what happens in the end but if you are anything like me your going to get mad at watching the mutants not use their awesome mind powers. Seriously just make all of your enemies shoot one another and you win. You cannot stream this on instant Netflix but if you could I would say steam it just to check it out. Since you would actually have to rent a disc, rent to stream via amazon or buy it to watch it I say pass on this.

Overall- Pass

There are three more movies to go and I will be bringing you the reviews soon.