I can remember the very first time I saw this film was in about 1973 at a summer matinee film series at Crossroads cinema’s in Bellevue Washington. The sets, the colors and the special effects really had an effect on me and my filmmaking later on in life. Films like this taught me that you did not need a multi million dollar budget to make a film and that you could make a film about what ever you wanted. These films also introduced me to whole alternative world in cinema. Before this I was only use to seeing mainstream Hollywood films, I love psychotronic cinema. So I thought I would present to you this wonderful film from 1962 on this weeks Movie of Week. So if you have time to kill and want to watch a movie you should enjoy this one.
Journey to the Seventh Planet is a 1962 science fiction film. It was directed by Sid Pink, written by Pink and Ib Melchior, and shot in Denmark with a budget of only US$75,000. The seventh planet of the title is Uranus, and a crew is being dispatched there by the United Nations on a mission of space exploration. The film’s ideas of astronauts exploring outer space only to confront their inner mindscapes and memories precede the similar-themed 1972 film Solaris by a full decade (although the novel Solaris precedes this film by a year). The film is also reminiscent of Ray Bradbury’s 1948 short story “Mars Is Heaven!” that appeared in the 1950 book The Martian Chronicles.
Plot:
During their journey to Uranus, in the year 2001, an alien presence briefly assumes control of the crew’s minds. They awaken safely but notice that a long – and unexplained – period of time has passed by. Upon landing, the crew finds a forested land oddly like Earth’s, rather than the cold, bleak world they were expecting. This forest is surrounded by a mysterious barrier. One of the crew pushes his arm through the barrier, only to have it frozen.
New features and forms begin to appear each time they are imagined by the crew. A familiar-looking village appears, complete with attractive women the various male crew members have known in the past. Soon, they must face a series of strange beasts including a giant bi-pedal cyclopean rodent and a lobster-like insect. The crew realizes that they have been the victims of mind control by a gigantic one-eyed brain living in a cave. There, they are confronted by the “Being,” whose mysterious brain cuts to the inner thoughts of the explorers and causes their thoughts to appear as seemingly real. The brain-Being plans to possess the astronauts’ bodies and have them take it with them back to Earth where it will implement a plan for global domination. The crew gradually come to realize their peril and start to fight back against the presence, even eliciting aid from the sympathetic women. They must then confront the Being in its lair while it assaults each with monsters spawned from their fears. ~ From Wikipedia
