PLANET OF STORMS, THE HEAVENS CALL Series: From Tsars To Stars: A Journey Through Russian Fantastik Cinema October 21, 2006

Double Feature:

PLANET OF STORMS (PLANETA BUR) 1961, 83 min. Dir. Pavel Klushantsev. Upon arrival on Venus, a team of cosmonauts finds a hostile environment filled with furious volcanoes and sundry prehistoric beasts, including a cackling, swooping pterodacyl. Working from a dullish source, director Klushantsev went his 1958 Venusian cosmonaut epic ROAD TO THE STARS one better with this Soviet classic, overpowering the party-line dialogue with excellent poetic effects. PLANET OF STORMS was subsequently bought by Roger Corman, who used Klushantsev’s footage as the basis of Curtis Harrington’s 1965 VOYAGE TO THE PREHISTORIC PLANET and later incorporated footage from the film in Harrington’s 1966 QUEEN OF BLOOD. Never one to look a gift horse in the mouth, Corman ran the original film through the recycling spin cycle one more time with 1968’s Mamie Van Doren vehicle VOYAGE TO THE PLANET OF THE PREHISTORIC WOMEN, which was the directorial debut of Peter Bogdanovich, no less.

THE HEAVENS CALL (NEBO ZOVET) 1959, 80 min. Dir. Mikhail Karyukov and Aleksandr Kozyr. This tale of two rival space probes, headed for Mars and the moon, only to crash-land on a nearby asteroid, features spectacular space scapes, as well as a prescient visualization of the Earth’s orbit cluttered by man-made satellites. Roger Corman helped himself to the film’s plot and footage for the 1963 opus BATTLE BEYOND THE SUN, re-edited and reconfigured into a drive-in movie by an ambitious young director named Thomas Colchert. These days, he goes by the name of Francis Ford Coppola.

Preceded by the short: "The Cameraman’s Revenge" (Mest kinematograficheskogo operatora), 1912, 12 min. Silent. Dir. Ladislas Starewitch. An early fantastic classic from the great animation pioneer, about adultery in the insect kingdom - a married beetle is filmed in a compromising situation by a jealous grasshopper; the beetle is later compromised when he takes his (also adulterous!) wife to the movies and sees the final results!

Official Website: http://egyptiantheatre.com/archive1999/2006/RussianFantastik.htm