An American made for TV thriller directed by Curtis Harrington, starring Anthony Perkins and Julie Harris.
A man accidentally caused a fire which killed his father, scarred his sister's face and left him partially blind. After a hospital stay, he is released into the care of his sister, who is still living in the house where the fire took place. His ex-fiancee visits and tries to help him get back to normal, but has difficulties. The sister takes in a college student who rents a room in the house, but is never seen. The main character sometimes sees a shadowy figure and hears it whispering his name.
The shadowy figure whispering "Allan" was actually scary. It's one of those nebulous fear of the unknown deals and was done quite well. The complex plot and variously developed characters kept my interest well as well. The video was a little dark in some spots, but generally alright. The main character's partial blindness was illustrated by showing his view using an out of focus camera shot, which I thought was appropriate. Add to this the dark form (picture) and a creepy voice and you can understand how effective it was. For a made for TV flick, this wasn't bad. I rate it adequate. You may be as pleasantly surprized as I was.
A Russian American science fiction adventure film directed by Pavel Klushantsevand Curtis Harrington, starring Basil Rathbone.
A team of astronauts with a robot crash on Venus and lose communication with their ship. A team with a car are sent to rescue them. Some women are there as well, but have nothing to do with the male astronauts. A female astronaut waits on the ship that the teams came from, which is orbiting the planet.
This is a weird and mislabeled re-edited set of 2 films, but exemplary of old science fiction flicks. In order to fully understand what's going on, you have to watch both. Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women is longer, busier, more chaotic and more complete. Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet is shorter, sparser, more clear, but less complete. Prehistoric Planet does have scenes that were edited out of Prehistoric Women, so you can't just watch one and call it done. We have spaceships landing on a foreign planet with aliens and a robot involved. It meets all of my stereotypical science fiction requirements. How they treat the foreign planet is absurd. Why are they wearing space suits if opening the helmet doesn't kill them instantly? On top of that, those helmets don't look like they make an airtight seal anyway. In the underwater scene, some of the astronauts are just standing around like they're on land while another can't decide if he's underwater or in a low-gravity environment. Their car/vehicle is a joke. Is it a hovercraft? They fill it with water to submerge it and have to drag the stupid thing around in water which some of them sink and others partially float/swim. The robot announcing that he will throw the men off of him because his feet are in lava didn't make any sense at all. When the astronauts with the robot are tired or run out of oxygen, one of them is ranting about mathematics like it will save his life. The robot opens his helmet, puts a pill in his mouth, splashes water on his face and closes the helmet again. What is this supposed to do to save him? Some things just don't make sense, but these antiquated notions about space exploration are what make the film good. I rate this awesome for being so exemplary of '60 science fiction. This is one that you should watch with someone so you can mock it.
