Movie Review: Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970)

Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970): You know how I really liked Planet of the Apes, the original one? Yeah. I'll start off with the basics: this isn't as good. It's not nearly as good. In fact, they're not in the same league. Remember how I thought the special effects were alright in the first one but anticipated them getting worse as we progressed through the original series? Yeah. That happened. This film picks up right after the end of the first one, except Charlton Heston didn't fancy doing much in this one so instead we get Brent, who is Heston's Taylor character in all but name. Okay, Taylor's a bit more of a sex pest, but apart from that, generally the same. They look pretty much the same (distinguished in this film by Taylor remaining beardless), both tag along with Nova, both run away from apes, both astronauts. In fact, if I were to make assumptions I'd guess they spent very, very little time conceiving the character of Brent. I get the impression Heston would have done pretty much the same stuff as he did, but then he turned down the lead role and they thought "We need a new lead character. "But who could it be?" "Astronaut, crash landed on the planet, doesn't know exactly where he is, discovers monkeys rule the place." "Worked before, why not again?"

That aside, about halfway through the movie it takes a ludicrous turn as Beneath the Planet of the Apes becomes a strange, extra cheap episode of the original Doctor Who as Brent stumbles upon humans living underground. Except these humans have psychic powers, for some reason. You know that Doctor Who episode, where Tom Baker was held hostage underground by psychic mentalists. He was wearing a loincloth and a scarf. Maybe they never got around to that. This leads to a lot of scenes where the weird dudes close their eyes (to concentrate on psychic powers, obviously) and the special effect of choice is to play a high pitched sound effect. Brent goes ARGH and falls over, or attempts to rape Nova or whatever the violent act of choice is at that time. These humans (who have peelable skin, surely the next step in our evolution) have a big bastard of a bomb that they're prepared to use on the monkey fellas. Due to their mind control they can create all sorts of weird illusions, like walls of fire and tears of blood coming from a large ape statue (done with the same paint you'd paint airfix models with). Anyway, all of this made very little sense to me and by the end of it I really didn't care. Roddy McDowell wasn't even in it so we got some other guy chimping about as Cornelius. Tragic. Two thumbs down.