Journey to The Seventh Planet is dumb but it’s pretty. I’m guessing the title of the film was chosen over Journey to Uranus for obvious reasons, although the second title might bring in a bigger crowd, certainly a different crowd.

The movie takes place far in the future in 2001. All war and famine have been eliminated and the U.N. runs the world. The human race has explored six of the nine planets, poor Pluto had yet to be demoted. The movie is the story of four brave and pretty horny young men who have accepted the mission to explore Uranus,

The exposition is covered by a disembodied narrator who sounds like he was borrowed off the set of the original superman television series. Everything is “bold!” and “courageous!” After the exposition comes the character development which is approximately 8 minutes of the crew talking about women. Each man’s character is measured by his relationship to women, there is the cocky Donn Juan, the earnest married man, the naive virgin, and the doctor. Doctors don’t count, they are scientists.
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They get to the planet and are observed by an alien who resembles a beanbag chair painted to look like a brain with a giant eye in the middle. You never fully see it through the smoke and weird animated effects. There are a lot of Vertigoesque swirling spirals. Of course, the brain thing hates humans and plans to conquer the earth. It decides to control all the men’s minds by reading their thoughts and manipulating them with their deepest desires and fears. If this sounds familiar the film is based on Stanislaw Lem’s novel Solaris which would later become the inspiration for another film you may have heard of by some guy named Tarkovsky.

The movie is then just a series of scenes with either space babes being seductive, or scary claymation monsters trying to kill everyone. It really would not have been worth sitting through but the visuals are fun.

It was directed by Sid Pink, and as far as I can tell that’s his real name. It was written by Ib Melchior and shot in Denmark with a budget of only $75,000. They mixed in some stock footage, a few cheap miniature models, and stole the cyclops’ roar from Rodan, They also stole, and clumsily colorized, some giant spider footage from the 1958 film The Spider. It could have used a bit more sex and violence but as it is I don’t regret watching it.

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