Load of rubbish!!

Good concept, poorly executed.

Absolutely brilliant

A waste of 90 minutes of my life

Gene Autry serial is an odd mix of Scifi and westerns. To be certain its more western then scifi, but its enough to keep scifi fans interested.The plot has an evil professor looking for radium trying to drive Gene Autry away from his ranch under which is buried a great amount of ore. Complicating things is the fact that under the ranch is a hidden kingdom.What should have been a standard western serial are lifted by the good cast that has Autry, his band of regulars as well as Frankie Darro and others. Is it be all and end all? no. Frankly if it hadn't been for Autry this probably would have been long forgotten, then again if it wasn't for this serial we never would have had Gene Autry as a leading man.Worth a look for those in a western scifi mood or for those wanting to reconnect with movie history. Personally I like the serial in a goofy retro sort of way but seeing it again for the first time in years I realized that I didn't need to see it again and after jumping through some chapters I gave up and moved on. Worth a look if you've never seen it. If you have, try something else.

So awful it is excellent... so it scores a 5. Please also read the other comments for the startling blend of ingredients to be screamed at in the dizzy 1935 serial spectacular from backyard shed studio MASCOT Pictures. One could almost pass out in a frenzy of 'where do I start' alarm in trying to even begin to describe what I saw.... but here I go.... (oooh! tingles!).... A gang of kid horseback riders with buckets on their heads. A funny farm of single men who - every day at 2pm - sing songs about each other. A secret cave with a glass elevator to a picture of an underground art deco city. Hillbilly inspired robots with tin hats and noses. (noses! why would a robot need a nose?) Big zizzy ray-gun and a torpedo launcher that spits striped flying frankfurters. An evil queen (a real one) still dressed for that nightclub date that never happened. Men in tinsel miniskirts. Tubby old men. Like Uncle Wally. Big screen art deco TVs everywhere... even on a cave wall. .... etc... etc.... all 1934/5 madness. Made before UNDERSEA KINGDOM and made before FLASH GORDON this serial clearly made so much money that Repubic bought Mascot and remade the film immediately using the same sets and storyline. (bummer if you saw both in 1936... what a gyp!) ... and of course, Universal restructured and remade both with a budget and Buster Crabbe and FLASH GORDON history was made. But is it cheap littler Mascot Pictures who got there first and Hollywood me and you are never the same once you get through this entire serial.

I'm involved in a study of "folding" in film; folding is a matter of overlain or referenced narratives. Sometimes the folding is something only of interest to highbrow specialists, but usually it is a matter of fun.Some folding is a matter of introducing bizarre conventions, and once they enter in one film they promulgate throughout the system. And then through our imagination. So part of my study is looking for examples of folding and most especially the first appearance of specific types.This serial is usually considered an oddball secondrater compared to more famous (if not better) examples. But I am putting it on my list of films that everyone should see before they die. This brief description should indicate why, for those not excited about sitting through five hours of mediocre production.Gene Autry was already a famous radio star before making this. He was the first one to combine hee haw Appalachian folk music with the notion of a western cowboy to create the so-called "singing cowboy." The juxtaposition is amazing if you know the history, and in fact the subsequent history of "country and western" music (now just "country") spins from this one man. But that's all before this.This is his first movie, so they preserved the radio show. Every day at 2:00, Gene (playing himself) must give a show or lose his ranch. The show is live from that "radio ranch," where his ranch helpers play parts in the show. Okay: one simple fold, right? Now add: in producing the show instead of just doing sound effects and voices, the players actually do what they are portraying. Odd. (Another fold.)The purpose of the ranch is to provide a place for kids to do their "ridin and ropin" stuff, and indeed there are kids in attendance who form a secret society called the "thunder riders" after local legends (and experiences) seeing bands of riders inexplicably accompanied by thunder. This gang of kids is at the same time a feature of the story of the radio show, inhabitants of the ranch, and participants in the larger story we'll elaborate in a bit. A feature of the radio show is recruiting kids at home to join the riders in a sort of boy scout affiliation.Gene's ranch happens to sit on a radium deposit. Nuclear fission, even the idea, would be years away but radioactive stuff held a special place in the popular imagination. Needless to say, there is an evil professor and henchmen who want to eliminate Autry so they can get the radium. So far so good.But there is also a subterranean culture under the ranch as well, a huge city at 20,000 feet under, sustained by the radiation and rebellious robots. (Note: this is _before_ "Flash Gordon.") They have all sorts of advanced gadgets including something that gives their evil young queen effective remote vision, providing her with the creation of the movie. They, too, want Autry eliminated. The original "thunder riders" are the special forces of this city who emerge for whatever project is at hand.Thus, science fiction takes to horses and indeed every time some motion is needed as a break from the talking (and singing!) heads, there's a passel of panicky ridin, usually in groups of 20-30, which seems to be the most that can fit in a frame.The serial consists of all the ordinary captures and escapes (always by 2:00!) you might expect. In that sense, the thing is pretty ordinary, excepting that the substance of the radio show and the movie overlap and separate constantly. Its the novelty and complete oddity of the strange framework that makes the thing interesting and important. Film would never be the same after.The framework is clearly a matter of psychotropic hallucination, and indeed you can see the very same folded structure in the similarly drugged out "Tell your Children" written immediately after.If you decide to see it, don't use the DVD (which is technically horrible and is missing key elements), nor the silly movie they edited out of it. The VHS tapes are the thing to seek out.Ted's Evaluation -- 4 of 3: Every cineliterate person should experience this.

Gene Autry was already a radio star when he went to Hollywood in the early '30s. Naturally, since Autry was known as "the Singing Cowboy," his first starring role was in a sci-fi serial about an underground civilization. One might think that this was a brave example of casting against type; in fact, Autry plays exactly the same character he would continue to play on film and TV for the next twenty years: "Gene Autry, the Singing Cowboy."With a premise like this, one would expect THE PHANTOM EMPIRE to be thoroughly goofy. And one would be right. It doesn't help matters that the serial is directed exclusively to children, without even a nod or wink at the adult audience. Also, the cliffhanger cheat factor is fairly high, mostly involving added footage of the escapes which completely distorts what we saw in the previous chapter (this would, of course, have been somewhat less obvious when seeing only one chapter a week and not having a rewind button).But if you're a connoisseur of cinematic goofiness, or if you're interested in B-Westerns and SF serials of the 30s, or if you have a burning desire to see Smiley Burnette in drag, you should check this one out. The Alpha DVD release, as others have said, is pretty poor (the worst Alpha DVDs I've seen, in fact), but if you can get through the first two chapters, the quality improves marginally (there does seem to have been some restoration work done on the print used--mainly with Scotch tape).