Thanks for the memories!

Good movie but grossly overrated

Admirable film.

All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

SPOILER ALERT! First of all, the title and the video box have something in common: they respectively hype and show the pre-hysteric women of the prehistoric planet - something alas the movie does not contain at all! There is one "prehistoric" woman and she's not very prehistoric! However, she is played by Irene Tsu so who cares, right? Suzie Kaye is a crew member on COSMOS I and she is great to look at too! Hubba, hubba! In fact, between those two, they're the only reason to tune in and watch this ripoff because there are no prehistoric women, half-dressed in loin cloths like Raquel Welch, Victoria Vetri or Julie Ege.The plot concerns a spaceship (COSMOS III) that is overtaken by the "savage" Centaurians on board. The lead spaceship, COSMOS I, headed by the "sober"(?) captain, Wendell Corey, flaunts a directive to return to homebase and instead turns back to look for COSMOS III, which has presumably crashlanded on a planet in the SOLARIS system, which by the way is a dead giveaway for the plot twist at the end of the movie.COSMOS I lands safely and then sends out an expedition to look for survivors (if any) of COSMOS III (what, they couldn't land closer to the wreckage than that?) In the meantime, one of the Centaurians, Irene Tsu, leaves COSMOS I, to go for a little walk just for the hell of it. Meanwhile the rescue expedition encounters iguanas that explode into flame when hit by pellets ejected from toy ray guns! They also encounter steaming pools of acid which one very clumsy and expendable crew member manages to fall in. Meanwhile back to Irene Tsu (and none too soon either). She gets kidnapped by a guy named Tang, whose mother and father were crewmembers on the crashed spaceship 18 years before! Finally, the rescuers reach the crashed spaceship and find a few bones and skeletons - and a fake spider that does in Chief, Stuart Margolin. One almost wishes it had done in perennial funnyman, jokester and co crew member, Paul Gilbert instead (talk about your sexual harassment!). The talk goes on endlessly, if not between Wendell Corey and Keith Larsen, then between Keith Larsen and John Agar! The talk wouldn't be so bad but those scientific explanations go on endlessly and even seem to confuse and confound the scientists on board the spaceship! The end twist would have been more believable had we not seen other primitive men try to kill Irene Tsu and Tang who at the end are supposed to be Adam and Eve, the FIRST MAN AND WOMAN on this new planet which as the movie fades out, Wendell Corey decides to name EARTH! If you don't take this movie seriously, it is one big laughfest. Oh, not as many laughs as say PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE, but it has its share.

There's a lot of negative things to say about this movie, which the authors of the reviews prior to mine have already done to death, and I'm not really going to argue with them: this is a badly made, lethargically written film. It's a textbook B-movie. However, unlike virtually every other low-to-no budget Science Fiction film I've ever seen, this one actually tries to work some actual "Science" into the fiction, and for that I give them high marks for trying, even if the rest of the flick completely undercuts the interesting time dilation aspect of the film.Here's the deal: A flotilla of starships have been on the planet "Centaurus" for some time, and are heading back to their homeworld again, launched in six-month intervals. There's a human civilization (Composed of Asians) on Centaurus that has fallen on hard times, and appears to have been colonized by the Caucasians. En rout back home, some Centaurans rebel on one of the ships, and it goes off course, eventually crash landing on the heretofore uncharted planet "Solaris 3". The flagship of the flotilla decides to go back to look for survivors, and eventually meet up with the child of the survivors of the crash.Here's the cool stuff: 1) They point out in great detail that they're traveling near light speed, and hence time is passing slower for them aboard ship than it is back on their homeworld. The starship's helmsman points out that by the time they get home again, his brother will be 32 years older than him. It only takes the rescue ship three weeks to get to Solaris 3 in subjective (Shipboard) time, but objectively, on the planet 18 years have passed. How freakin' cool is that? Come on, after a lifetime of watching lousy SF films where interstellar flight is as easy as hopping an airplane to Reno, you have to admit one which actually deals with Einsteinian Relativity is pretty sweet! It's a very cool idea to have someone look at a functional ship he just saw six months before, and yet it's derelict wreck that's been sitting in a jungle for 18 years. What's that? You find relativity confusing? There there, sparky, that's OK. Why don't you go back to watching Star Trek and leave the science fiction to the big boys, OK? That's a good boy... 2) The race relations aspect of the movie is pretty neat, too: the astronauts are all Caucasians, the Centaurians are all Asians, and neither side really trusts the other. Some of the Caucasians don't even consider the Asians to be human, despite the fact that they obviously are. Again, in an age when all SF postulates a future where all races live together in a spirit of peaceful unity, it's kind of charming to see a movie that dwells on how hard it can be to attain that kind of unity. 3) This movie actually goes out of it's way to imply a larger history than we actually see on screen, which is pretty clever. The Admiral believes (According to dialog in the film) that humanity established interstellar travel millenia ago, and then lost it for whatever reason. The Centaurans are the descendants of human colonists that adapted to the conditions of the planet Centaurus over scores of thousands of years, which is why they look different than the spacefaring humans who found them. 4) Irene Tsu is just smokin' hot in this movie, seriously. It doesn't hurt that her cave-girl sarong is slit up the leg all the way to her waist, but even without that she'd still be just..wow. I remember seeing this movie for the first time when I was 10 (On Dr. Paul Bearer's "Creature Feature" show) and getting strangely attentive whenever she'd come on screen and eat a banana or kick her legs when being carried off. I was only 10, mind you, I had no idea what it was about her that was affecting me so, I just knew that I felt pleasantly happy whenever she was on screen. 5) The final twist of the movie actually came as a big shock to me. Granted, I was ten, but it does kind of come out of nowhere, and it is sort of neat.To conclude, I'm not saying this is a good movie because it certainly ain't. I *am* saying that it tried really hard, that it's got more interesting ideas than an entire season of Next Generation, or the entire series run of Seaquest (Not that that's hard in either case), it actually tried to say something about race relations, and while it unquestionably failed artistically, I have to admire it for tackling the big questions when so few more professional productions would even take the chance admitting the questions exist.Probably the MST3K version of this film is the best way to watch it, though, because it is deadly dull, and Joel and the 'Bots really do liven it up quite a bit.

I watched this movie on a Monday night cuz nothing was on. In fact, I bought this movie. It's actually really good. It's about these astronauts who travel through space and the time shifting is off from real time. The main guys are kind of like scientists and there are a few women on this ship also. They are going to a planet that has dinosaurs and lakes made of acid. Very strange huh? Well some cavemen eventually torment the folks on this planet and there is an engineer who is really into doing stand up comedy in the middle of an expedition. He just talks and talks and at one point he does a FLIP for no reason. There is a Chinese man named TANG who is like ADAM and a woman named LINDA who is like Eve. As the astronauts leave, they look behind at the planet and name it Earth. It was a goosebump moment for sure!

Somewhere in space, where no one can hear you scream, the Cosmos 1 is heading off to somewhere else. The crew have been on this 6 month mission. They are an advanced space faring race with their futuristic lockers and guitar-looking radar wall screen and the tendency to do space/time conversion formulas. Somewhere else another space vessel, Cosmos 3, has problems. The ship and crew are being held hostage by Centaurians (think of Klingons without the brown paint and sash, but all Asian) and because of it they crash onto a "prehistoric" planet.The commander of Cosmos 1, Admiral King (played by the walking corpse of the late Wendell Corey), disobeys orders and goes on a rescue mission to Solaris. 3 months later .....Cosmos 1 arrives at the planet, where 18 years have gone by. A rescue party is sent down, lead by Commander "I don't like Centaurians" Scott with Dr. Farrell (played by the incomparable John Agar), Lt."Why won't he shut up" Bradley, Stuart Margolin as the Chief and some nobody who's expendable (think of the red shirt security officers from the original Star Trek series). At the same time, Linda (Irene Tsu) escapes to the planet to stretch her legs.On the "prehistoric" planet below, they find the crash site and the lone survivor; a Centaurian named Tang (Robert Ito). The rest of the movie is just a "stew" containing paper machete sets, stock footage of an iguana, a rubber iguana on fire, a sock-like jumping tree snake, a hopping spider plush toy, animal cruelty towards a chimpanzee (Teeko), stock footage, the admiral's slurred confused alcoholic rants and a trio of cavemen brutes. We top this with scenes upon scenes of the lecherous, chauvinistic, sexual harassing, karate practicing Lt. Bradley (who never shuts up). Visualize the Watney Smith character from Outlaw of Gor .... CABOT !!Though the budget of the movie (and by proxy the intelligence of the write/director) was low, the movie still manages to be infused with a thought provoking plot about race relations, cultural differences, not being understood, being different, going through turmoil and finding a resolution. As a rule, you probably won't need more than 5 or 6 shots of SoCo to be able to see this.You will probably recognize some of the actors. They had long and fulfilling careers, but you would not have bet on that after seeing this movie. Riveting performances like "crossing the log when we could go around or jump over the liquid" scene and Irene Tsu's unforgettable banana scene. This scene is both erotic, inappropriate and confusing (the skin of the banana ,and by proxy the banana itself, is bite-proof, yet not peel proof). Robert Ito's "hopping" interpretation of Tang will haunt me for the rest of my days. I highly recommend this movie if you are not alone, not on any sleep inducing medication nor in possession of a dissection kit and are watching the MST3k version of this movie. In my final thoughts I noticed a similarity between this movie and another MST alumni, The Clonus Horror. Now to a bit of SAT deja vu :The Clonus Horror is to The Island as The Women of the Prehistoric Planet is to …. a) Star Trek b) Star Wars c) None of the above d) Battlestar Galactica.... for those even remotely interested the answer will be in my next review.-Celluloid Rehab