cult film freak: DOLORES FAITH & COLEEN GRAY ARE HOT IN 'THE PHANTOM PLANET'

Poster for The Phantom Planet introducing Dolores Faith YEAR: 1961

Another "bad space movie" that's not so bad, held back by a meager budget that also provides its charm: centering on an astronaut shot not from the Earth to the Moon but, in this particular future, 1980 viewed from 1961, the moon's space station into deeper space where another rocket had already vanished. When Captain Chapman lands from a magnetic pull, he finds a world hybrid of a Biblical Epic and B-Western...

The inhabitants are miniaturized, which means nothing since we mostly see Dean Fredericks the same size among them: a square-jawed, high cheek-boned, dyed-blond-haired actor best known as television's really white STEVE CANYON, he also played a score of Native Americans, which, ironically, the leaders of this planet share the same cinematic wisdom of: with technology far beyond our own, they still choose to live in a primal setting, leading to a man-to-man fight between our hero and the only other virile young man around (this scene and their overall anti-chemistry's reminiscent of Sam Jones and Timothy Dalton in FLASH GORDON years later)...

Coleen Gray and Dolores Faith in The Phantom Planet RATES: ***1/2

But it's the dames, including smart, semi-manipulative Coleen Gray and passive mute Dolores Faith, who make this worth the watch: blunting the dated aspect since hot chicks are as universal then as now. And both remain equally important as the men plot-wise while invading forces move in: made tangible by an alien-mask-wearing Richard Kiel...

The mellow, deliberately slow-paced sciencey science-fiction is similar to the future STAR TREK: THE MOTION PICTURE "wait and watch from the console window" aspect, and is pretty interesting and creative albeit needing (in both cases) more urgency. Meanwhile, Dolores Faith's Zetha becomes the kind of damsel-in-distress the likes of horror genre scream queens. Only she can't scream, or even speak, but is equally as pretty and effective — ultimately more worth saving than the planet itself.