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Terrible acting, screenplay and direction.

Admirable film.

This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

THE PHANTOM PLANET is another low budget, endearingly cheap US science fiction movie of the early 1960s. This one could easily have been made a good decade previously because it feels very dated for its era. The story is about a ship of astronauts who find themselves on a miniature world in which the inhabitants are menaced by ugly alien creatures and the like. It's a film full of cliffhanger action, dated but effective special effects, and a cool-looking man-in-a-suit alien played by a youthful Richard Kiel. Sometimes, it's the dated films which are the most fun, and so it proves with this simple but effective slice of US sci-fi cheese.

'The Phantom Planet' is an extremely dull and talky sci-fi quickie set in 1980, by which time (as in Gerry Anderson's 'UFO') we Earthlings have established a base on the moon (where the communications officer interestingly enough is played by a Japanese actress (Akemi Tami), although we see and hear very little from her).Most of the music (plainly library material) is actually pretty good. And it's so far, so dull until we eventually arrive on the surface of the planet Rheton (actually an asteroid), which resembles an enormous Chicken McNugget. It's at this point that the film delivers it's one real surprise, which I won't divulge here as so many others have, as it has remarkably little bearing on anything else that follows.The Rhetons' costumes look as if they were left over from a movie set in ancient Rome; while the sets and the duel fought stripped to the waist between the film's two alpha males over the heroine anticipate one of the cheesier episodes of 'Star Trek'. Rheton's elderly ruler, Sesom (Francis X. Bushman) explains the primitive drabness of their present existence by claiming that the ill-effects from the unprecedented amount of leisure time resulting from labour-saving technology were solved by abandoning modern technology and returning to the simple life (late 20th Century capitalism certainly did a good job of licking this particular worry, if little else). Not that we see much evidence of good honest toil taking up much of the time of those Rhetons that we actually meet; all twenty of them. (Maybe all the real work is being done by slaves.) Nor do we see any bookcases, so it presumably didn't occur to the Rhetons to use all that unaccustomed leisure to read or write books. Their frugal existence, however, hasn't stopped them from harnessing "the magnetic forces of Rheton" to create a hi-tech defence system against attacking enemy ships piloted by aliens called Solorites (in scenes which recall the climaxes of 'This Island Earth' and 'Star Wars'), and creating force fields within which to imprison a captured Solorite (played by an uncredited Richard Kiel) and 'disintegrating gravity plates' in the floor to vapourise anyone who stands on them.

I rather enjoyed this amazingly daft sci-fi film. There's just something about hokey effects, pseudo-science, astronauts recording their thoughts on cassette and the brain scratching physics on display. It's 1980 (!) and man has a spaceport on the moon, sending out manned rockets here and there. Problem is, these rockets keep crashing on a dwarf plant that can seemingly move around the solar system at will, and it's up to astronaut Frank Chapman to sort things out! The US are already two ships down by the time Frank heads out there with his buddy, and Frank's not about sticking to the rules, so in order to find a random planet that flies about the place, he goes off course and it's not long before the ship is being wrecked by meteorites. Frank and his buddy go outside to fix things and Frank get's beaned on the head by a tiny rock, but his mate gets him onboard before he himself is battered by a rock and drifts out into space. Frank comes to just in time to steer the rocket onto the Phantom Plant.This is where the film get (even) dafter, because Frank crawls out of his ship and meets loads of tiny men, but don't worry about that. Didn't Stephen Hawking mathematically prove that a physical body will shrink to adapt to its environment? He didn't? Well that's what happens here as Chapman shrinks to the size of everyone else and soon finds himself on charges of assault. Also, they all speak English and lives in caves but can steer their planet about. Yep.So Frank is found guilty but that means nothing as he's set free as long as he doesn't try and escape. He also gets into a duel with a guy and there's a mute girl making goo goo eyes at him. Just when you think Frank's about to go native (and to be honest just when things started getting boring) a bunch of aliens called the Solarites turn up and start attacking everyone! Thank the Gods for them as this bunch of crazy eyed bovver boys tear around the place in ships made of fire. Can Champ Frankman sort them out, grow big again, and go home? You'll have to watch the film to see or at least look up the plot on Wikipedia or even go and do something worthwhile with your life instead.Films like the Phantom Planet are far too daft to hate. Full of cheesy effects (including the rockets ships, the look of the Solarites, and the brain damaging 'science) and the kind of rugged guys who always do okay as long as there's someone to sock on the jaw, this one was a good laugh back in those naive days before we discovered that space was full of a whole load of nothing.

This is typical of the schlock era of scifi, the time when budgets, technology and expectations were all low, and drive-in theaters kept demand for product fairly high. The cheese will either put you off entirely, or you will find it mildly charming, as I do.One highlight of this film is the spaceship designs by Bob Kinoshita, who later designed the interior of Jupiter II and the Robot on Lost in Space. These designs aren't spectacular, but are fun and functional. Another highlight is the creative shrinking effect used to miniaturize our astronaut hero...it is not realistic per say, but not nearly as silly as most FX of this era.The script for this film is variously ingenious and silly, but the writer should be commended for creating rationalizations for the cheap sets weak action. For instance, you have a super-advanced race of people who possess hyperdrive spaceflight yet who nonetheless live in rock caves and eschew comfortable furnishings and conveniences...the incongruity is explained by stating that they have adopted a spartan philosophy regarding daily life.Our hero is a sort of low-rent Nick Adams type, but less likable. There is a lovely mute girl as the love interest, thus telling us something about the director's attitude toward women. There is a silly ceremonial fight. There is space battle against an alien race featuring primitive yet creative FX.This film contains no socio-political commentary or other food-stuff for the brain, the only value is for escapism, ridicule value, or curiosity. There are certainly worse schlock scifi, although perhaps this film would have been helped if the writer and director had taken a few more risks, put in something shocking, subversive, or bad taste...this one appears aimed more toward the 12-year-old's at a matinée than at teens at a drive-in.