[troggi]

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Last night I watched:
"The Wasp Woman" 1960
AND:
"Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet" 1965

Well a bit of a mixed bag here. "The Wasp Woman" is an old favourite and I haven't seen it for years. Yes the science involved is pure hokum, yes the selective transformation of Janice Starling is really hard to get your head around (the head and arms become insectoid but the rest of the body is a bipedal humanoid but obviously with book lungs and spiracles to explain the buzzing noise), but it is fun. 7/10 for silliness.

"Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet" has really bad picture quality, so much so that you only realise that it is a colour film when the whole screen goes red which it does quite often. Great ideas in this film though, pity they are all completely wrong! It was made at that optimistic time in the 1960s when people believed that we would all be commuting home in flying cars by 1980 and that we would have colonised the moon by the early 2000s. I'm still waiting for the universally cheap humanoid robot butler/housemaid to come on the market!

The "Prehistoric Planet" of the title is Venus, dinosaurs and volcanoes are rampant on it's surface. Only 10 years later the Russians proved that only the "volcanoes" bit is anything like correct. Venus has a runaway "greenhouse effect" the pressure and temperature on the surface being lethal to life. And the big "Star" of the film, Basil Rathbone, is completely wasted only ever talking down a microphone to issue orders.

Having said all that I still got the thrill I felt as an 8 year old watching crappy sci-fi "B" movies on an old b/w TV set. Oh and a great robot and "car"! 6/10 for the robot.

I am resigned to the fact that these 50 films are the cheapest transfers available but they are difficult at times to watch and hear and I am sure that I would rate most of them much higher if I could see and hear them better. They have a naive "charm" and appeal to the little boy I used to be so long ago!

None tonight as I have the "Mad Artichoke" coming 'round for a game of cards, life in the fast lane, eh?