“We’ve got an Alice in Wonderland forest here.”
Space ship Explorer 12 and its international five man team are on its way to Uranus. The five UN astronauts are Captain Don Graham (John Agar), Commander Eric Nilsson (Carl Ottosen), Barry O’Sullivan (Ove Sprogoe), Svend Viltoft (Louis Miehe Renard) and Lt. Karl Heinrich (Peter Monch). As they prepare to land on the planet an alien presence scans the crew’s minds. When they awaken they are at a loss as to how long they were out or how it happened. They continue on with their mission and land on the planet.
Upon landing they find an Earth-like atmosphere and see a forested area. They leave the ship and explore where they are. Although the area looks like Earth on the surface, when they pull up a bush there is no root system. They find that this fake forest is surrounded by a soft barrier. When one of the astronauts puts his arm through the barrier his arm freezes.
Everything around them is familiar to them. From their past. Any time they think of something new, it appears. A rock, an apple tree, a village populated by people they know or have known in the past. As if someone is reading their mind and replaying it back to them in reality. The next day Don, Eric and Karl put on their space suits and walk through the barrier. On the other side is a waste land. They just begin to investigate when Don falls through the snow. It’s made of ammonia and acts like quicksand. He is pulled out and the exploratory party continues on. They next find a green blob. When Karl shoots it a one eyed rat monster appears and attacks them. They manage to get away.
Back at the ship they try to figure out what is happening. Some entity on Uranus seems to have the power to probe their minds and create whatever they are thinking. Not only their worst fears, but their inner most desires as well. They believe they are the victims of mind control. The creature is not satisfied with just playing with their minds; it plans on taking over the crew and then taking over Earth.
“Journey to the Seventh Planet” was released in 1962 and was directed by Sidney Pink. Apparently at least one of the special effects for the movie was so lame that is was substituted by stock footage from “Earth vs the Spider”. Since Earth v Spider is a black and white movie the footage was tinted blue to at least blend in somewhat. In some versions there is one other effect that got replaced with a piece of footage from “Angry Red Planet”.
The movie was made in Denmark, hence the mostly Danish cast. Since the astronauts are supposed to be from all over the world, the voices are dubbed. The budget was around $75,000, hence the bad special effects. Granted the ‘special effects’ are not great, but I didn’t consider them horrible. OK so maybe I’ve seen too many bad movies to be objective. I actually liked the one eyed rat puppet. I’ll even go along with the tripe brain-type monster with the marble eyeball. As I said, I’ve seen worse.
The movie stresses that by 2001 there is peace on Earth. The world is run by the UN and there are no more wars. The date on the letter of instructions that John Agar reads is September 10, 2001, one day before 9/11. Too bad the movie is fiction.