Very freely based on the story by Jules Verne.
During a storm in outer space a transport cruiser with five crew members on board manages to escape the storm but ends up going through a worm hole and crash lands on a strange planet. The crew is composed of three men, one woman and an alien. The woman and pilot is Commander Rogan (Paula Taupier). The men are Sub-Commander and telepath Krane (George Seavey), two mercenaries Arnus (Boydd Piper) and Hang (Bruce Nadeau). Hang is a Poltrusian and a war hero. The fifth person on board is Telis Marcus (Michael Quigley), a civilian engineer that happened to be aboard for a card game.
The castaways end up on the shores of an alien ocean. Scouring the beach for food Hang finds something that looks like giant ticks. They cook and eat them. Hang likes his raw. Arnus is attacked by a giant two headed snail. Eventually they manage to drive it back into the sea.
Wanting to find out more about where they are they decide to get to a high point and look around. On the top of a high Dr. Seuss looking mountain they can find no civilization for as far as they can see. On the way down they are attacked by a flying dragon. Commander Rogan is injured. They rest of the crew find a cave to rest in. The cave is in a mountain cropping that looks like a skull. One by one they pass out.
While they are asleep a young woman (Marilyn Mullen) comes into the cave and touches the injured Commander. When they awaken the Commander is gone. Marcus finds her by a pond. She is mysteriously well again. They try to do what they can to survive on the strange planet. They find water, hunt for food and try to avoid alien creatures.
One day Marcus finds the young woman who has been living on the planet alone. Krane tries to communicate with her telepathically. She leads them to the ship she was on that crashed on the planet a long time ago. They manufacture weapons and a radio from the downed ship.
The radio alerts aliens of their presence. They are attacked by four alien ships. They blow up two of them and manage to down the other two. The young woman leads the Commander to an ancient alien entity that exists on the planet. The alien spirit tells her that the planet is going to be destroyed by asteroids. The castaways now must find a way off the planet or they will be destroyed. Their only hope it to try to salvage parts from the two downed alien ships and see if they can get off the doomed planet before it explodes.
“Mysterious Planet” was released in 1982 and was directed by Brett Piper. He’s the guy that brought us “Queen Crab” 2015 and “A Nymphoid Barbarian in Dinosaur Hell” 1990. “Mysterious Planet” was his first film. It is supposedly based on Verne’s “Mysterious Island” story. One thing I will say for Piper is he prefers old school filmmaking to CGI. He uses matte paintings, stop motion and miniatures instead of computer generated effects. That is a point in his favor. If only he could learn how to do them well.
It is a very obscure film. I couldn’t find out much about it. I believe it was filmed in New Hampshire and consisted of actors from the Boston area. But don’t quote me on it. It is basically a home movie that had some really bad re-dubbing done to it since the redubbing is out of sync.
There is an incredible amount of bad here. The lighting is horrible; the camera work terrible, the sound is unbelievably horrendous. The dialogue, acting and anything else you can think of are equally bad. The monsters are delightfully hysterical. The monsters are bad too, but still fun. They are stop motion, possibly even Claymation. They aren’t well defined, however the two headed snail was good. Piper got a little better at monster creatures when he made “A Nymphoid Barbarian in Dinosaur Hell”. Even though they were rough they were still the best part of the movie.
What is especially bad is the sound. There are echoes and bad dubbing. Sometimes the sound is loud and sometimes it is too soft to hear. Half the time it’s difficult to understand what is going on. But there is usually something going on. Granted half the time it doesn’t make sense but there is usually something shiny to distract you from all the bad. Usually.
Yes it’s a bad movie, but shiny.