The · Affected · Provincial’s · Almanack

Best to watch late at night when everything is quiet. It's a kind of cut-up tone poem in the ghostly mold of Cornell's Rose Hobart, but far more eerie and effective in its editing--a sort of headless, tailless space age mythology painted with that wonderfully muddy texture, sound and color found in old film. According to its auteur, cheapsurrealist:

"Planeta Bur"...was a Soviet SciFi movie made in 1962. The space race was heating up and the Russian film makers didn't have to worry about the box office or a budget so they spared no expense on special effects. I haven't seen this version but it is on YouTube with no subtitles.

"A couple of years later an American named Chris Hunington mixed in newly shot footage with Basil Rathbone, Dennis Hopper and John Saxon. The result was "Voyage to the Prehistoric planet". I haven't seen that version either but you can download it from archive.org.

"A year after that Roger Corman purchased the negative of Planeta Bur and put Peter Bogdanovich to work on it. Again new footage was shot with American actors. Most notable was Mamie Van Doren. This version was called "Voyage to the Planet of the Prehistoric Women" and that is the material I worked from.

"It's one of those so bad it's good movies. If you can sit through Plan 9 From Outer Space then you might enjoy it. It's in the public domain and you can download it from archive.org

"So in 2008 I took a stab at it. The movie is built around "looks". A Russian guy dressed as a cosmonaut on a sound stage in 1962 makes eye contact with Mamie van Doren on a beach in 1966. They fall in love. It's a love story.

"There's actually quite a bit of film theory in there. From Kuleshov to Bresson to ...well... Corman who once said he "could make a movie about the fall of the Roman Empire with two extras and a sage bush".