The Phantom Planet (1962) (film review).
Set in the year 1980, an interplanetary spacecraft is making a log on its way back to the Moon when it’s caught in a tractor beam and drawn into something when it explodes. This is the second rocket in less than two months. General Lansfield (actor Dick Haynes) is ordered to send his best pilot, preparing for a trip to Mars, Captain Frank Chapman (actor Dean Fredericks) and co-pilot Lt. Ray Makonnen (actor Richard Weber) to find out what is going on in the Pegasus 4. They also find their instruments go AWOL, lose contact with the Moon, and avoid a meteorite shower. With their engines not firing, they EVA to do repairs. That doesn’t go well, and Makonnen saves Chapman by throwing him through the airlock but finds himself thrown from the space rocket.
Chapman revives in the Pegasus and lands on an asteroid. Getting out, his airliner damaged, he collapses. He wakes momentarily to see inch-high people below him. Despite his resistance, he shrinks to their size and becomes a captive. They charge him with injuring one of the men, inform him that he is on the planet Rheton, find him guilty, and convert him to citizenship. He is told by their leader Sessom (actor Francis X. Bushman) that the other two Pegasuses crashed, but they were ready for Chapman’s craft. Liara (actress Coleen Grey), Sessom’s daughter, tends to him and informs him that his rocket shot back into space while he slept.
This time Lunar Control detects it and sends a rescue rocket that finds it deserted but receives Chapman’s message and is told to bring the rocket back.
Meanwhile, the frustrated Chapman has problems adjusting to their society, and although he is offered a way off Rheton by his rival Herron (actor Tony Dexter), he finds himself drawn into their war with the Solarites, who want their technology. He also has a thing for the dumb girl Zetha (actress Dolores Faith).
Effects-wise, the long shots in space are poor, but the close-ups are much better for their time period and look more functional.
For a low-budget film, some of the scientific concepts are quite profound. I’m not sure if buying an unusual oxygen supply can shrink people, but the Rhetonites understanding of manipulating gravity is at least applied rather than just as a backdrop.
Like a lot of these old SF films I’ve been reviewing lately, they haven’t been playing up the monster aspect. If anything, the alien humanoid societies are pretty much like our own, although to go too far back in the 1950s might seem too far.
GF Willmetts
December 2024
(pub: public domain. 1 dvd 82 minute film).
cast: Dean Fredericks, Fred De Gorter, Fred Gebhardt.
