The Phantom Planet is a 60s sci-fi film starring Dean Fredericks, Coleen Gray, Anthony Dexter, Francis X. Bushman, Dolores Faith, and Richard Kiel. It's (very) loosely inspired by Gulliver's Travels.
In the distant future of 1980, humanity has a base on the moon and is launching exploratory ships. One such ship crashes into a "phantom planet", and so they send a follow-up captained by Capt. Chapman (Fredericks). His ship, too, crashes into said planet, and as soon as he steps onto the planet, he shrinks to six inches tall (because...something about the atmosphere).
Chapman is taken prisoner and learns about the planet of Rheton, and is given the choice to wed Liara (Gray) or Zetha (Faith), eventually assimilates, and then escapes with the help of his one-time rival Herron (Dexter). In the meanwhile, there's a whole lot of quasi-scientific mumbo jumbo, a duel (with Herron), an invasion by Richard Kiel in a googly-eyed alien suit, and a lot of melodrama.
There's an MST3K episode of this movie, and that's just a good idea. But with that said, the movie isn't terrible. Sure, the science is silly, the acting is overwrought, and the story meanders, but for all that, it was kind of a fun watch. Science fiction, like horror, is instructive inasmuch as it says something about the society that creates it, and in the early 60s, evidently the theme "there's a lot of shit out there that we don't understand" was on someone's mind. The idea that a lot of the universe has life and it's very different from Earth life gets repeated, and the end of the movie doesn't really resolve much for Rheton, nor does it grant Chapman a lot of revelation. He goes back home, Rheton spins merrily on.
It's nice to see a movie that could have been a kind of "white savior" (I mean, everyone's white here) just involve visitation. DNA from Swift, I think.
My Grade: C
Rewatch Value: Low
Next up: Phenomenon
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