Beneath the Planet of the Apes

Review: I’ll just be upfront with you. This is only slightly better than the 2001 remake. This movie was bad. The first half was an exact rehash of the first story with a carbon copy of Taylor. The second half barely even featured apes (and the ones it did weren’t the ones you care about from the first) but it did feature many, many unnecessary things such as: subterranean communities, mind control, telepathy, peeling off faces Mission Impossible style, protesting apes, religious wars, and nukes. The costumes managed to get worse from the first film (I’d attribute that to the budget dropping from $5.8m to $2.5m) and SPOILERS it just killed off all the main characters before blowing up literally everyone. And then having a narrator come in to tell us everyone was dead was a strange film-making choice.

High: James Franciscus did his best and did a passable job. I have to give him credit for his efforts.

Low: I planned to watch all the Planet of the Apes films, but this movie just killed that for me. I tried watching the next one (Escape from the Planet of the Apes) but about halfway through I realized how dumb it was that they tried to retcon and have a few apes survive. Not only did it kill my plans to watch all the films, it brutally murdered them. This movie was bad.

Rating: 2/10