Phantom Empire
I think the average person would view this as a low budget piece of crap that isn't worth the effort to watch. However, I'm not the average person. I like a lot of Fred Olen Ray's stuff, and I liked this. I mean, it's ridiculous and bad and stupid. But in my book, it's got a lot going for it. I watch a lot of 50's Phantom Planet or Women Of The Prehistoric Planet type movies, and if you view this movie as a homage to these sort of movies, it works. It would have been even more effective if it had been filmed in black and white instead of color.
Fred sort of has an acting troupe that appears in his movies, and these actors are present, and I like them. One is Ross Hagen and another is Jeffrey Combs of Re-animater fame. The movie also features Sybil Danning and Michelle Bauer. If that isn't enough, the film has the land rover from Logan's Run and Robby The Robot!
Plotwise, things go like this: A group of guys and a woman travel into some caves to find the lost city of R'Lyia, but they run into a bunch of cannibals in really bad monster costumes. After they overcome the cannibals, they are attacked by a laser beam shooting Robbie The Robot (of Forbidden Planet and other Sci-fi movies fame). Then they run into a bunch of spear-wielding cave girls. The cannibals eat the cave girls, too, and the expedition saves one cave girl, Michelle Bauer, from becoming the soup of the day, and Michelle falls in love with Jeffrey Combs. It turns out that the cave girls are disciples of Sybil Danning, the reigning queen of R'Lyia, who happens to be from outer space and wears a really funky queen-of-outer-space-warrior costume that her boobs can barely fit into. I wonder what movie that costume came from. And Sybil tools around in the land rover from Logan's Run. How can you not like that?
The only spoof I can think of that rises to this level is Amazon Women On The Moon, which also features Sybil. Maybe Sybil's costume is from that movie. I'll have to compare sometime. And as if this weren't enough, Michelle Bauer is running around in a skimpy cave girl costume, which gets ripped off, and she's running around topless for half of the movie. Plus, there's a scene where she's licking Jeffrey Comb's face like a dog would lick his master, and it's really funny. So tell me, what's not to like? Yes, this is a low budget piece of doggy doo doo, but so were the movies that it's spoofing. I like the kind of movies that this movie is spoofing, and obviously, so does Fred Olen Ray, so he did everything just right. For a guy like me, this kind of stuff is a lot of fun. The average viewer may not like this movie, but if you take it in the right spirit, it is fun. I'll give the movie a strong 4.