VOYAGE TO THE PLANET OF PREHISTORIC WOMEN

Back in 1962, the Russians made a pretty nifty film called Planeta Bur about a group of astronauts and their robot who run into a brontosaur while exploring the surface of Venus, and then have to escape as the planet's weather goes nuts. Thanks to the heroic sacrifice of the robot, who gets left behind, most of the astronauts make it back home. It's enjoyable and brisk, running a mere 72 minutes. However, when the rights for the U.S. distribution of the film were acquired by American International Pictures, they decided Roger Corman could somehow make two movies out of the footage. Which, of course, he could.

The first film, Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet, was a fairly faithful dubbed version of the original, with a few new scenes featuring Basil Rathbone thrown in for good measure. Think Raymond Burr in Godzilla. It was marketed directly to TV stations and became a Saturday afternoon staple. The second movie, Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women, is a different beast altogether. According to screenwriter/director Peter Bogdanovich (who wisely asked not to be credited), Corman came to him saying AIP might give the film a limited theatrical run, but only if they found a way to stick some chicks in it. Well, in Hollywood, a job's a job, so Bogdanovich called in Mamie Van Doren and a gaggle of blondes, dressed them in sea shells, and rewrote the story so their presence would almost make sense. Almost.

What you get with Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women is the story of a group of astronauts and their robot who run into a pterodactyl while exploring the surface of Venus and immediately kill it. Unfortunately, it turns out the flying reptile was the object of worship by a matriarchal society of telepathic Venusian women who like to hang out at the beach. Using the awesome power of being female, the ladies call upon their planet to punish the invaders with floods and volcanoes. The male invaders are chased off, but the robot they inadvertently leave behind inexplicably becomes the women's new god. It might all be okay if the men and women weren't so obviously in two separate movies and voiceover narration wasn't required to make it all halfway understandable. As it is, the movie's enjoyably silly, but it's undeniably a hunk of junk.

It's funny how so many of these types of movies have male astronauts running across matriarchies. There's Cat-Women of the Moon, Queen of Outer Space, Abbott and Costello Go to Mars, and so on. I guess it's because you have to go to space to find such arrangements, as earthly matriarchal societies—defined as those where women hold dominant political, economic, and social power over men in a mirror image of patriarchy—are widely considered by most anthropologists to be mythical or unattested to in historical records. Sure, there have been matrilineal societies (descent and inheritance through the female line) and egalitarian systems with strong female influence (the Iroquois or Mosuo come to mind), but real matriarchies have been difficult to identify outside of feminist revisionary texts.

There have been a few reasons speculated for this. Some suggest that men's evolutionary physical advantages gave patriarchal systems an edge when it came to territorial expansion, especially through warfare. Others think that as economies shifted from domestic horticultural setups to movable wealth (e.g., cattle, tools, trade), they played more into the strengths of male hunter-gatherers than they did female nurturers. And, of course, some point to the boogeyman of religion, especially those pesky Abrahamic faiths (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) which are accused of emphasizing patrilineal descent and male authority. Some, in a fit of wishful thinking, even like to imagine that these patriarchal religions crashed the ancient matriarchal party, killing off the female deities and leaving a male-created God in their place like some robot abandoned on Venus.

Fantasies aside, whether or not monotheism encourages patriarchy is arguable. However, at least when it comes to Catholicism, the male-female dynamic is a bit more nuanced than just saying men are in charge. As St. Pope John Paul II notes in his apostolic letter Mulieris Dignitatem, the Church affirms that while the sexes have distinctly ordered, though complimentary, roles, women still have an essential equality with men in personhood, grace, and mission. This complementarianism results in a unity of the masculine and feminine that enriches each other in mutual self-giving, elevating both sexes rather than one oppressing the other. So, the Church's view is definitely not matriarchal, but neither is it egalitarian, as the role of the sexes is not identical, nor is it patriarchal in the oppressive sense, as men are called to recognize and serve the dignity of women. Because of this, JPII explicitly states that any type of patriarchal domination, even those times it may have occurred in a Church setting, is a post-Fall distortion of what God actually intends for men and women.

Not that AIP, Corman, or Bogdanovich were thinking about any of this when they churned out Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women. They just wanted a movie with some chicks in it. By that measure, they succeeded.

(By the way, if you'd like another take on this old clunker and what it has to do with Augustine and paganism, check out the guest review from reader Xena Catolica from a while back.)