Reviews

Far in the future (1999!) humanity (i.e., Western non-Communist nations) has colonized the Moon on Moonbase Alpha, using the far side of it as a dumping ground for nuclear waste. Then calamity strikes! The nuclear waste on the far side spontaneously explodes (don't you hate it when that happens!) and the Moon is sent hurtling (intact) out of Earth's orbit at millions of miles an hour! If you can believe that, then you might find a modicum of enjoyment from this "movie".

"Cosmic Princess" is basically two non-sequential episodes of "Space 1999" spliced together, which explains the lack of continuity in the middle of the film. The first part involves our heroes being held hostage by an Orson Wells impersonator with dyed hair who controls the whole of the planet through a computer made out of bubbling beaker fluids. The crew of Moonbase Alpha (I can't remember any of their names) eventually escape with the mad scientists's shape shifting daughter, Maya, the so-called Cosmic Princess. Maya is able to take on such princessly forms as: a lion, a dove, man in a gorilla suit, man in an anthropomorphic insect suit, and her father (hair, clothes and all).

In the second half, two crew members are stranded in space and struggle to catch up to the Moon (it fell into a time warp) as Maya loses control of her shape shifting abilities and runs amok on Moonbase Alpha. Checking around on the internet, the two episodes spliced together (The Metamorph and Space Warp) are actually the 1st and 14th episodes of the 2nd season of Space 1999. I bring this up because in the 2nd half of the movie it is difficult to understand why Maya isn't just blasted away after she kills some people and starts wrecking the base.

As a MST3K episode, the riffing is OK; much better in the 2nd half, especially during the intense 5mph moon buggy chase scene near the end. It originally aired during the Super Bowl in 1989 so there are a lot of football references in the breaks during the movie.

With a title like "Women of the Prehistoric Planet" I envisioned a Lost World type movie in which scantily-clad amazonian beauties ride dinosaurs, fight against half-animal savages and a harsh, unforgiving environment. But with only one women, some forced perspective lizards that com-bust on impact, and a bunch of white guys straight out of the U.S. Navy, one can only wonder what the creators of this movie were thinking when they came up with the title.

To be fair, there are some legitimate scientific ideas that are dealt with in the movie, even if the writers don't understand how they really work. For example, the writers were correct in saying that when you travel near the speed of light time slows down, so that a three week journey for the astronauts aboard the spaceship is perceived by those on the planet as taking eighteen years. However, the perception of the people down on the planet has nothing to do with the speed of the planet's rotation but the way in which the planet's matter distorts the space time continuum.

The real plot of this movie is that a spaceship (Cosmos III) is hijacked by the primitive Centurions (a.k.a., non-white people) who probably perform menial domestic services for the crew aboard the spaceship. The ship crash lands on an unexplored planet with only a few survivors. Another ship in the vicinity (Cosmos IV?), moving at nearly the speed of light, travels to rescue the survivors (a three week journey on the spaceship, but an eighteen year wait on the planet). Once on the ground a group of idiots looking like U.S. Navy officers are dispatched to find the crash site. Meanwhile, a beautiful Centurion girl (the ultra-sexy Irene Tsu as Linda) wanders off and encounters a mysterious stranger named Tang who is also a Centurion. Obviously, he's the son of the survivors of the crash eighteen years earlier.

The story of Linda and Tang is probably the most interesting aspect of this movie. Through their adventures together they fall in love but must still deal with the tension of growing up in two very different environments. The other aspect of the plot has to do with clumsy idiots falling off logs into acid pools and shooting at anything that moves with their ultra high tech .44 pistols. The ending of this movie will surprise no one.