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"You Maniacs! You blew it up!" - Planet of the Apes 1-5

post #1 of 13
7/22/08 at 8:54am
Thread Starter 
PLANET OF THE APES - 1968
BENEATH THE PLANET OF THE APES - 1970
ESCAPE FROM THE PLANET OF THE APES - 1971
CONQUEST OF THE PLANET OF THE APES - 1972
BATTLE FOR THE PLANET OF THE APES - 1973

Looking back, it's quite astonishing to see that there actually were 5 PotA flicks in the course of just 6 years. I think they aged quite well, with ideas that still work and some good performances by Heston and McDowell.

The first one is quite good at being a neat sci-fi action movie. Linda Harrison looks like Megan Fox and Zaius happens to be a great cinematic asshole. The ending makes it even better. The masks are a bit stiff (at least this was done extremely well in the remake), but they still work. What I don't get - whether it's the remake or the original - why does the hero run around all day with a hotass by his side, only to kiss the ape girl later on. That leaves a bad taste.

Now Beneath doesn't work that good. First of all, that Heston copy is nowhere as good as the man himself. The new guys underground, I think they just sucked in concept and execution. The ending is good, though.

Escape is clearly the least spectacular, but with bringing the Apes in present day world it works quite well. Plus you get drunk Apes and Apes in suits... and KHANN!!! (if only for a bunch of minutes)

Conquest as a Rise of the Apes is interesting to look at (McDowell is especially good in this.. and we get more KHAN), but it's a bit retarded in not explaining how chimpanzees evolved into those man-chimps.

Battle is the worst one. Easily. I mean the general does his best to channel Cox as Stryker in X-Men 2, but the onscreen battle is one of the worst ever put to film. It's clumsy, horribly edited and just slow as fuck. No feel for danger, and that strategic maneuver is just dumb.
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post #2 of 13
7/22/08 at 9:15am
It was dumb, but they were monkeys, after all.

I hate that you numbered them. This was before all sequels could muster as a title were "...Part 2".

Amazing: Watched independently of each other, the first couple films seem to dare the writer to figure out a sequel. The guy crafting the sequels' stories (Paul Dehn) deserves credit for not rehashing the first film over and over (they obviously couldn't afford to, but it's great to see the narrative gymnastics the series goes through to keep the sequels rolling).

Since they never aired Battle during channel 7's Planet of the Apes week, that sequel was a rare beast I was constantly on the lookout for in childhood. I think I recorded the sound of it off the tv as a kid.
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post #3 of 13
7/22/08 at 10:42am
When I was about 4 years old (circa 1978/9) POTA scared the crap out of me.

In our street, when one of the kids had a birthday party they would show the POTA 16mm shorts and I used to sit in the kitchen eating birthday cake until they finished. One time when I did look in, I had to be taken home doing the stiff-legged walk as I did actually shit myself from watching.

Now HMV have the box set for £7 and I keep meaning to pick it up as I wtched the original a couple of years ago and really liked it. I've caught a couple of minutes of the sequels here and there and I love to look of that retro 60/70s future...
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post #4 of 13
7/22/08 at 3:35pm
The scene in part two where the mutants take their faces off scared the shit out of me when i was a kid.
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post #5 of 13
7/22/08 at 3:46pm
Beneath is weakest for me, because it is so much of a rehash.

Escape is pretty great considering the budgetary (and as noted above) narrative restrictions going in.

But I loved me some Conquest. As a kid this was smart and exciting sci-fi. I'll hopefully get them all on dvd someday and see how they hold up. Don't know that I've ever seen all of Battle but what I remember seemed to have been filmed with some of the same sets, props and uniforms as Day of the Dead.
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post #6 of 13
7/22/08 at 3:51pm
Ricardo Montalban is a race traitor. Discuss.
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post #7 of 13
7/22/08 at 3:56pm
BENEATH is kind of DIE HARDER to the original's DIE HARD. The ending makes it. Subtext aside, could never get into the rest.
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post #8 of 13
7/22/08 at 4:00pm
I love Beneath simply for the balls of blowing up the planet. They might as well have had a sign at the end saying, "Go ahead, make a sequel out of that!"
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post #9 of 13
7/27/08 at 5:52am
Because of these movies as a kid growing up in the 70s whenever I heard the term guerilla warfare mentioned on the news I honestly pictured soldiers fighting gorrillas right down the the purple shirts and black leather vests.
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post #10 of 13
12/4/08 at 3:14am
Holy fuck, the director's cut of Conquest is insanely violent in a couple shots. At first I thought "eh, it's a little rougher, and longer", but then shit got real. (SPOILERS!) Apes get shot in the face and their heads erupt in blood. A gorilla turns a fucking flamethrower on a guy.
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post #11 of 13
12/4/08 at 5:15am
I really love the first one. I was wandering through the video store and they had it playing up on the monitors. I didn't know what it was, there were just three dudes is space suits walking around the desert. Then when they saw the 'warning-things' I was captivated. I stayed in the video store right up until the end of the corn field chase.

What really struck me was how effectively they conveyed a savage and barbaric world. The apes didn't muck around in rounding up the humans. It's not too often we see that level of crazyness. In the remake, the humans were mostly intelligent and it seemed a little too much like 'Us + Apes' rather than a true role reversal of man and monkey.
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post #12 of 13
12/4/08 at 5:49am
That shot of the dessicated woman whose pod broke from the film still haunts my dreams.
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post #13 of 13
12/22/08 at 4:02am
Encore Action is doing a marathon of all five, called Going Apeshit On New Year's. I hope you all have something better to do, but maybe you can set the DVR if you haven't seen them all yet.
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