Rich Danae Chambers (Susan Stokey) hires explorer Cort (Ross Hagen) and
his tough-as-nails chick sidekick Eddy (Dawn Wildsmith) to find a fables
underground realm ... and before you know it, the three of them are off
into the next cave with the young-and-old-scientist-team of young Andrews
(Jeffrey Combs) and old Doc (Robert Quarry), where they find all kinds of
people and creatures like mutant cannibals, Robby the Robot, cavegirls -
including Bunny (Michelle Bauer), who before long gets very firendly with
Andrews -, and an alien queen (Sybil Danning), who does her best to take
our heroes captives. However, somehow our quintet of explorers flee
through a valley full of dinosaurs and manage to steal the alien queen's
extraterrestrial landrover, and get out of the underground realm alive ...
and they blow up the landrover to create a landslide and cut off the
underground kingdom from our world for good.
Of course, The Phantom Empire is trash, I would even go so far
and call it trash as trash can, it pretty much does not leave out a
single cliché you would expect from a movie of this kind, and it's
entirely silly in premise, concept and story ... but this is actually only
half the truth, because co-writer/director Fred Olen Ray actually knows
what he is doing, and so does his cast, and neither of them takes the
whole film seriously for a single minute. - making the whole thing into a
genre parody. Truth to be told, Fred Olen Ray is not the funniest, not the
most subtle comedy-writer/director, and neither are his actors comedians
per se, but the film still has a good natured madness to go for it, a sort
of anything-goes/make-it-up-as-we-go-along feeling - as if
they were thinking "Why don't we let them meet Robby the Robot
?" - "Why don't we have some mutants in that scene ?" -
"Why don'w we have some scantily clad cavegirls in that scene ?"
- "Why doesn't the lead cavegirl (Michelle Bauer) lose her top
?" - "How about some dinosaurs (allegedly lifted from the 1978
film Planet of the Dinosaurs [James K.Shea]) ?" - "How
about Sybil Danning in a campy and revealing outfit ?" - and so on
and so forth ... and somehow all those over-the-top elements made it into
the film.
So please, to enjoy this movie don't expect serious genre
entertainment, nor great comedy, just some good natured over-the-top genre
mockery - and this way you (like me) might actually come to like the film.
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