Last night I watched Women of the Prehistoric Planet, another movie in the continuing line of the first season of Mystery Science Theater 3000.
This is the one episode that is out of order, because Joel has a button to press now when he gets movie sign. Also, this episode didn't have another Commando Cody short in front of it, either. The last skit of the episode also talks about the winner of a contest from episode 10 (this is supposedly episode 4), but this is the accepted, published order, so that's how I watched it.
Anyway, where do I start?? A mutiny aboard a space ship causes it to crash on a primordial planet, full of giant lizards and snakes and stuff. Due to time dilation, the rescue party doesn't arrive until 18 years later (a bit late for a rescue!), but the admiral won't leave anyone behind that could possibly have survived. Well, it should have been called Woman of the prehistoric planet, because there was only one woman ever on the planet. Supposedly the German version (with the same, shorter run time as The Crawling Eye—it's metric conversion, I swear!) has a couple of scenes with women in bikinis swimming in pools or something. I promise you won't see them in this version, though. Back to the story!
Tang is the sole survivor of the crash-landed ship. Technically, he's the son of the only two survivors, who later died and were cryogenically frozen in a cave so Tang could look upon them at any time. Linda, a member of the rescue crew and illicit daughter of the admiral, falls in love with Tang immediately after he saves her from a snake and undresses her after she fell into a pool of water (her clothes were wet!). Some spearchucking natives (the only time we see anyone not from a space ship) come and try to kill Tang—apparently this is a common happenstance—and he fights them off, but the rescue crew shoot Tang thinking he's also one of the natives. They haul Linda back to the ship, which she quickly abandons during a volcanic eruptiion to return to Tang. Tang is miraculously healed after kneeling in front of a totem pole, finds Linda, and they watch the rescue ship take off. The admiral, after admitting Linda is his daughter, elects to leave her behind because that's what she wants. In the end, we see the admiral making a ship's log entry naming the planet Earth (how cheesy). Plausible, but how would anyone on Earth know what to call it?? Huh, movie? Can you answer me that one?
Anyway, it was a perfectly horrible movie full of scaled-down models either floating in space or crashing on the planet, or hovering above it. Perfect for MST3K. Hey, at least this one was in color.