Beneath The Planet Of The Apes (1970)

Review: written Sep 2024

Swarm of bad guys

This is the very definition of a rushed sequel, with a slashed budget and a director and star more used to the small screen, really showing. Picking up directly where the first movie leaves off, Taylor (Charlton Heston) wanders off to explore the Forbidden Zone with Nova the mute woman he found in Planet of the Apes, only to become separated. Meanwhile, a second astronaut arrives in search of the lost first spacecraft (miraculously having the same accidental arrival on the same planet, and same location!). His search for Taylor leads him to find Nova, still wearing Taylors dogtags. Following her to find Taylor leads him then to make his own shocking discovery of the increasingly divided simian society. Enlisting support from benevolent scientists Cornelius and Zira, he escapes the increasingly militant gorillas and heads into the Forbidden Zone, finding a strange and disturbing society of telepath mutant humans.

Benefitting from at least an extended cameo from Charlton Heston, with James Franciscus gamely trying to hold his own as the newly arrived astronaut, this still falls woefully short of the first movie, eschewing the subtleties of message for an “in-your-face” anti-war tone. Its tale of a weird society of mutant humans worshipping an atomic bomb, climaxes in a nihilistic ending which fails to shock or involve in anything like the way the first did.

Director Ted Post was more used to small screen directing, but the fault isn’t all his – the rush to capitalise on the first movie led to slashed budgets which really show – look around the crowd of apes and it’s quickly apparent that only the main characters have a thorough make up job and the rest are visibly wearing not much more than simple ape masks. Similarly, both the locations and effects seem smaller in scale – with the exception of some of the more effective sets of the devastated city which were actually redressed sets from that years expensive flop “Hello Dolly”, to save money. By doubling down on the bleak message from the original that without changing his ways, man may not be worth defending, the movie spirals off into a less ape driven story, and suffers for it.

Most of all though, the script suffers from a series of unlikely coincidences, clunky messaging and plot which fails in its attempt at shock factor and offers limp and obvious dialogue for the unfortunate actors to utter. No wonder Roddy McDowall didn’t return for this outing. Charlton Heston adds the only element of class in the exercise, but it’s not enough to save the movie, and it’s a miracle the movie did as well as it did at the time, and the franchise survived.

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