Beneath the Planet of the Apes

Okay, this starts with 5 minutes from the end of the first movie, after which we see Charlton Heston as Taylor disappear into a landscape, leaving his non-talking companion Nova alone on a horse in a barren wasteland.  It then quickly moves to a ‘rescue mission’ after Taylor (the other astronauts with him seem to be forgotten about by the rescue team) which quickly whittles down to one man, Brent, who encounters Nova on a horse. then goes through discovering Ape city and then escaping into the Forbidden Zone after various shennanegins – to encounter a group of human mutant telepaths that worship an atomic bomb as a god. These find themselves about to be attacked by an oncoming ape army (who don’t know they’re there…), and prepare to launch the bomb at Ape City – not knowing the bomb is designed to blow up the whole world (yep, like someone would build that).

There’s some real whackiness here, and whilst the ideas are interesting and fun, and some parts of the execution of the ideas are quite good (the time of worshipping, like a religious service – the use of notes on the soundtrack to denote telepathic messages being sent), it’s not really that much fun to watch.  There’s also some really silly scenes – like the apes in a steamroom – looking like guys in excellent ape masks wearing shaggy carpets…

Not as much fun as the ideas suggest, but not bad.

Rating: Odd, 6/10