Jason blasts off in the Starship Vortex and lands on THE PHANTOM PLANET

What a better way to celebrate the end of the 55th San Francisco International Film Festival than to ditch the party semi-early and walk a few blocks to my favorite underground film club and catch one more movie?

I missed the very beginning, but I got a Manhattan and was assured I missed nothing importnat and then I settled into THE PHANTOM PLANET (1961.) A spaceship captain crash lands on a planet and finds himself surrounded by tiny people. Then something in the air makes him tiny, too. And he becomes one of them. So he spends half his time trying to figure out a way to escape, contact his colleagues, etc. and the other half of the time allowing a couple of women to fight over him. Oh, and eventually they're attacked by a monster and he has to help out with the defense. Or something like that, I dozed off at some point. Mostly I was interested in seeing Francis X. Bushman in one of his final film roles as the planet's elder leader, Sessom. He was still cool, even when everything around him was cheesy as all hell.

Running Time: 82 minutes

My Total Minutes: 283,300