The movie opens with Denae Chambers (Susan Stokey) hiring partners Cort Eastman (Ross Hagen) and Eddy Colchilde (Dawn Wildsmith) for an expedition. Twenty years earlier Denae’s father perished on a similar expedition. The objective is to find a lost civilisation hidden deep within a system of underground caverns. There’s also the strong likelihood of finding a fabulous lost treasure.
The cavern is not to be found deep in the Amazon rainforest or the foothills of the Himalayas or the sandy wastes of the Sahara Desert. No, it’s just a couple of miles from LA. Five minutes drive away. Which is certainly convenient.
There is likely to be danger involved. A few days earlier a picnicker was decapitated by a mutant cannibal monster that emerged from the cave.
Denae will be going along on the expedition as well and Cort has recruited a couple of scientists - Professor Strock (Robert Quarry) and graduate student Andrew Paris (Jeffrey Combs).
It doesn’t take long for the expedition to encounter the first of the mutant cannibals. They don’t seem too friendly. In fact they try to cook Denae for dinner.
The expedition also acquires another member - a friendly but frightened half-naked amazon warrior girl. They name her Cave Bunny. Cave Bunny takes a bit of a shine to young Andrew which doesn’t please Denae - she’d also taken a shine to him.
There’s lot of running about in the vast system of caverns, which was a challenge to Fred Olen Ray and his crew since all they had to film in was a single cave about twenty feet long. But thanks to movie magic you will believe this is a gigantic cave system.
The amazon warrior women (apart from Cave Bunny) are not too friendly. The robot isn’t friendly either. The mutant cannibals are decidedly hostile. And their trouble really starts when the alien queen puts in an appearance. She considers them to be inferior specimens of an inferior species.
There are gun battles in the cave, expedition members get captured and there are plenty of narrow escapes.
The acting is pretty bad by ordinary standards but the performances are right for this type of movie. Dawn Wildsmith is great as the cynical wise-cracking tough dame Eddy. Sybil Danning is, well she’s Sybil Danning and she makes an awesome-looking alien queen.
The movie was shot in six days and cost $120,000 to make. So don’t expect spectacular special effects. The alien queen’s spaceship and her futuristic hovercar look very cheap, but cheap in an endearingly fun way.
Don’t expect the plot to make much sense either.
Given the meagre budget Ray knew he had to take advantage of any opportunities to add production values and visual interest. He discovered that he could rent Robby the Robot very cheaply. There’s no reason for a robot to be in the movie, but he’s a cool robot. Ray was also able to get the hovercar cheap - it had apparently been used in the Logan’s Run TV series. And then the distributor wanted extra footage shot, and Ray found out he could get some cool dinosaur footage from Planet of the Dinosaurs.
As a result The Phantom Empire is filled with things that have no logical place in the story and no logical connection with each other, but that adds to the movie’s goofy charm.
The Phantom Empire might be an incoherent mess, but it’s an incoherent mess that is huge amounts of fun. It’s such a good-natured romp of a movie.
The RetroMedia Blu-Ray looks great and includes a very enjoyable audio commentary by Fred Olen Ray and cinematographer Gary Graver plus a documentary on the film and a few other extras.
The Phantom Empire is cheap low-budget fun and it’s highly recommended.
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