I’ve seen the original, and recently rewatched it thanks to the new one, and am interested in seeing the sequels for it. I’ve heard they start to get bad after 2-3. Is that impression correct?
None of them really. Only the first one is any good, the others are all pretty silly and worth very little beyond some blandly campy stuff.
But they’re still better than the Tim Burton version.
The budget for the ape costumes plummeted in the later ones, so it is fun to pay attention to the background apes. Some are wearing cheap Halloween masks.
They are crappy movies, but some people love them because they are so bad.
So bad, they are good?
That’s the best way I can explain it.
I liked the third movie, Escape From the Planet of the Apes. Three of the apes from the original movie escape the earth’s atomic destruction and wind up in the 20th century to find their roles are reversed and the humans are studying them. Cornelius and Zira have a child who grows up to lead the ape uprising in the next movie, Conquest of the Planet of the Apes. Those two are the best sequels of the original series of Apes movies. And Roddy McDowall was good in his roles as Cornelius, then as Caesar.
Conquest is my favorite after the original. It’s actually a pretty good movie. I’d watch them all just for the full story, and some campy fun. In fact, I have watched them all multiple times.
My favorites are:
- Planet
- Conquest
- Escape
- and 5. are tie between Beneath and Battle, depends on which one I’m watching at the time.
Cool, sounds like watch them until I stop having fun with it seems to be the way to go.
Yeah, “Escape” is the only one that I’ll watch if I happen to notice it on cable - it’s also pretty funny in parts.
I think TNT has been running all these recently.
All of them but Battle for the Planet of the Apes.
Beneath is weaker than the first one but decent, Escape starts as a comedy and then becomes something else. Conquest is my favorite of the sequels but a lot of people (most?) don’t like it. Battle stinks.
They are movies form a different era (and it shows) and the budgets got smaller and smaller as the movies progressed but I enjoy them.
I’ve always liked “Beneath” (heck any movie with Nova in it can’t be all bad). I think most people didn’t like it because it kind of paralleled the first too much, and had the real downer ending.
I never liked “Escape” because they tried to make it too much of a comedy. And the whole time travel aspect was never really explained (one of the keys about the very first “Planet” was the “time travel” was a realistic, plausible approach - not so much “travel”, but merely sleeping through many years).
“Conquest” and “Battle for” are kind of a blur to me. I had lost interest with the whole time loop thing (Cesar is born “before” his parents…)
Comedy? It was pretty damn dark for a comedy. It went dark pretty quick once Sal Mineo was killed. It did have one great line, “I hate bananas.”
Looking back I pretty much liked them all. Huge plot holes. The time travel aspect was a mess. Lots of paradoxes. I probably like Beneath the least. Even though it still had decent production values it seemed very cobbled together. And just plain weird. Escape was well acted and poignant but the hand waving of the time travel was jarring. Conquest was pretty good but I’m not sure who you were supposed to be rooting for to win. I always had a soft spot for Battle. I really liked it as a kid. It didn’t never answered the question of whether the future had been changed and the world that Heston will find is now different with humans and apes living together.
So all in all each are very flawed but I enjoyed each in its own way.
Battle for the Planet of the Apes reminds me of a small story.
I have a friend who made the mistake of admitting that as a child he was terrified by the Planet of the Apes movies. In the natural way that so many great insults are the product of reductio ad absurdum, this was translated, in our circle of friends, to him being afraid of “Claude Akins in a gorilla suit.”
So if Battle for the Planet of the Apes has nothing else going for it, it at least has the snicker factor (for me) of featuring Claude Akins in a gorilla suit.
I liked both *Escape *and *Conquest *(Ricardo Montalban!)
I don’t think *Beneath *has aged well - in some ways it’s a retread of the first movie, but with the whole A-bomb fears of the 1970s as a heavy-handed lesson weighing down the end.
For some reason, Conquest always bored me. Although, the previous poster has a good point re: Claude Akins in a gorilla suit.
“Disec…Disec…disec…”
Sounds like a hiccup!
Aye, this is my favorites order too.
When I was a kid the reveal at the end of Beneath freaked me right the hell out, so that one always has a special place in my heart even tho it’s not a very good film.
The apes had a cure for hiccups.
Of course, it was dissection.
They never did explain how the three ape astronauts traveled back in time, did they? Anyway, Escape and Conquest had Ricardo Montalban.
The hand waving “science” was that the astronauts in the first two films had actually went through a time warp to the future and the apes in Escape went back through the opposite way to go back in time.
I also liked the spin-off TV series.
I had no recollection of that, and thought you were talking about a cartoon until I wiki-ed it .
I was too little to have watched it, but it sounds like it might have been a good idea, but wasn’t network TV basically very shitty in 1974?
On a more humorous note, there was an episode of the Simpsons that had them at a Broadway musical version of Planet of the Apes.
I think that is a great idea, and I would certainly go see it. 
Oh, I am never surprised at what one can find on YouTube.
