Okay, without Charlton Heston in the lead, the film loses a point. Now I am not saying that James Franciscus did a bad job. While he's NOT the quality actor Heston was, he really established that he was a good actor that had just never gotten the chance to do much more than TV shows like LONGSTREET.

It turns out the reason Heston wasn't in the lead was not the studio's fault. They threw gobs of money at him to take the lead but he'd had enough and wanted to go on to other challenges. So, they threw EVEN MORE money at him and so he agreed to at least do a "guest spot"--appearing in the last 15 or so minutes of the movie for a stunning and mega-cool conclusion.

So, this movie begins with Franciscus ("Brent") landing on the planet to look for Heston and the rest of his crew--not realizing Heston is the only surviver. He somehow (and pretty darn miraculously) finds Nova (Heston's squeeze in the first film) and she leads him to the nice apes, Cornelius and Zira. None of the three had seen Heston in some time--apparently he went missing when he traveled into the "Forbidden Zone" (I love the way that sounds).

Nova reluctantly leads him there--but the way is strewn with scary stuff!! Well, it turns out all this is illusion and Brent continues with Nova deeper into the Forbidden Zone (yikes). Eventually, he meets up with some of the coolest mutants I have ever seen on film (even better than those in OMEGA MAN). They are the remnants of mankind who were not enslaved by the apes. However, they were forced to live in radioactive rubble and this has had positive and negative effects. On the plus side, they have GREAT mental powers that help them scare away ape armies and make anyone do their evil bidding! On the negative side, Brent later finds out they are all wearing masks and their faces and bodies look like chum! Well, you gotta take the good with the bad! Anyways, although these are powerful people, they are psychotics who, for fun have Brent and the captured Taylor (Heston) fight it out to the death. They also have the odd desire to worship a cheesy-looking doomsday bomb (in this one scene the special effects team blew it). Well, as the two heroes are trying to bash each other's brains out, the apes attack because now their leader is convinced the images they see aren't real. It's an all-out bloodbath and one by one we see most everyone killed. Taylor, in his last action as he dies, pushes the button to blow up the miserable planet!! And, with that, ended the Planet of the Apes movies,...or did it?! Well, seeing that this movie had a ton of money and the quality was maintained, they decided to make an odd followup--ESCAPE FROM THE PLANET OF THE APES. I, for one, was excited at this prospect, since BENEATH THE PLANET OF THE APES was jam-packed with cool action, plot and excitement. Sure it wasn't MASTERPIECE THEATER, but it was so entertaining and fun.

It took two years for the sequel to Planet Of The Apes to get to the big screen, henceforth 20th Century Fox would space them out about a year at a time. Beneath The Planet Of The Apes seems to have been inspired a lot by Dr. Strangelove played far less tongue in cheek by the cast.

Kim Hunter, Maurice Evans, Linda Harrison, and Charlton Heston return for this first sequel. And James Franciscus is the only survivor of a rescue ship sent after Heston and his crew. Of course he finds the same simian civilization that Heston found and with the same problems and friends among the apes.

Franciscus goes into the forbidden zone that Heston entered, but now the apes have a military chieftain who wants to enter and conquer the previous forbidden zone. He's played by a thuggish James Gregory.

Maurice Evans is the scientist who has a vested interest in keeping the ape orthodox traditions inviolate. He doesn't want to go into the forbidden zone where Heston and Franciscus have gone, but the force of public opinion is working against him. He tags along with Gregory's military expedition to watch out for their culture.

Of course there are humans there and of a higher order than the simple creatures who were thought to be below the simian on this planet. What happens when they encounter those humans is for you to see the film for.

No doubt the force of public opinion influenced 20th Century Fox to make this sequel. Today's sequels to popular films are the result of certain teaser questions put into the plots of the originals. That was not done back then clearly because of some rather clumsy writing in Beneath The Planet Of The Apes. And certainly the ending here did not anticipate yet another sequel.

Despite that though a lot of good social commentary about the world and America got into this film, maybe even more than in the original Planet Of The Apes. Nobody could mistake the protests of the young chimpanzees to the military expedition for anything else, but criticizing the war in Vietnam and Nixon's incursion into China.

As in the first film my favorite is foxy Maurice Evans, protector of the orthodox ape religion and culture. Fans of the series will be pleased with him and the film.

Despite widespread condemnation on release and a dearth of originality I quite enjoyed this first follow up to the sci-fi classic. It's not a brilliant film by any means, but it has some fun, if dated effects and a second half that covers new ground in an interesting way. The film begins with a good recap reminding us of the ending of the first film before turning into a virtual retread of that movie, with Charlton Heston lookalike James Franciscus playing a new crash-landed astronaut captured and humiliated by the war-like apes. He even hooks up with the same cute mute girl from the first film, Nova.

Then the plot moves underground and we're into new territory involving super bombs, a psychic society and outright warfare. Things lead up to an excellent, extended fight scene when Franciscus finally meets up with Heston for some seriously old-fashioned fisticuffs, and then there's time for a twist ending which brings new meaning to the word 'downbeat'. I really liked this bloody way of finalising the series once and for all, ensuring that there would be no sequels (except, of course, there were). The cinematography is the best thing this film has to offer: searing desert scenes that wouldn't be amiss in LAWRENCE OF ARABIA and giant underground cities that were cutting edge in the late '60s. I've always liked Franciscus and he plays the action man hero pretty well; Heston steals his (few) scenes and Linda Harrison blows away memories of Raquel Welch as the sexy love interest. Not a great film by any means, but not a bad one either, this suffers from paling in comparison with the original.