La Planète des Singes, la Ville Oubliée

The Forgotten City of the Planet of the Apes is the second TV film made from editing episodes of the ill-fated 1974 TV series, The Planet of the Apes, together to make a feature length movie. This one was constructed using the second episode entitled 'The Gladiators' and the fifth entry, 'The Legacy'. The basic problem with these films – and this one's no exception – is that they really seem like what they are, i.e. two episodes joined together. Consequently, they don't work very well as a 90 minute movie and have a split focus. In this one, the first half was the stronger, where the protagonists are captured by the ape inhabitants of a village that organises gladiatorial battles between their human underlings; the second half involves, you guessed it, one of them being captured again but is additionally set in a ruined city where they discover old technologies from their destroyed civilisation. As I say, it begins well enough but gets progressively more tedious in the second half. If you really want to see this stuff, you'd be a lot better just watching the old unedited episodes from the TV series on DVD.