The Phantom Empire

Have you ever found yourself making a meal out of whatever you happen to have in the house, when you haven’t been to the store in a while?

Putting together a fine stew of canned corn, a questionable piece of deli ham, some pickled jalapeños, and half a container of leftover Moo Goo Gai Pan? If so, you have some insight into the filmmaking process that went into The Phantom Empire!

Directed by RiffTrax regular Fred Olen Ray (The Alien Dead, Jack-O, Rapid Assault, Fugitive Rage), the film assembles an eclectic feast featuring cannibalistic cave monsters, Ross Hagen as a shambling knockoff of Indiana Jones, Jeffrey Combs of Re-Animator playing “the cute one”, re-used dinosaur footage from Planet of Dinosaurs, re-used Robby the Robot from Forbidden Planet playing A Different Robot, and even a re-used prop from Mel Brooks’ History of the World, Part 1. And naturally, since it’s a Fred Olen Ray joint, there is a scantily clad alien queen with a sword, and a scantily clad cave babe doing scantily clad cave babe things. What more could you want from a B movie buffet?

Oh, perhaps a plot! Well it has one, technically. After a cave monster ruins a perfectly nice picnic by pulling a guy’s head right off, it’s discovered that these cave creeps are sitting on a motherlode of valuable jewels. So naturally, an expedition of losers and misfits is assembled to go underground and “reclaim” them. But first they’ll have to survive a lot of cave exploration and seemingly unrelated encounters with aliens, robots, and dinosaurs… basically anything a little boy might own a toy of.

Join Mike, Kevin, and Bill as they journey into the caves to plumb the unimaginable riches of The Phantom Empire!

Written by: Mike Nelson, Conor Lastowka, Sean Thomason, Jason Miller, and Zach Shatzer