A good villain can make or break an otherwise unremarkable film. After all, everyone loves a great villain. But what if the villain in question was a spandex-wearing, cackling idiot with a chicken-like nose, a voice that sounds like nails scraping a chalkboard, and a proclivity to not wear underpants? Then you'd have the evil Phantom from the planet Krankor from Eijirô Wakabayashi's Prince of Space. Truly, the Phantom is one of the most obnoxious sci-fi villains that I have ever encountered. He arrives on earth announcing that he is conquering the planet. But he is constantly defeated at every turn by a bizarre superhero named the Prince of Space who is impervious to their weapons. This doesn't stop the Phantom and his men from trying to use those weapons on the Prince every time they meet, of course. It just seems like the villains in Prince of Space have the collective memory of a bowl of goldfish. Maybe this is due to the fact that Prince of Space is actually a hybrid of two Japanese tokusatsu films: Planet Prince (1959) and Planet Prince - The Terrifying Spaceship (1959). It certainly explains why Prince of Space seems so jumbled and randomly thrown together. The special effects are a joke (one of the main spaceships literally looks like a giant flying roast chicken), the acting is atrocious, and the narrative is slapdash and disconcerting. And then, of course, there is the evil Phantom of Krankor. If you remember three things about Prince of Space, it will be the Phantom's laugh, his chicken nose, and his disturbingly tight pants. Well...I guess that not all sci-fi villains can be Darth Vader...
3/10
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