So we escaped from the Planet of the Apes, and now all the dogs and cats are dead. Anyone remember that scene in Back to the Future Part 2  where Doc Brown talks about the timeline skewing into a tangent? Yeah, that sprung to mind a lot while watching Conquest of the Planet of the Apes . This is definitely the start of an alternate timeline, and the point where the franchise begins to take a swan dive. Believe me, those two things are not mutually exclusive. But 1991 looks very different in this timeline. I mean, some highly evolved chimpanzees show up in  a spacecraft NASA launched a while back and all of a sudden you've got "a galaxy far, far away" on Earth. Maybe the dogs and cats have distracted us so much over the centuries they've hindered our advancement. Without them we could enjoy a life that includes energy shield doors, fancy interrogation methods, extreme yet uniformed tailoring, and ape servants. Of course we'd also have to live in a Nazi-like police

We've returned to the Planet of the Apes, only to escape it. After the rather disappointing Beneath the Planet of the Apes  things take a considerable step up with Escape from the Planet of the Apes ! Which is odd given that from here on out the franchise takes on a more 'made for TV movie' aesthetic. The fact that by this point the filmmakers were operating on a much lower budget is apparent, and yet, Escape  is the best of the sequels, by far. Not only is it very entertaining, it's also thought-provoking. We are presented with an entirely new scenario. One that allows for a much deeper examination of humanity's flaws, as well as its strengths. Escape  is very much a movie of two halves. After the opening scene the first half can be quite light-hearted. Even silly, at times. Everything from the zoo to the hotel, the shopping trip and the prize fight. Not to mention the Top Secret CIA base that's not disguised in any way and is clearly a government installation.

Return to the Planet of the Apes ... movies. Recently a buddy of mine - his name is Dave, which may or may not become apparent - began talking about rewatching the classic Planet of the Apes  movies. Naturally I was interested, not only because I hadn't seen them all, but also because I can't turn down the opportunity for a movie marathon. Quite the revelation (that last one), I know. Anyway, that's how Dave's DVD Dungeon  came to be, and no movie is safe. Dave and I decided to kick things off with a double feature - not one Planet of the Apes  movie, but two. Two movies from the same place, yet wildly different. Even by today's standards  Planet of the Apes  is groundbreaking - somehow forward thinking and very much of its time, all at once - and like many groundbreaking movies it spawned a litany of sequels. Some better than others. Thankfully however, this doesn't take anything away from the genius of the original. Hilariously it all begins with a decidedly 6

What begins as an experiment involving induced memory quickly turns into a nightmare when the grad students responsible inadvertently  unlock repressed memories for their test subject. After undergoing the procedure, Adam (Artie Shase) - who also happens to be one of the grad students running this study - begins having flashes of a gruesome event. Raising questions to which some would prefer he didn't find the answers. To say that Look Into The Fire  is a psychological/sci-fi/horror wouldn't exactly be accurate. What it does do is drift/jump between each of these genres in the telling of this increasingly bizarre  tale. At first it feels like this movie wants to be Flatliners  - a bunch of grad students messing with a rather dangerous but ambiguous experimental procedure - but then everything shifts and it begins to resemble something else entirely. This continues to happen throughout the movie, making the whole thing feel like a mish-mash of Flatliners , Inception , Misery , S