Battle for the Planet of the Apes

20th Century-Fox. Director J. Lee Thompson; Producer Arthur P. Jacobs; Screenplay John William Corrington, Joyce Hooper Corrington; Camera Richard H. Kline; Editor Alan L. Jaggs, John C. Horger; Music Leonard Rosenman; Art Director Dale Hennesy

Roddy McDowall
Claude Akins
Natalie Trundy
Severn Darden
Lew Ayres
John Huston

By VARIETY STAFF

The fifth and last film of the series depicts the confrontation between the apes and the nuclear mutated humans inhabiting a large city destroyed in previous episode. Roddy McDowall encores as the ape's leader, having his own tribal strife with Claude Akins, a militant trouble-maker.

Considering the usual fate of sequels, it's not so much that this final effort [from a story by Paul Dehn] is limp, but that the previous four pix maintained for so long a good quality level.

McDowell and Natalie Trundy head the cast, in which Paul Williams plays a philosopher-type, and Austin Soker is a black counselor, most respected of the humans who are more or less captives of the apes. Severn Darden is leader of the mutated humans. Lew Ayres has a good bit, and John Huston appears in another pompous cameo as an aged philosopher of future generations who sets the flashback motif for the story. (Color) Widescreen. Available on VHS. Extract of a review from 1973. Running time: 88 MIN.

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