Makeup is again under the supervision of John Chambers, winner of an Oscar for his work on the original film, only the second such award in the Motion Picture Academy's history.


Taking up where "Planet of the Apes" ended, "Beneath the Planet of the Apes" opens with Astronaut Taylor (CHARLTON HESTON) riding off with Nova (LINDA HARRISON) from the simians who had captured him. Astronaut Brent (JAMES FRANCISCIJS), is sent by U.S. space authorities along the same trajectory through time and space followed earlier by Astronaut Taylor. Brent's mission: locate Taylor and bring him home. But shortly after Brent's departure, the U.S. is devastated by a series of nuclear attacks and New York City, among others, is leveled. Taylor's spacecraft crash-lands and he is taken into custody by armed gorilla soldiers who bring him to the city which serves as capital of their all-simian society. He escapes, wanders through the wilderness of the Forbidden Zone, stumbles upon the subterranean remains of New York city--and realizes the homeland and civilization he had known no longer exists. Brent traces him to the underground city ruled by human mutants who can project their thoughts without speaking and who have developed terribly sophisticated weapons of psychological warfare. Accompanied by Nova, the mute human girl Taylor had befriended in the simian jail, Brent follows Taylor into captivity by the mutants who inhabit the underground remains of New York. These mutants worship the cobalt bomb--and have a live bomb mounted upon the altar of their cathedral. They know its power--for life or death. They believe it can be a deterrent to the further use of nuclear weaponry in warfare. But their underground domain is invaded by armed gorilla hordes, led by General Ursus (JAMES GREGORY) and Dr. Zaius (MAURICE EVANS), seeking territorial expansion for the ape empire. The conflict between the heavily armed gorilla forces, with their cannon, small arms and associated weapons, and the mutated humans--whose defense rests upon the efficacy of their methods of thought projection and control--forms the basis for a climactic series of events which make an urgent cinematic statement to all mankind.