Missile to the Moon (1958)

Directed by Richard Cunha

Featuring Richard Travis, Michael Whalen, Cathy Downs, K.T. Stevens, Nina Bara, Gary Clarke and Tommy Cook

Dirk and Steve, two independent scientists, create a spaceship. When the government tries to take control of the rocket as part of its space program, Dirk decides to take it to the moon himself. Two criminals escape from jail and are found hiding in the rocket, and Dirk forces them to come along as his crew. Steve and his fiancee June accidentally end up stowing away for the journey too.

The flight is eventful – one of the jailbirds forces a kiss on June, prompting a fight between him and Steve. Our intrepid crew also make it through a meteor shower, but Dirk dies after hitting his head, calling out for his ‘Lido’ as he dies, and giving Steve a medallion.

After this drama, the remaining group land on the moon, which turns out to have a bright and sunny desert ambience. They head out to explore, and face off with a very silly looking group of rubber-suited rock monsters. Fleeing from these fearsome foes, they hide in a cave – which conveniently contains oxygen! But moments later they are gassed, falling into unconsciousness.

When they awake, the group find themselves in a cardboard approximation of a luxurious chamber. The blind, female leader Lido (in a towering headdress) greets them, and a bevy of leotard-clad young women (apparently played by beauty pageant winners!) ply them with refreshments. Upon seeing the medallion, they take Steve to be Dirk, welcoming him as an emissary returning to their planet, and announcing that he is to be married to one of their number, Alpha.

The stakes are high though: this women-only planet is dying, and they need the humans’ rocket ship in order to escape and save their dwindling civilisation. Once under the control of the women, our heroes must try to escape back to their ship before they are killed.

If there was ever a movie that didn’t need a remake, it was Cat-women of the Moon (1953). Yet here we are. If anything, this movie is probably even cheaper and more poorly made than Cat-women of the Moon, which is saying something!

But against all odds I still enjoyed this piece of cheesy, ridiculous stupidity. It has a bunch of classic crappy b-movie elements: cheap looking monsters, bad special effects, some very hammy acting, a hackneyed storyline, and plenty of unscientific moments in a science fiction film (check out when one of the characters bursts into flames on the surface of the moon!). There are some dull patches between bursts of stupid action, but it’s enjoyably brainless once it gets going.

Worth watching? It’s ok low-grade bad movie silliness for those with low expectations.

Truth in advertising? Calling the rocket a ‘missile’ seems like a weird description to me. Plus this title fails to convey the main storyline, about the all-female society on a dying planet: 2.5/5.

Vegas in Space (1991)

Directed by Phillip R. Ford

Featuring Doris Fish, Miss X, Ginger Quest, Tippi, Ramona Fischer, Lori Naslund and Tommy Spence

Three space soldiers take pills that instantly change their sex in order to allow them to go to Vegas in Space, the capital of the female-only planet Clitoris. They head there undercover, disguised as showgirls visiting from Earth, and help the planet’s empress search for some missing gems. But during their investigation they can’t help but get entangled in the various machinations of the planet’s inhabitants.

This movie is fairly unique in that it is a science fiction film where the vast majority of the cast are drag queens. It’s also quite clearly a home made, zero budget endeavour, and displays some of the usual pitfalls of these kinds of movies: poor sound quality, amateurish acting, a barely comprehensible plot, and some charmingly bad special effects.

I love this kind of backyard (or in this case, apartment-bound) production, and I really wanted to like this. But it just drags (no pun intended), with periods of tedium that were difficult to sit through.

That said, there are some amazing costumes and make up on show, which is possibly half the reason the film was made in the first place.

Worth watching? This movie is clearly meant to be silly and campy (and it is definitely both of these things). I can imagine it seeming somewhat more entertaining if viewed with a few friends given the right mood. But I ultimately found it too boring to really be enjoyable.

Truth in advertising? Does Vegas in Space have the level of drama, spectacle and cheesiness required to live up to its namesake Las Vegas? I’m not sure that it does: 3.5/5.

12 to the Moon (1960)

Directed by David Bradley

Featuring Ken Clark, John Wengraf, Tom Conway, Michi Kobi and Roger Til

An international crew of 12 astronauts head off on the first mission to the moon, claiming the moon for the whole of the Earth in order to stop individual nations from laying claim to it. After landing on the moon and exploring it, they receive a hostile message from aliens living below the surface. After receiving this warning, the crew take off back towards Earth, unceremoniously leaving behind two of their party who were kidnapped by the aliens. But as they approach the Earth, they see that the whole of North America has been put into a frozen state. So the astronauts hatch a dangerous plan to shake the continent out of its deep freeze, contending with an attempted sabotage along the way.

With its crew including two women (one of whom is Japanese) plus a black man, this film immediately struck me as being somewhat progressive for its time. In this respect, it reminded me of First Spaceship on Venus (1960), released a few months before this film. Unfortunately, this is about the only thing I found remotely novel about 12 to the Moon.

It is not too badly made for a film of its type, but it just isn’t really interesting in any way. Plenty happens in the film, including various mishaps while exploring the moon, and lots of clunky interpersonal/political drama between various members of the crew (a Jewish man vs. the son of the Nazi who killed his parents! Russia vs. Israel in a debate over who should control Israel! A French guy who thinks Europe should control the world! Cringeworthy romance that springs up without a second of build up!). Far too much time is spent on these stupid interactions between crew members – instead of these shallowly ‘topical’ interactions, the time would have been much better spent on more scenes of the crew exploring space.

Then again, the actual scenes of the team exploring the moon were also pretty dull. Everything unfolds in thrill-free fashion, and it’s hard to care at all about what happens to this crew of cardboard cut-out characters.

There are some small moments of deeply nonsensical ‘science’ (the astronauts wear helmets with magnetic field ‘masks’ on the front instead of any kind of physical barrier??), but not enough to push things into ‘so bad it’s good’ territory. And of course I was deeply annoyed at the moment when the crew tell their Japanese crewmate to read the alien’s message since it supposedly looks similar to Chinese characters, when in fact it bears no resemblance to any kind of Asian script.

All in all, this is a convoluted yet deeply boring story, topped off by an unsatisfyingly sudden and convenient ending. Plus we never even see the threatening aliens! This is a good example of where the film went wrong: it sets up aspects that could turn out to be interesting (the existence of aliens, the kidnapping of two crew members, the fact that the aliens demand that a pair of cats which the crew brought with them be left on the moon), but then does absolutely nothing with them, dropping these storylines as quickly as they are introduced. Which makes it all seem even worse, deepening the sense of disappointment at what could have been.

Worth watching? I wouldn’t bother – it’s a truly dull film.

Truth in advertising? Yes: 5/5. 

Invasion of Astro-Monster (1965)

AKA: Monster Zero; Godzilla: Invasion of the Astro-Monster; 怪獣大戦争 (literal translation: Giant Monster War)

Directed by Honda Ishiro

Featuring Takarada Akira, Nick Adams, Tazaki Jun, Kubo Akira, Sawai Keiko and Mizuno Kumi

A Japanese and an American astronaut head off on a mission to Planet X, which is occupied by aliens in Devo-esque costumes. The aliens have been driven underground due to constant attacks by the monster King Ghidorah. They ask the humans to help, specifically asking that Earth ‘lend’ Godzilla and Rodan to them, reasoning that these monsters together will be able to defeat Ghidorah. After some debate, the monsters are transported to Planet X.

But it was all a trick! The aliens were never actually in distress, and instead use the three monsters to attack the Earth, aiming to invade and take over. It is up to the astronauts, the sister of one of them, and her inventor boyfriend to defeat the aliens and save the Earth.

With its somewhat silly alien invasion plot (that only gets more and more nonsensical as it goes along) plus large dashes of human drama, this barely seems to qualify as a Godzilla movie. All three monsters are underused, and are mere pawns of the aliens. They don’t appear much, with only a couple of brief fight scenes. In fact, the monsters could have been cut out of the movie entirely and it would still work. Not what I want out of a kaiju movie, really.

That said, even though the plot has been done a million times before, I found the movie pretty entertaining. Plus there are some well-executed model-based special effects, with Godzilla spending a reasonable amount of their brief screen time destroying a lot of miniature buildings in classic style. As a whole, the movie is not overly original in any way, but is still quite fun to watch, feeling a little like a dodgy American sci-fi film from the 50s when the monsters aren’t around.

Worth watching? It’s entertaining in a cheesy kind of way, as long as you can get over the relative lack of kaiju action.

Truth in advertising? I don’t recall any of the monsters being referred to as ‘the Astro-Monster’, so I’m not sure where that came from. The original Japanese title is even more misleading: although the three monsters do battle it out, their brief skirmishes can hardly be considered a war. 2/5.

Queen of Outer Space (1958)

Directed by  Edward Bernds

Featuring Zsa Zsa Gabor, Eric Fleming, Dave Willock, Laurie Mitchell and Paul Birch

‘You know, there’s a certain irony in the fact that our lives and perhaps the lives of everyone on earth may depend on Captain Patterson’s sex appeal’

Three astronauts and a professor are sent on a mission to a space station orbiting Earth. Before they can get there, a mysterious beam destroys the space station before turning to attack their ship. They manage to evade it and in doing so veer off course, crashing on the planet Venus. Venus has an oddly hospitable environment and air that the crew can comfortably breathe. They explore the planet, finding areas of snow and forests of weird plants. But soon enough they are captured by a group of space babes in short skirts and high heels.

It turns out Venus is inhabited by an all-female, all-miniskirted civilisation, ruled with an iron fist by a queen wearing a glittery mask. This same queen banished the men of Venus to a satellite planet after their wars almost caused the ruin of the planet. Since the men never took the women seriously, it was easy to undermine them – revolution could take place literally under their noses! As the crew are thrown in prison Zsa Zsa Gabor shows up as Talleah, the only person on Venus with a Hungarian accent and a scientist who exclusively wears evening gowns in the lab. As the captain fails to woo the queen into releasing them, Talleah warns the crew that the Venusians plan to destroy the Earth and plots to help them escape.

Although it plays out like a juvenile wet dream fantasy, this movie is pretty entertaining on the level of pure cheese. It is so ludicrously sexist that it seems almost like it must be a parody: its thesis is apparently that women cannot exist without men. The men in the film can’t fathom the idea of an all-female society, and can’t stand it either, just wanting to bring men back to Venus and making wisecracks about these dizzy dolls all the while. If it wasn’t all so incredibly silly I think I would have had trouble watching it.

As it is, it’s ridiculous enough to be amusing, with highlights including the Venusians’ illogical costumes, some laughable special effects, and a climactic escape involving a long, non-thrilling sequence of our heroes hiding in some bushes. Plus Zsa Zsa does not disappoint, overdressed for every occasion and spouting stupid dialogue at every turn. She even tries to impersonate the masked queen at one point, despite her thick accent being an immediate giveaway! The silliness carries it along, making for classic bad movie viewing right up until its groan-inducing ending.

Worth watching? It’s an incredibly stupid, male chauvinist fantasy of a film, but works as boneheaded entertainment. Watch it if you’re in the mood for a bad movie that is cheesy as hell.

Truth in advertising? Well, the queen in the movie is the queen of Venus, not of all outer space. So I’m deducting a couple of points for exaggeration: 2/5.

Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet (1965)

Directed by John Sebastian (AKA Curtis Harrington)

Featuring Basil Rathbone, Faith Domergue, Gennadi Vernov, Georgi Zhzhyonov, Yuriy Sarantsev, Georgiy Teykh and Vladimir Yemelyanov

In the year 2020, two spacecraft set off from a lunar base to explore Venus. Two of the astronauts (plus a robot named John) lose contact with the rest of the crew. The other astronauts land on Venus to search for them, running into carnivorous plants, a variety of dinosaurs, and other hazards along the way. They also hear a mysterious siren-like song, leading them to speculate on the existence of human-like female Venusians.

This film is one of several that Roger Corman produced using footage cut from Soviet science fiction films (see also Queen of Blood (1966)). In this case, copious footage is taken from Planeta Bur (Planet of Storms, 1962). In fact, the new American footage makes up only a small percentage of the running time, with Basil Rathbone and Faith Domergue each more or less statically isolated within a space station or shuttle, communicating remotely with each other and with the astronauts on Venus. It uses a technique which has become synonymous with Godfrey Ho in my mind, where scenes from disparate films are linked together via showing parties from either film seemingly talking to one another over the telephone (or in this case, via radio transmissions). In any case, the American footage is almost totally dispensable, with the main storyline being almost entirely comprised of dubbed footage from Planeta Bur.

And this is not a bad thing at all. Planeta Bur looks like it had a sizeable budget (much higher than the average Corman film anyway), and the sets and special effects are not bad given the era. I particularly liked some of the underwater exploration sequences, which were fairly effectively and imaginatively filmed. Care was also apparently taken with the dubbing, which matches fairly well with the actors’ mouth movements – although some fairly convoluted phrasing is used at times in order to achieve this.

There are some hokey moments, statements of illogical scientific ‘facts’, and laughably poor decisions make by the crew (for example, two of them decide to escape a lava flow by jumping on the shoulders of John the robot and commanding the robot to walk through the molten rock – not sure what John is made of, but I would like to see a robot which could withstand this. To make matters worse, a second later John unsurprisingly detects that he cannot tolerate the heat, and will need to throw one of them off, leading to a last minute rush to disable him, and leaving all three stranded in the middle of the river of lava!). But this all just adds to the charm of its 50s sci-fi atmosphere. Overall it’s a pretty entertaining film of its type, and the superfluous nature of the new scenes make me want to dig up a copy of Planeta Bur in full.

Worth watching? Yes: this film is an interesting glimpse into the world of Soviet science fiction, and a pretty fun watch to boot. And it’s definitely a better and much more entertaining film than the other Corman production that heavily borrows from Planeta Bur, the nonsensical Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women (1968, featuring Mamie van Doren(!))

Truth in advertising? In this film, Venus is home to brontosaurus, pterodactyls and miscellaneous other dinosaur-adjacent lizard creatures, so I’d say the title works well enough: 4/5.

Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone (1983)

Directed by Lamont Johnson

Featuring Peter Strauss, Molly Ringwald, Ernie Hudson and Michael Ironside

Space bounty hunter Wolff takes a detour to the hazard-filled planet Terra 11 in order to rescue three captured Earth women and collect a large cash reward for their return. Once on Terra 11, he begrudgingly teams up with the extremely annoying teenage urchin Nikki. In return for food, Nikki guides him through the wasteland. The two of them manage to get past mutants, hostile siren women and various other obstacles until they reach the lair of the ruler: Overdog. From here, Nikki must defeat a deadly obstacle course and Wolff must work out how to get around Overdog and his minions in order to rescue the women and claim his reward.

This movie plays like a cut rate mash up of Star Wars and Mad Max, and is clearly trying to play off the success of its predecessors. It’s very silly, full of illogical moments and plays at a clean PG level, but while derivative it does have enough action to keep things somewhat interesting and boasts some occasionally imaginative set, vehicle and creature design.

What killed this movie for me though was Molly Ringwald as Nikki. Her character is constantly yammering on in a very loud, screeching voice, spouting off cheesy and irritating comments at every opportunity. If she had shut up occasionally I think I would have enjoyed this piece of post-apocalyptic silliness a lot more. I also had to laugh at the hokey overuse of prefixes like ‘space-‘ and ‘star-‘ added to the start of pretty much any word you can think of. Definitely not the best way to try to create a futuristic atmosphere, in my humble opinion.

Worth watching? It had some ok elements, but was really nothing to write home about.

Truth in advertising? Wolff is a bounty hunter in space, and Terra 11 does have a forbidden zone. So I’ll give this one 4/5.

Planet of the Female Invaders (1966)

AKA: El Planeta de las Mujeres Invasoras

Directed by Alfredo B. Crevenna

Featuring Lorena Velázquez, Elizabeth Campbell, Maura Monti, Rogelio Guerra and Adriana Roel

Hiding their ship in plain sight by masquerading as a spaceship themed ride at a fun fair, alien women from the planet Sibilia kidnap a group of unsuspecting punters when they enter the ship to go on a ‘ride to the moon’. The group, including a family with a young son, a boxer on the run from some gangsters, the gangsters he is hiding from, and the boxers girlfriend, are whisked away to Sibilia.

Sibilia is a female-only society, ruled by the evil, big-haired queen Adastrea. The queen imprisons the earthlings in several op-art styled rooms, declaring that they must obey her or be destroyed. Soon the queen’s good, even bigger-haired twin Alburnia arrives on the scene to try to help the earthlings escape their fate as Adastrea starts ordering that they be operated on to try to create ‘lung adaptors’ based on human lungs, which would allow Sibilians to breathe on earth, facilitating their takeover of the planet.

Alburnia sends one of her confidantes to Earth to try to get help. Although the messenger dies before she can deliver her message, the boxer’s manager and his girlfriend’s scientist boss come to the rescue. In the meantime, Adastrea has realised that adult lungs are too worn out to make good lung adaptors. So, she creates a death ray that kills only adults in order to facilitate a 4-step plan that it as outlandish as it is dastardly – Step 1: Kill human adults using the ray; Step 2: Kidnap the human children who were being cared for by those adults; Step 3: Harvest the fresh young lungs from said children; Step 4: Create effective lung-adaptors and take over the Earth. Simple, really. It is up to Alburnia and the remaining humans to try to foil her evil plan before it’s too late.

This Mexican movie is a pretty typical piece of late 50s science fiction, very similar in feel to many b-grade American movies of the same period. The main point of difference is the fairly superfluous inclusion of a boxing match near the start of the film (instead of the expected Mexican wrestling bout). Its space theme, hokey special effects and flimsy plywood sets all feel very familiar despite the language gap.

It suffers a little from a plot which is at times confusing and illogical. For example, when the people are kidnapped, no one on Earth seems too fussed – they literally drink tea and wait to see what happens. And although the earthlings are ‘imprisoned’ on Sibilia, there are no locks on the doors and they can easily get past the sensors in their rooms by rolling across the floor.

Despite a few annoying moments, there is much to like about this film. It is generally pretty entertaining, in a cartoonish kind of way. Given that it involves a female-only civilisation, I was tiredly awaiting the moment when one of the alien women would begin a round of ‘kiss? What is..’kiss’?’ with one of the earth men. I was quite surprised when not only did this moment never arrive, but there was no real romance subplot. There were some vague motions of interest between the queen and the main gangster, but it was very minor and felt like an afterthought. The alien women are for the most part totally uninterested in Earth men, and unusually for these kinds of movies the Earth men also do not really try to pursue them. After seeing so many films where women exist only as decorative love interests or sex objects, this was surprising and quite refreshing.

Worth watching? Yes – it is an entertainingly silly movie just right for lovers of 50s science fiction, and surprisingly less sexist than many films of its era.

Truth in advertising: Pretty true to its title – 5/5.

Queen of Blood (1966)

AKA: Planet of Blood, Planet of Vampires

Directed by Curtis Harrington

Featuring John Saxon, Judi Meredith, Basil Rathbone, Dennis Hopper and Florence Marly

In the oh-so-futuristic year of 1990, scientists receive radio contact from an alien civilisation, informing the Earth of their intention to visit. When the alien spacecraft crashes on Mars, a rescue team is sent from Earth. Although the mission appears to have been a success, things begin to go horribly wrong after they rescue a female alien from the wreckage. The alien, green skinned and with an onion-like hairdo, smirks silently at the male crew, but scowls at the lone female crew member. Waiting until the rest of the crew is asleep, the alien targets the crew members on night watch, killing them off one by one. Hypnotising them with her glowing eyes, she renders them helpless before drinking their blood. The remaining crew feed her from the ship’s plasma supplies in order to avert further attacks, but the situation becomes tense as the supplies dwindle before they are able to make it back to Earth.

This film is one of the better cut-and-paste jobs perpetrated by Roger Corman in the 1960s, where special effects were taken from a Russian sci-fi film and patched together with new footage (see also Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet). Although it is generally pretty obvious where the Russian footage has been inserted, it mostly works quite well – the Russian footage is often quite beautiful, and is nicely offset by the vividly coloured new footage which carries the plot. The first half of the film drags a bit, but once Florence Marly shows up as the eponymous alien things become a lot more interesting. Her silent performance is genuinely creepy, with an intensity and truly alien quality about it.

Worth watching? Yes – it is pretty good for a low budget b-movie, and the silent vampire alien makes for a memorably sinister monster.

Truth in advertising? Is the vampire alien a queen? Some of the crew members seem to think so, but I can’t really see any strong justification for this speculation. 2.5/5.