Every so often a movie will cross your path that just makes you stop to wonder how much more advanced we are than the chimps that sit around and pick bugs off each other’s crotches all day.
Cat-Women of the Moon was awful from start to finish, stem to stern, and pillar to post. I was constantly amazed at the depths that this film continued to reach as it unspooled.
Everything about it stunk. The plot, the acting, the music, the dialogue, the sets, and especially the science.
I knew there was trouble when we opened up things in a large spaceship with some of the walls looking like they were made out of corrugated metal and chairs which appeared to be nothing more than cheap lawn chairs.
Once the astronauts manage to haul themselves out of their lawn chairs they make radio contact with Earth. Since this is the first space mission to the moon on lawn chairs, the folks on Earth ask if they can speak with each of the crew members about this historic moment.
The leader of the expedition, a guy whose first name is Laird, shouts, “no!” Then he says they’re going to do this mission “by the book.”
Luckily though, he relents thus introducing us to the rest of the crew. The co-pilot is named Kip which shouldn’t come as too big a surprise on a ship where the captain is called Laird.
There’s a woman navigator named Helen and two other guys who don’t leave much of an impression, except that one of them has brought along his own postmarking equipment so that he can sell first day covers to all the mindless philatelists back on Earth!
While they are all being interviewed, a meteor hits or almost hits the ship. (The special effects were so minimal that I really couldn’t tell.)
This really makes Laird mad (he already has this acting technique where he shouts out his lines, so this just exacerbates that condition) and he announces again that from now on the mission is going to be done “by the book.”
Once they land (after some suspicious behavior by Helen), they decide that everyone should get into their space suits and explore the surface.
This is one of those movies where the astronauts are highly trained professionals who take all the essentials with them while exploring the moon. You know, essentials like cigarettes and a handgun. Are they exploring a distant world or holding up a 7-11?
Watching them explore the surface gives you the distinct impression that whomever wrote the script had an five year old’s understanding of physics and astronomy.
First of all, the crew communicates by shouting through their helmets. Um, don’t need some kind air or atmosphere to transmit sound?
Second of all they have all this blather about the dark side and the light side of the moon. To show us how deadly the light side is somebody bums one of Helen’s smokes and throws it into the light side where it immediately and spontaneously bursts into flame. Don’t you need oxygen for something to ignite and burn?
They head over to the cave that Helen couldn’t have possibly seen from space (but somehow did) and once inside of it they see what looks to be moisture and decide that there must be some type of atmosphere in there.
So one of the guys takes his helmet off, gets a big whiff of that smelly cave air, and since he doesn’t turn blue and his eyes don’t bug out, everyone shucks their space suits and starts breathing that sweet moon air.
They leave their space suits lying in a heap near the cave entrance and go further into the cave and run smack dab into a giant rubber spider attack.
Helen tries to get herself chomped by this big thing that some stagehand has lowered on several ropes and started to shake violently.
The other four crew members see this and proceed to take care of it “by the book.” This involves all of them jumping onto the thing, punching and stabbing it and generally gang stomping it. Once they get it under control, another one attacks so they bust a cap in its ass. Good thing they brought that gun to the moon!
The Cat-Women contact Helen and we see that Helen has some white spot on her hand that the Cat-Women use to control her mind. Shortly thereafter, there’s some battles with the Cat-Women and eventually everyone ends up in the Cat-Women’s secret city in the cave.
The city is as cheesy as you would expect in a movie like this, consisting chiefly of ugly park benches, lots of ornate vases and other items that generally look like the trash that one of those stores that sells all those outdoor yard ornaments would have in their inventory.
The Cat-Women appear and they all have these stupid names (Beta, Lambda, and Zeta) along with these ugly black leotards. To top it all off, their hairdos can only be described as something along the lines of an Eddie Munster do with a bun in the back.
The Cat-Women use Helen to get close to Laird so that they can get the knowledge on how to fly the ship because they want to invade our planet, breed with our men, and produce whole litters of little Cat-Women!
The Cat-Women were never explained in such a way so that you could understand their abilities. Sometimes they teleported. Sometimes they used mind control, but sometimes it didn’t work, and when it did, it didn’t achieve any big results.
But why even mess with all this cloak and dagger mind control crap when the Cat-Women could have just acted nice and helpless and got these guys to transport them back to Earth as part of a “rescue?”
As stated earlier, the problems with the film are legion. The actors are as bargain basement as the budget in this film. They can’t deliver lines and aren’t even very photogenic.
The special effects are just as hideous and look like someone went out of his or her way to make them look that awful.
And while the science part of this science-fiction movie is completely absent, I didn’t even know it was scientifically possible to squeeze so many stupid and bad ideas into an hour long movie!
© 2011 MonsterHunter
