A remake of Cat-Women of the Moon that premiered a scant three years after Cat was first released (give us some time to heal for God’s sake!), Fire Maidens From Outer Space is a British version set on the thirteenth moon of Jupiter instead of Earth’s moon. It’s also about a half hour longer, worse, and more annoying to sit through than its “inspiration” ever thought about being.

Immediately, it is evident that director Cy Roth had access to a single camera and one warehouse because the observatory scene in the beginning is shot with one camera simply following characters back and forth as they yammered and sexually harassed a secretary that had the unfortunate task of taking a letter for them. The sound is abysmal and listening to the inane dialogue echo throughout the scene (and other places in the film) indicates that a very deserted warehouse was used for some of this production. Other parts of the film appeared as if they were shot at a state park or someone’s really big, bushy backyard.

Since this a movie involving a trip to another world, some scenes involving the launch of the rocket ship are required. If you had any doubts that Roth was funding this movie out the allowance his mommy gave him every Friday, these scenes would assuage them forever. Low rent can’t begin to describe the look and feeling of these scenes. First of all you have mission control. It consists of one guy sitting at a desk with a telephone while five or six other people stand around to give the impression that there is more than one guy sitting at a desk with a telephone.

The spaceship doesn’t fare any better. It’s very spacious and everyone sits at some tables with some blinking lights and knobs, periodically saying stupid things about the completely bogus technology they’re using. The astronauts do keep in constant contact with mission control just like in the real world. In this case it involves that single guy at the table making a telephone call to them on his rotary phone.

Once they land successfully on the moon everyone stretches, congratulates one another, and busts out the cigarettes just like they had gotten done with a marathon session of bumping space boots with one another! Ah, the good old days when astronauts’ survival equipment came courtesy of Philip Morris!

They make their way across the wooded countryside to a beacon theyv’e spotted and hear a girl screaming and see her struggling with a monster. This monster is a real skinny dude dressed up in a black body stocking and wearing a mask that looks like he rubbed his head in feces. He also has these atrociously dubbed howls and growls. The guys shoot at it (after having a debate as to whether they should interfere) and they eventually lob a gas grenade at it. This is another one of those manly space missions where the guys all strap on their six shooters and load up on the incendiary devices before they go out to “explore” their surroundings.

A civilization comprised entirely of women and one really old dude that can’t hold his liquor is discovered inside a cave These women are dressed in these ugly ballet costumes (which is a clue that some dastardly ballet is in the offing!) and they live in a place that resembles a low budget filmmaker’s idea of ancient Greek set decoration. There’s columns, vases, torches and sacrificial altars – that sort of thing.

The old drunkard announces that they are the last descendants of the great civilization of Atlantis! He explains that Atlantis sunk into the ocean so everyone moved out to the thirteenth moon of Jupiter. Well, duh! That’s so obvious, you don’t need to explain it!

The girls show up and our two heroes really tie one on. This leads to the great scene where the girls repeatedly try to wake the navigator and he is so wasted he can barely be roused from his slumber. When he does wake up, he yells at the girls to get out! I hope New Atlantis has an AA chapter!

The movie’s pointlessness and stupidity shifts into hyperdrive from here on out. Somehow or other one of the astronauts has fallen in love with one of the women. That took all of about thirty seconds. Also, the men are not being allowed to leave. I was never quite sure what the problem was, but it was around this time that Cy Roth decided that what his film needed to ensure it would be remembered as even more brain damaging than Cat-Women of the Moon was some ballet sequences. These are as sickening as any Italian cannibal movie and you silently curse whoever it was that came up with Cat-Women of the Moon for providing the spawning ground for such a display of amateurism.

Homely chicks in their ugly outfits and dirty slippers run and jump and their hands flail about like they had gotten ahold of some bread with some funny-looking mold on it. I was expecting the astronauts to plead with them to kill them, but they all sort of sat there watching it like they cared. That was perhaps the closest thing I saw to actual acting in the entire movie.

The old man dies leaving a really mean black-haired skank in charge and she decides that the chick that loves the astronaut should be sacrificed for her bad taste in men.. The two astronauts who’ve gotten themselves captured are forced to watch as this broad is dumped on an altar with flames billowing behind it. Also on hand for the festivities is that monster in the black pantyhose. I don’t recall whether he was part of the whole sacrificing angle or whether he was simply crashing the party to justify his own existence in this movie.

The remaining astronauts appear and start shooting at the monster who also happens to be right next to the woman in peril. Luckily nobody hit her especially since these dummies should know from their last encounter with the monster that bullets don’t bother it. You know what that means! Another gas grenade! Problem solved and the astronauts leave, promising to return with other desperate, lonely men to help them build their race back up.

Huffing and puffing at an obese 80 minutes, this movie is clearly worse than Cat-Women of the Moon, but not in a good way. It is way less entertaining. (A guy in black pantyhose subbing for two giant rubber spiders on strings? Give me break!)

This movie actually made less sense then the swirl of bilge water that passed for a story in Cat-Women. What was this garbage about these people being the last remnants of Atlantis? How in the world did they end up on a Jovian moon? By all accounts, their civilization was still stuck in about 1000 B.C. and if they were so great, why didn’t they just row their boats over to Europe or North America when their stupid continent sank? It would have been a heck of a lot shorter trip and wouldn’t require any technology that they obviously didn’t possess. The film does prove Albert Einstein’s little known theory that terrible ballet exists outside of normal space and time and is destined to consume the universe one day with its filthy-shoed suckiness.

© 2009 MonsterHunter