 |
 Heralded as a "sort of British version of Cat Woman [sic] of the Moon," the
retard that wrote back copy makes another boo-boo when he or she writes that
this movie is "rediculous" [sic]. Astronauts locate a civilization of lost
women on a moon orbiting Jupiter. These people are the descendants of Atlantis
and "wear bathing suits with little skirts and lie around in flames for extra
energy." There is a also a monster on the loose. It's described as a
"lumpy-faced monster in tights." 1956, 80 minutes, VHS
In a perfect world there wouldn't be any such thing as remaking a movie. I
understand that novels or real-life stories might lend themselves to different
takes by different writers, directors and stars, but a movie based on a movie
is pretty much like a child of a brother and sister - a degenerate freak that
you would most likely recoil in horror from if you ever saw it. In a less
than perfect world, there would be remakes of movies, but people would have the
wisdom to only remake movies that had some redeeming quality (i.e. good story).
In this living, stinking hell we call the real world, however, there are some
miscreants that think it is a good idea to remake an awful, stupid movie you
would never want to sit through unless it counted as community service of some
kind (and even then you might think twice about just doing some time in the
pokey instead). So it is that we find ourselves watching a remake of Cat-Women of the Moon of all pictures a scant three years after it was first released (give us some
time to heal for God's sake!). A psychopath named Cy Roth decided that it
would be cool to do a movie based on this premise, only make it a British
version and set it on the thirteenth moon of Jupiter instead of Earth's moon.
The result is an affair about a half hour longer, worse, and more annoying to
sit through than his "inspiration" ever thought about being. Fire Maidens of
Outer Space begins with a secret project called "Thirteen." The idea behind
this project is to send a manned (or is that manly?) mission to Jupiter's
thirteenth moon because they got some postcards from it and it looks a lot like
Earth. Right off the bat, it is evident that Cy had access to about one camera
and one warehouse, because the observatory scene in the beginning is shot in a
very bland way 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 these bums. The sound is abysmal here and listening to
the inane dialogue echo throughout the scene (and other places in the film)
would indicate that a very deserted and therefore cheap, warehouse was used for
some of this production. Other parts of the production looked like they were
filmed 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 doubt that Cy 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. In this
movie, mission control basically consists of one guy sitting at a desk with a
telephone while five or six other people stand around to give the impression
that this is in fact more than a guy sitting at a desk with a telephone. The
spaceship is one of those movie spaceships where there is all this room and
everyone sits at some tables with some blinking lights and knobs and things,
periodically saying stupid things about the completely bogus technology they're
using. This movie is so low rent, that the ship looks fairly barren and
doesn't have nearly as many knobs, buttons, and blinking lights as you're
accustomed to seeing in these abortions. Once everyone is in the air, they
keep in constant contact with mission control, just like in the real world. Of
course in this case, it involves that single guy at the table, making a
telephone call to them on his rotary phone. In space, we know that one of the
dangers is the ever-present meteor shower or asteroid collisions or whatever.
I suppose it's probably too much to assume that a guy with a telephone would be
smart enough to plot out a course for the space ship ahead of time that would
put the crew in as little danger as possible, so you get the obligatory scene
of the crew watching in horror as all these meteors whiz by on their view
screen. Eventually, well three weeks actually - this is another one of those
trips to another world that only takes three weeks to get to as seen most
recently in Journey To The Far Side Of The Sun, they get to the thirteenth moon and a man's voice comes over the loud speaker
(I bet he had been trying to get through for awhile since mission control was
tying up the line - their rocket ship should look into call waiting or
something) and gives them instructions on how to land. They manage to land
successfully, then 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 Phillip Morris!  Once these guys land, they take off these unflattering white flightsuits that
look like something a housepainter would wear and climb out of the rocket. The
disembarking procedure consists of one of them putting a really long ladder
outside the door so they can all go down it to the ground below. Pretty fancy
stuff, you British boobs! Once outside something throws some rocks at them
(never did figure what that was about) and they spot a beacon off in the
distance. They make there way across the wooded countryside to the beacon and
then they 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 - thanks Picard) and I think they
eventually lob a gas grenade at it. It was nice to see that this is another
space mission where the guys all strap on their six shooters and load up on the
incendiary devices before they go out to "explore" their surroundings. The
dialogue was so poorly recorded in this movie that half the time I thought I
would need to go order the Miracle Ear to figure out was going on. Somehow or
other two of the astronauts go into a cave and happen upon a civilization
comprised entirely of women (and one really old dude that can't hold his
liquor). These women are all dressed in these ugly ballet costumes (which is
clue that some dastardly ballet is in the offing!) and they live in a place
that is patterned after a low budget filmmaker's idea of what the ancient
Greeks or Minoans lived like. You know, columns, vases, torches, and
sacrificial altars, that sort of thing. The old geezer claims that he is their
leader or father or something and says with a straight face (though his
delivery was very stilted) that what we have here are the last descendants of
the great civilization of Atlantis! See, Atlantis sunk into the ocean, so
everyone moved out to the thirteenth moon of Jupiter. He also explains about
the monster, but I didn't understand what he said except that the spacemen
needed to kill it, because it attacks whenever they try to leave the area (thus
the attack we saw earlier!). 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 or captain or whoever 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! You
could tell by the way he navigated the ship with the two levers (up and down)
that he was a mean drunk! 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 or something. 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
put it over the top in the "Is It Worse Than Cat-Women of the MoonSweepstakes" was some ballet sequences. These are as stomach-churning as any
Italian zombie movie, and you silently curse whoever it was that came up withCat-Women of the Moon for providing the spawning ground for such a display of
amateurism in the first degree. These ugly 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. Meanwhile, the rest of crew stands around
with their space-helmets up their ass wondering what happened to the other two.
They decide to go back to the ship and telephone mission control that
everything is AOK and the exploration of the moon is continuing. Then they
leave the ship and go back to the cave entrance, but it's sealed up. They walk
around looking for some clue and eventually come upon a stone wall. One of the
guys climbs a tree to see what's over the stone wall and he sees all the
Atlantian women walking around doing nothing productive (are they from my
trailer
park?). These highly trained astronauts hit upon a plan to go over the wall by
chopping a really big tree down and leaning it against the wall. The wall is
electrically charged so they decide to dig their way in under the wall. And
yes, the scene was as interesting to watch as it was to read about. They get
into New Atlantis, but trouble is a brewing as the old fart has finally sucked
down his last glass of Boone's Farm and has gone got hisself all croaked. This
puts 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 bust in on all this 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! Dude lets it fly right at the monster and it lands there right where
the woman is! The monster falls off the altar and lands behind it, hopefully in
the flames. The woman is unaffected by the gas grenade and is promptly
rescued. 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.
It certainly wouldn't require any technology that they obviously didn't
possess. Also, what was up with the monster? Where did he come from? Why was
he attacking? And how did he get into the sacrificing room? If they had such
a great civilization, why didn't they get rid of that dude earlier? The
characters were interchangeable to the point that I had no idea who was who,
even after reading the credits. I wasn't even sure what their jobs were. One
guy was the navigator, but somebody else that I thought was the captain kept
calling him the captain. The only thing worse than an abominable science
fiction movie, is an abominable science fiction movie featuring amateur ballet!
Geez! Who thought that was a good idea? I'm assuming that Cy Roth was a
loner, because if he had any friends at all they would have told him that every
single idea he had was insipid and that the only thing worse was that his total
lack of
technical proficiency at committing such an insipid thing to film made you wish
that man had never discovered how to put moving pictures on celluloid!
Reviews © 2004
MonsterHunter
|
|
