Wolff rating: TAIL-WRENCHING
Plot summary: Whitebread milquetoasts go to the moon, where they discover chicks in black body suits (AND NO CAT EARS OR TAILS) who want, uh, like, air, or Earth, or sperm, or something.
Biased, pithy comments: Hooah. This is an MST3K-level piece of drek made by passable stars given terrible material, no sets, and not much time to do it right. You know you're in trouble when the movie is entitled ``Cat Women'' but there are no signs of any cat women for the first half of the film. Likewise, when you see a cat woman, she doesn't look very catty---more sort of over-made-up. It doesn't take a PhD in Women's Studies to figure out that this is a heavy-handed fairy tale about the dangers of lesbianism/feminism. Essentially, when women don't have men for very long, they get bitchy, jealous, and start wearing black bodysuits. This is about as boring as it comes, and music (by the reknowned Elmer Bernstein) is some sort of hideous flute/glockenspiel mix that made me want to do something bad. The ``exciting'' conclusion takes place almost entirely offscreen (I guess they didn't want to show women getting shot or something). Oooh. I get shudders just thinking about how bad this is.
Other Notes: Originally released in 3D. Science is so bad it's actually kinda funny---the atmosphere-free moon plus a gun (how does the powder ignite?), the desk chairs and lockers on the rocket set, and the guys in dumb-looking plastic fishbowl helmets shouting at one another in deep space (what, like there'd be anything to carry the sound waves?). Yak. Clearly this is the movie Joe Dante based his ``Amazon Women on the Moon'' parody in the movie of the same name; in all truthfulness you can get more laughs and the whole gist of this original by watching Dante's parody without suffering as much as I did. The two films are nearly the same, only Dante's has better acting, more realistic sets, and cuter women in neater costumes, and Dante's is only half as long.
How many times I have seen it: x1
Starring: Sonny Tufts, Victor Jory, Marie Windsor, William Phipps
Directed by: Arthur Hilton