In my previous blog post, I talked about the film Missile to the Moon, which is a remake of this week’s subject, Cat-Women of the Moon. I first heard of Cat-Women of the Moon when reading the book, Son of the Golden Turkey Awards where it was another nominee in the “Most Primitive Male Chauvinist Fantasy” category. In this one, a spacecraft ends up on the moon where they find a civilization of black leotard wearing women with beehive hairdos. The Cat-women had practiced mind control over the female navigator of the spacecraft to get it to the moon. They tried to used mind control to overtake the men, but their minds were too strong. They want to take over the spacecraft to go to earth because they cannot live on the moon anymore. After some fighting, the crew overpowers the Cat-Women. Then they board their spacecraft and go home.
There were a couple of things that make this film stand out among the rest. The first thing is that is has a more exciting title. The promotion said it included “Hollywood cover girls”. Another attraction of this film is that it stars Sonny Tufts. When I first saw this movie, I had no idea who he was. But I had heard his name as the punchline to one of the jokes on a Kermit Schaffer Bloopers album. When I first heard the Bloopers album, I get the reference to Sonny Tufts. I didn’t even know he was a film star. Looking at his filmography now, I have only heard of one of his other films. I don’t know that he was ever much of a star. When I first heard of Cat-Women of the Moon and saw that he was the star, it increased my curiosity. He doesn’t do anything special in the movie, but at least now I could say I had seen Sonny Tufts.
The other attraction for this movie was 3-D. I love 3-D movies, especially ones from the 1950’s during the initial heyday of 3-D. The first time I saw it was in 1995 when it was released on VHS in the 3-D format that uses the red and blue glasses. The tape came with 2 sets of glasses. This 3-D format is usually worse than the one that uses the polarized glasses. This just added to the appeal of the film for me. I no longer have the tape, but I’ve hung onto the glasses and hope for a polarized release in the future.