After seeing Cat-Women of the Moon and Missile to the Moon, why would anyone need to see Queen of Outer Space? After all it’s just a variation of the same story that I had already seen twice. What could possibly make a difference to make this one worth watching? First, I think they are all worth watching in spite of their quality. In this one, the spaceship is drawn to Venus instead of the moon. So they were expanding the universe where this film happens. They also expand the frame of the film since it is the first widescreen film in this genre. It is also in color. It also has the feel of being a bigger budget film. Maybe it seems like a bigger movie because it stars Zsa Zsa Gabor.
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.
Back in the days of the home video revolution, I picked up an inexpensive VHS set of low budget sci-fi films. It included The Hideous Sun Demon and Missile to the Moon. When I watched Missile to the Moon, I realized that it was one of those films where space explorers land on a planet where the entire population is women. In the book, Son of the Golden Turkey Awards, they devote a whole section to this type of movie with a category called “Most Primitive Male Chauvinist Fantasy”.
A syndicated movie show appeared on late night around 1987 featuring bad movies. One of the only movies that I saw on this program was Hillbillys in a Haunted House starring country music singer Ferlin Husky. Ferlin Husky was familiar to me because his song Wings of a Dove was on some 8-track tape that our family carried on vacation when we only had about 5 tapes. Hillbillys in a Haunted House follows Woody Wetherby (played by Husky) and his two traveling companions, Boots Malone and Jeepers, as they travel to a country music jamboree. Their car breaks down at an abandoned house that is haunted. The film is a showcase for country music performances by a variety of guest stars. About the last half of the film is a country music concert. The music gets old, but the haunted house and bad comedy keep the film interesting.
Robot Monster is another film that I discovered from the Golden Turkey Award books. It has a lot going for it to make it bad fun. The monster is a guy in a gorilla suit with a fake scuba diving helmet for a head. The opening credits lists the N. A. Fischer Chemical Products as the provider of the “Billion Bubble Machine”. The movie was made in 3-D during the heyday of 3-D movies and is a perfect vehicle for that technology. It has stock footage of stop motion dinosaurs and fighting lizards for no apparent reason. During one scene where a rocket is launching to escape the tyrannical Robot Monster creatures, you can see someone’s arm moving a rocket on a stick. Even with all these fun things to enjoy, the movie seems long at a 66-minute run time.
Plan 9 From Outer Space is the grandaddy of all bad movies. It is the film that has worn the title Worst Movie Ever Made for the longest. One review of the movie said that it might not be the worst movie ever, but it is the most entertaining bad movie you’ll ever see. I think this description is the best. Its reputation was established in the late 1970’s through the book The Golden Turkey Awards and has continued to grow over the years. The Tim Burton film, Ed Wood, about its director has added to the lore of Plan 9.
In 1980, the movie The Creeping Terror was featured in a book, The Golden Turkey Awards. The book shared information about a variety of movies that are considered the worst ever made. In addition to being an extremely bad movie, this one is also very fun to watch. It involves a creature in a spaceship that terrorizes the town where it lands. It sounds like a standard 1950’s science fiction film but the technical details of the film give it the boost that make it comedy gold. The monster appears to be made from a giant remnant of carpet with a bunch of kids underneath it to make it move. In several of the scenes, you can see the kid’s sneakers. The movie was made in a small town in Texas where the director had the people from the town pay him to be in the movie. This is one of the reasons you see so many people get eaten by the monster. The director also ran out of money before he could finish the film. Before it could be finalized, the soundtrack got separated from the film. They couldn’t get the people to overdub the dialogue because they were mad about the film. For the most part, the film is narrated like a nature film. In one memorable scene, a scientist and a military officer are arguing whether to kill or capture the monster. The narrator describing action says “The Colonel, more concerned with saving human lives than advancing Science, told Bradford to Go to Hell.”
One day in 2009, I was channel surfing and I saw a showing was coming on called A Haunting in Connecticut. I had recently seen ads for a movie called The Haunting in Connecticut that I didn’t think had been released yet. The similarity of the names confused me, and I watched just to see the show on TV was the same thing. It turns out that the The Haunting was based on the same story as A Haunting. I enjoyed the TV show enough that I decided to go see the film when it was released. My son and my youngest daughter went with me to see the film.
My family and I started watching classic blaxploitation movies from the 1970’s on Turner Classic Movies several years ago. There is a sub-genre of these films that are horror films too. Blackula and Scream Blacula, Scream are probably the most famous of these films. One of the lesser known of these films is called Sugar Hill.
We watched Pee-wee’s Playhouse when it first came out in 1986. My wife and I were fans of Pee-wee Herman and were interested in seeing how they would do a children’s show. One of the show’s characters was someone they called The King of Cartoons. The King of Cartoons dressed like you would expect a king to dress with a crown and regal, ornate clothes. During the early seasons he would bring a projector which he would shine into the camera as he said, “Let the cartoons begin!” Later the projector was replaced with a remote control. The projector wasn’t the only thing that was replaced. After the first season, the original King of Cartoons, Gilbert Lewis, was replaced by William Marshall. Marshall looked familiar. It was after a couple of seasons that I found out that he played the title character in the blaxploitation horror film, Blackula.
