Monthly Archives: January 2021

Abbott and Costello Go to Mars (1953)

Posted on by

Orville (Bud Abbott) is the oldest orphan* at the Hideaway Orphans Home. Seeing how Bud was 56 at the time of filming, perhaps we need to look into the weird practices of this orphanage. Regardless, he sneaks into a top-secret lab where he helps a lab worker named Lester (Lou Costello) and accidentally sends their spaceship into a launch sequence, flying them to what they think is Mars, but it turns out that it’s New Orleans at Mardi Gras.

Yes, a movie called Go to Mars has no sequence where anyone goes to Mars.

Meanwhile, two crooks named Harry the Horse (Jack Kruschen, Satan’s Cheerleaders) and Mugsy (Horace McMahon from the Dr. Kildare movies) sneak on board the spaceship, steal the spacesuits and weapons and rob a bank. Hijinks ensue when the cops think Bud and Lou are the criminals and everyone gets chased on to the rocket, which blasts off for Venus.

It turns out that Venus is a matriarchy where all men have been exiled for being cheaters. Queen Allura (Mari Blanchard, Twice Told Tales) falls for Bud and makes him king as long as he remains faithful. Of course, one of the other women wants to kiss him and this ends up with all of our male characters proving the queen correct, returning Venus once again to the sanity of female rule.

Almost all of the Venusian women was played by a Miss Universe and Miss USA contestants**, including Miss Germany Renate Hoy (she’s also in Missile to the Moon, playing nearly the same role), Miss Sweden Anita Eckberg (before becoming a star in La Dolce Vita), Miss New Jersey Ruth Hampton (Ricochet Romance) and Miss Louisiana Jeanna Thompson, the only woman to be in Miss USA twice. An exception to all these beauty queen contestants is Jean Willes, who appeared in several Three Stooges shorts and in the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

Of all people, Robert A. Heinlein inspired this movie with a film treatment he wrote called Abbott and Costello Move to the Moon. In other science fiction trivia, the sets for this movie were reused for This Island Earth.

Yes, I can barely believe that the intelligent leader of an all-female society of great scientists would give it all up to aardvark Bud Abbott. After all, he has the secret to best strawberry malted ever, even if he had to die for it.

*Harry Shearer is there, too.

**My favorite beauty title in this movie is the one won by Jeri Miller: Miss Welcome to Long Beach.

The AGFA Horror Trailer Show (2020)

Posted on by

Unleashed from the dungeon of the American Genre Film Archive (AGFA), this is a compilation of some of the wildest, most insane trailers they could find. Trust me, I have so many trailer compilations and this one even surprised me with some of its entries.

According to AGFA, this was “meticulously constructed by the mad scientists at AGFA to resemble an otherworldly night at the drive-in.” Unlike so many of the comps that I own, these trailers have been cleaned up with a 2K scan to make them look better than they have in years, perhaps even when they originally screened.

I like to be surprised when I watch these, so if you’re like me, you can stop reading now, because I’m going to spoil what movies are on this:

There are also some astounding food ads and one totally wild one for the Winchester Mystery House which has to be seen to be believed. Plus, they’ve also included Say Goodbye to Your Brain, a found footage horror experiment that combines multiple trailers.

Perhaps best of all, there’s a full hour of SOV trailers, The AGFA Horror Trailer Show: Videorage, which includes:

You can get this from Vinegar Syndrome. You totally should, because it’s so worth the money. Let me tell you, the TV commercials that are worked into this are so incredible, too. Get it and let me know what you think!

REPOST: El Planeta De Las Mujeres Invasoras (1967)

Posted on by

EDITOR’S NOTE: Back on June 29, 2020, I said, “Behold pure magic! You may have noticed that I have a weakness for movies where planetary races of female overlords descend on our little mudball and wipe humans out left and right. This is one of the best examples I’ve ever seen of the genre ever and has suddenly leaped to the top of the list.” As we work on an entire week of movies where evil women try to destroy Earth, how dare I not include this one, which comes from Alfredo B. Crevenna, the director of The Fury of the Karate Experts, one of the most out-there films ever, a movie that somehow combines Santo, kung fu mysticism, aliens, the Coral Castle and Atlantis.

After walking into a flying saucer-looking ride at a carnival, a group of humans is soon light speeding their way through space, the prisoners of a planet of women looking for a new home. Beyond the nuclear family being menaced, we also have a boxer who is in over his head with the mob, his girl and the gang of thugs out to make him pay.

Soon, they’re being experimented on by the evil queen Adastrea and helped by her twin Alburnia. There’s a legend on their planet that twins would arrive, with one serving a dark god and the other a being of light. They’re both played by Lorena Velazquez, whose acting career continues to this day. She’s as close to a scream queen as this era would produce, with roles in The Ship of Monsters, Macabre Legends of the Colony, She-Wolves of the Ring and, in perhaps her best-known horror role, she was Thorina, queen of the vampires in Santo contra Las Mujeres Vampiros. She’s beyond fabulous in this, threatening the lives of children in one scene and sweet and tender in the next.

Speaking of children, the space women have a plot to take human lungs — the younger the better — and use them to make their own ability to breathe our air.

One of the space women, Eritrea, is played by Maura Monti, who would play a similar role in Santo vs. the Martian Invasion, released the very same year. She’s also The Batwoman, which we covered last week.

This movie packs plenty of poignant moments and hilarious dialogue inside it, so much so that you’re unsure if you’re watching a drama or a comedy at points. The sets are astounding works of pop art, the aliens’ costumes leave little to the imagination and the bad guys are as bad as you can get. All movies should aspire to do so much with so little.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Petticoat Planet (1996)

Posted on by

As I watched this week of women in power, I wondered, how long until I have to watch a David DeCoteau movie? This one started and had Ellen Cabot listed as its director and I paid no notice until I looked up and noticed that the man in the love scene was nude and the girl was fully clothed. One quick look at IMDB and yep. I just got DeCoteaued. Is that a word? It is now.

Commander Steve Rogers — not Captain America — has crash-landed on a planet where all of the men died in a mining accident. And yes, for some reason, much like Oblivion*, the planet is a Western movie because all of the women wear — you guessed it — petticoats and the more masculine ones wear cowboy hats. Steve is, of course, fresh meat for these ladies and soon, they’re all battling over him.

Should you watch it? Well, the town is called Puckerbush Gulch, for one. And you get to see Elizabeth Kaitan (Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood, the last three Vice Academy movies), Lesli Kay (who was on As the World Turns, The Young and the Restless and The Bold and the Beautiful) and Betsy Lynn George, the girl from Billy Idol’s “Cradle of Love” video cavort about in soft focus.

But yeah. It’s a total piece of shit.

*That’s because it was shot on the same sets as that movie and its sequel, Backlash: Oblivion 2.

La Diosa Virgen (1974)

Posted on by

You may have noticed that there are two tropes so often at work this week: alien women who battle the men of Earth and H. Rider Haggard’s She. This is another of the latter, a white jungle goddess being attended to by the native populace. As long as she remains a virgin, she can live forever. And then the men of the outside world visit.

Isabel Sarli plays the Virgin Goddess of the title. She was discovered by filmmaker Armando Bo* — who is Hans in this movie — and became this muse, starring in his film El Trueno Entre Las Hojas, a movie whose nude scenes scandalized Argentina.

South African filmmaker Dirk de Villiers wrote, produced, directed and even appears in this movie. James Ryan also shows up, who is in the much better Kill and Kill Again and the just as bad as this if not worse film Space Mutiny.

*Armando’s son Victor is also in this movie and plays his father’s lover’s — in real life —  lover — in the movie. His son Armando would go on to write Birdman.

The Wild Women of Wongo (1958)

Posted on by

One of only two movies that James L. Wolcott would direct — the other is a compilation film called The Best of Laurel and Hardy — this is one odd duck. It also features scenes that were, believe it or not, directed by his friend Tennessee Williams, who was on set and thought it’d be fun to try.

It’s shot inside Coral Castle, an oolite limestone structure that was built by one man, Edward Leedskalnin, who either used ley lines or reverse magnetism to move and carve numerous stones — all by himself — with several weighing multiple tons. Other movies shot there include Nude on the Moon and La Furia de Los Karatecas.

Mother Nature herself explains to us an experiment that she created with Father Time. On the island of Wongo, they made two tribes, the ugly and violent men and the gorgeous women. On the island of Goona, they did the exact opposite.

Now, the four tribes have come into contact with one another, as the brutish apes of Wongo have attacked the attractive men of Goona. That tribe sends their king’s son to seek help and he discovers the attractive women, who suddenly realize that they no longer have to settle for the grotesque men that their mothers and grandmothers once did.

Going against tradition has its downside, as the crocodile god of the people — played by stock footage — grows angry and demands their deaths. They rebel, defeat their opressors and make their way to Goona, just as the good looking men of the tribe are engaging in the ritual where they must survive weaponless in the jungle. The women easily defeat them and take them for husbands while the less good looking races find one another too.

The women of Wongo are played by Marie Goodhart, Michelle Lamarck, Val Phillips, Jo Elaine Wagner, Adrienne Bourbeau (not Adrienne Barbeau, who would have been 12 when this was filmed), Joyce Nizzari (Playboy Playmate of the Month for December 1958, who was photographed by Bunny Yeager and would serve as one of Hugh Hefner’s personal assistants in the 1990’s), Jean Hawkshaw, Mary Ane Webb and Candé Gerrard.

The women of Goona were played by Barbara Lee Babbitt, Bernadette, Elaine Krasher, Lillian Melek (Pagan Island), Iris Rautenberg and Roberta Wagner.

If you want to learn more about them — and this slice of strangeness — I recommend the Women of Wongo page.

I’m trying to think of what message that this is all trying to send and how it ties into our week of female-based societies when it really seems that this movie is all about outward appearance. It does have a talking parrot and lots of alligator wrestling, so it has that going for it.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Queen of Outer Space (1958)

Posted on by

It’s amazing just how much Amazon Women on the Moon got the parody of this movie right, all the way down to the uniforms.

What’s even more astounding is that this movie was written by Charles Beaumont, who wrote “Number Twelve Looks a Lot Like You” for the Twilight Zone, as well as 7 Faces of Dr. Lao, The Intruder and one of my favorite movies of all time, The Masque of the Red Death.

Oh man, this movie.

Edward Bernds is mostly known for Three Stooges and Bowery Boys shorts, but he also made Return of the Fly, High School Hellcats and Reform School Girl, which are three movies that I absolutely love. He was hired by producer Walter Wanger, who had just got out of prison for shooting agent Jennings Lang when he caught him making time with his wife Joan Bennett.

Exiled to Allied Artists, he bought this movie, which wasn’t made for a decade and by which time others at the studio were looking for properties that had already been paid for. Throw in some recycling of Abbott and Costello Go to Mars, Cat-Women of the Moon and Fire Maidens from Outer Space, as well as actual recycling — Queen of Outer Space uses sets and ships from World Without End, footage from Flight to Mars, another ship from the Bowery Boys movie Paris Playboy and costumes from Forbidden Planet— and you have a movie.

The far-flung future world of 1985 is when Captain Patterson (Eric Fleming, Rawhide) and his crew of Lt. Mike Cruze (Dave Willock, What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?), Lt. Larry Turner (Patrick Waltz, The Silencers) and Professor Konrad (Paul Birch, Day the World Ended) are attacked by a laser beam that crashes their ship on Venus, where they run afoul of Queen Yllana (Laurie Mitchell, who is also in the very similar Missile to the Moon). This masked matriarch presides over a society of all women, having killed all men after her face was scarred ten years ago. Well, not all the men — some of the scientists have been kept on a prison colony on one of the planet’s moons*.

Luckily, the all-white crew of JR “Bob” Dobbs lookalikes is helped by Talleah (Zsa Zsa Gabor, perfectly cast as the only Hungarian beauty queen in space) and her female comrades Motiya (Lisa Davis, the voice of Anita, the female owner of the 101 Dalmatians), Kaeel (The Monster That Challenged The World) and Odeena (Marilyn Buferd, the only actress I can think of who was in Les Belles de nuit and won Miss America and was also in The Unearthly).

For all my attempts at assembling a week of movies about matriarchies, Talleah and her friends long for the love of men, which means that this women-run planet cannot survive. It all falls apart when the queen decides to destroy Earth and the disintegrator backfires, killing her and putting Talleah in power.

Even though their ship is fixed, Earth’s leaders demand that they remain on Venus for a year, which is exactly what they wanted anyway. Everyone begins to embrace and hug one another and…well, let’s leave it up to your imagination.

You know who wasn’t happy? One of the crew left behind his girlfriend, who was played by Joi Lansing (Hillbillys in a Haunted House, Bigfoot).

The strangest thing about this movie, however, is that it predates Star Trek by eight years and the uniforms that the queen’s guard wear are in the same red, blue and gold colors.

*Strange, because Venus has no moon.

Collision Earth (2020)

Posted on by

“The gravitation field is accelerating the meteor shower!”
“We’ve lost the orbital shield!”
“Invert the signal flow on the flux capacitor!”
“Launch all deus ex machina techno-weapons!”
— Techno-babble as only The Asylum can shuckster

Truth: we weren’t going to review this film. But after reviewing the ludicrous fun of the recently-released Asteroid-a-Geddon and discovering the newly-released Meteor Moon on our cable system’s PPV channels, we figured we might as well polish off The Asylum’s Deep Impact-cum-Armageddon Earth-is-jeopardy-and-only-sexy n’ buff-scientists-can-save-us trifecta. In fact, this is the perfect film to review for our “Matriarchy in Space Week” as The Asylum-verse is saved by a woman.

Is that sexist to say?

Here’s the trailer.

Well, have you ever watched a PBS-TV episode of Nova? The brainiacs on those shows are always more Giorgio A. Tsoukalos unkempt-flabby than Gerald Butler GQ-ripped. But it’s not The Asylum’s fault. And it’s not first-time screenwriter Joe Roche’s or director Matthew Boda’s bad, either: they’re just a pair of struggling actor n’ crew dudes making a buck on The Asylum manufacturing line, hired to assemble a mockbuster following the Gerard Butler-disaster epic template cast forth in Geostorm (China’s The Wandering Earth is the better film) and Greenland (which actually isn’t that bad). Look, no one’s dropping $7.99 streaming fees to see Leonard Hoffstedder sucking back on inhalers, doubled over on zero-gravity toilets, battling both lactose-irritable bowls and meteors; meanwhile, below deck, at the controls of the Blackhole-deus ex machina Generator, Mission Specialist Howard “Fruit Loop” Wolowitz wants to screw Kate Watson’s cargo-camping hot pants-bottomed (What, no “Daisy Dukes” were available?) meteoricist: the Earth’s fate be damned. And no, Dr. Kothropali, Becca Buckalew isn’t interested in your whiny insecurities, either. Turn your telescope back to the stars, your perv.

When The Asylum gives only the very best in SFX; Image courtesy of mkdltkrs/eBay.

So, if you’ve navigated the stars of The Asylum-verse, you know Collision Earth is one of those films that stars-a-bunch-of-first-time-actors-you-never-heard-of and _____________. In Meteor Moon, it was Dominique Swain in the stand-here-on-the-same-spot-on-this-set-for-the-whole-movie role to get a “name” on the box; this time it’s Eric Roberts (this time in military fatigues and back from Asteroid-a-Geddon) to bark orders and make all the other cardboard-hysterical, techno-babbling thespians look even worse than they really are at the craft. (Plot spoiler: It takes 30 minutes to achieve our Eric-ness; in another 30, Eric’s dead via his falling into a cavernous CGI-fire.)

Before The Asylum: Where it all began . . . with Paramount’s 1965’s Crack in the World.

So, Collision Earth is another one of those movies where the Earth has clusters of nuclear warhead-armed satellites and phalanx after phalanx of perpetually launch-ready rockets — and we still can’t stop the wrath of Lucifer’s Hammer (the best-selling, award-winning 1977 novel by Larry Niven that started this unintentional mess in the first place). And, like Greenland, this Asylum-romp is just that: a fiction survival romp set on Earth with less Deep Impact-in-space shenanigans and more about how-do-the-bunkered-humans-cope-with-the-meteor-aftermath of the Panic in Year Zero! (1962) variety. When it comes to effects: Collision Earth is a budget-strained film void of in-camera effects traded out for After Effects-overlays of the Colorforms play-set variety.

Oh, and this is a film where our camping shorty-shorts n’ boots-and-ankle socks babe with a tummy tie-off on her flannel shirt hops into a Lockheed F-35 Lightning to electro-fry the meteor to oblivion. We’ll forgive that the actual jet CGI’d is a Boeing F-18 Super Hornet — and the cockpit isn’t accurate to either jet — because women in space rock our world.

You’ve seen better. But you’ve also seen a lot worst in The Asylum-verse . . . or any Roger Corman AIP-verse, for that matter. Hey, it’s better than Rocket Attack, U.S.A. and King Dinosaur, so there’s that going for it. And the women — sans the wardrobe snafus — are Bechdel test-strong, so double bonus, for this ain’t no Cat-Women of the Moon. Collision Earth is currently available as a PPV on U.S. cable systems and as a VOD on multiple streaming platforms.

About the Author: You can learn more about the writings of R.D Francis on Facebook. He also writes for B&S About Movies and publish music reviews and short stories on Medium.

Project Moonbase (1958)

Posted on by

“In 1948, the Secretary of Defense proposed that the United States build a space station as a military guardian of the sky.”
— From the film, according to the words of James Forrestal, the First Secretary of Defense, under President Harry Truman

“Today, I’m thrilled to sign a new order taking the next step to create the United States Space Force.”
— President Donald J. Trump, February 2019

Yep, that’s Hayden “Dr. Bellows” Rorke from I Dream of Jeannie.

Robert A. Heinlein, the “dean of science fiction writers,” may have penned the short story and adapted-to-screenplay, and ex-Douglas Fairbanks stuntman-turned actor Richard Talmadge may have come to second-unit direct on the classics Casino Royale, How the West Was Won, and The Greatest Story Ever Told, but they’re either two of Hollywood’s most blatant sexists or producer (on his final film) Jack Seaman creatively-overruled the production. Or studio chief Robert Lippert — whose Lippert Pictures gave us the superior Rocketship X-M (1950) (that Hollywood has been trying to remake for years) — saw Heinlein’s future world of women running space stations and moon bases as poppycock. The Bechtel Test scene-failures of Generals threatening over-the-knee spankings to female officers, mansplaining spaceflight to a female gossip columnist (instead of Hedda Hopper, we get the offensive Polly Prattles . . . women “prattle,” ha-ha), and offhand commenting on Ms. Praddle’s wide girth, that “it costs the government $300-a-pound to send anything into space and everything must weigh under 150 pounds” must be heard to believed. And the insulted women just role their eyes and chuckle at the “jokes.”

Women in space as pilots is bad enough, but running the mission! Why . . THIS IS AN OUTRAGE!

Yeah, Dalton Trumbo didn’t write this . . . and Colonel Briteis is more Wilma Deering than Ripley. And when you see the Col. (called “a nice kid” as her last name is mispronounced as “bright eyes” by superiors) clad in those shorty-short camping cargos, tights, and ballet flats — and a space tee-shirt cut to accentuate the breasts — you’ll know what I mean by more “Deering than Ripley.” And dig those headpieces: is this where Alfonzo Brescia got his costuming ideas for his Italian “Pasta Wars” oeuvre? (Shameless plugging of our “Drive-In Friday: Pasta Wars with Alfonzo Brescia” featurette.)

So goes the future-history of 1970: a world where the era of #MeToo was not yet foretold; a future were the “Enemies of Freedom” plot their the moon base mission foil with an Ed Woodian oscillator, a short-wave radio, and an office intercom plopped on a wooden desk à la Plan Nine from Outer Space.

It helps when the U.S Air Force — who ran space before NASA — lends you their concept models.

“You need any help?”
“Can I strap you in?”
— Maj. Bill Moore exhibiting more chauvinistic chivalry to the female Colonel “Bright Eyes” ready to climb aboard and strap into the rocket

While Heinlein’s pen changes up the space opera tomfoolery from the usual intelligent-but-weak female Bechtel Test boondoggles of The Angry Red Planet, Gog, and King Dinosaur — by giving us a female U.S. President and moon base commander — the “women are equal” subtext is lost in space against all of the condescending male-nationalism. Oh, did we mention the orders for Maj. Bill Moore to propose marriage to Colonel Briteis — and be the first marriage on the moon — are preformed by our Madame President of the United States? And while that flip of the script gives Project Moonbase the distinction as the first onscreen portrayal of a female president, Madame is also a female president complicit in matrimonial servitude.

Ad astra per aspera, my dear galactic concubine. May your hardships and adversity, be light.

However, even with its sexist dialog faux pas and the MST3K ribbings, aside: Once we get into space, Project Moonbase is a fascinating watch, with those official U.S. Air Force models, along with split-screen photography of astronauts walking upside down in corridors and sitting in chairs on walls, and shuffling along in magnetic boots (more like Robin “The Boy Wonder” rejects) — all before Kubrick came up with the idea. And, if you’re a junk cinema fan, you’ll notice the set and costume similarities with the also-slagged Cat-Women of the Moon (also released in 1953; but a day apart from each other via different distributors). And bash that alien-women-rule-the-moon romp as you may, but, courtesy of decent against-the-budget set designs, its a not-as-bad-as your MST3K-led to believe.

You can watch Project Moonbase — unriffed — on You Tube.

About the Author: You can learn more about the writings of R.D Francis on Facebook. He also writes for B&S About Movies.

Mesa of Lost Women (1953)

Posted on by

Before Ron Ormond went off and made his religious films, he was making some really out there movies. Actually, the religious films are just as bonkers, but Mesa of Lost Women is plenty strange as well.

Originally called Tarantula, Ormond came in, added some new footage and gave it the kind of name that would draw drive-in audiences. That’s after the original director, Herbert Tevos, claimed to have directed films on Germany starring Marlene Dietrich and Erich von Stroheim, including The Blue Angel. The truth is that Mesa is the only movie he ever worked on.

As we’ve watched movies where women — specifically outer space women — lorded over matriarchal societies this week, we’ve seen plenty of them working alongside giant spiders. Cat-Women of the Moon, Queen of Outer Space and Missile to the Moon*, you share something in common with this movie!

I love the beginning of this, as we watch a man get caressed by the monstrous hands of Tarantella, who kisses him to death as the narrator** intones, “Have you ever been kissed by a girl like this?”

What follows is not as good as that opening.

Grant Phillips (Robert Knapp) and Doreen Culbertson (Paula Hill) have been lost in the desert for days and nearly died from exposure and dehydration. As they recount their tale at the Amer-Exico Field Hospital, we discover the story of Leland Masterson, who has been invited by the spidery-named Dr. Aranya (Jackie Coogan!) to see the doctor’s human-sized tarantulas and women with the abilities and instincts of spiders, including Tarantella, who can regrow her body parts and could live forever. As for the males, well, they all turn out to be mutated dwarves. You can’t have it all, I guess.

Man, this movie is all over the place from here, with Leland getting drugged into insanity, Tarantella dancing in a club until she gets shot*** and then bringing herself back to life, George Barrows — the monster in Robot Monster — playing a nurse, sexual tension and, of course, a heroic and suicidal death for one of the leads, all wrapped up by the man and woman back in the hospital, telling their story that no one believes.

Hoyt Curtin wrote the music for this on guitar, bass and piano. It’s either going to make you happy or insane. Ed Wood must have been in the former camp, as he reused it for his movie Jail Bait.

This movie will hurt your brain, but hey — I’m all for a women-run society with gigantic spiders that believes in the power of dance numbers.

*To be fair, Missile is the exact same movie as Cat-Women. It was also filmed in the same location as Mesa, Red Rock Canyon Park.

**It’s Lyle Talbot, who also shows up in Amazon Women on the Moon, a movie surely influenced by this one.

***Before he shoots her, Leland quotes II Kings 9:33 by saying,”…So they threw her down, and some of her blood splattered on the wall and on the horses; and he trampled her underfoot…” as if he’s a proto-Jules Winnfield.

You can watch this on YouTube. There’s also a copy on the Internet Archive.