Planet Outlaws is the edited Buck Rogers serial from 1938. It was edited again to feature length and titled Destination Saturn as it was syndicated to television,. It was edited again into in the late 70s and called Buck Rogers with the theatrical poster advertising, “Star Wars owes it all to Buck Rogers.”

Lieutenant Buck Rogers (Buster Crabbe, who was also Flash Gordon) and Buddy Wade (Jackie Moran) are lost somewhere in the North Pole in 1938. The Nirvano Gas they have in their ship causes them to go to sleep for five hundred years, waking up in 2440.

The future has been taken over by Killer Kane (Anthony Warde) and his army. The only people left to fight him are Dr. Huer (C. Montague Shaw), Wilma Deering (Constance Moore) and Air Marshal Kragg (William Gould). Buck and Buddy join up and head to Saturn to fight against the super crime bosses of the future.

This serial reuses a lot of things, such as the vehicles, a set and costumes from Flash Gordon’s Trip to Mars, background music from The Bride of Frankenstein, the theme from Tim Tyler’s Luck and background shots from Just Imagine,

Forty years later, Buster Crabbe made a cameo appearance as Brigadier Gordon on the Buck Rogers TV series episode “Planet of the Slave Girls.” Gordon tells Buck (Gil Gerard), “I’ve been doing this since before you were born.” When Buck, at 533-years-old, asks “You think so?”

EDITOR’S NOTE: I feel bad that this ran just a few weeks ago, but hey, it’s in this box set.

Director W. Lee Wilder formed a film production company in the early 1950s called Planet Filmplays to quickly make low-budget science fiction films with screenplays co-written with his son Miles. Directing was in the Wilder blood, as his brother was the much better considered Billy.

Other Wilder science fiction movies of this era include Killers from Space and The Snow Creature.

Do you know who gets there first when a UFO crashes? The Federal Communications Commission. Yes, they’re there when The Phantom (Dick Sands), an invisible radioactive alien, is on the loose before it gets trapped inside Griffith Observatory. He tries to communicate through tapping but it’s too late. He can’t breathe our air and ends up falling off the top of the planetarium to his death, despite Barbara Randall (Noreen Nash) trying to save him.

I kind of love the way that the alien looks but then again, I like how Robot Monster looks.

Don’t have the box set? You can watch this on Tubi.

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 in 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.

Don’t have the box set? You can watch this on Tubi or download it from the Internet Archive.

Phil Tucker invented a rotary engine known as the CT Surge Turbine that he successfully patented and unsuccessfully tried to sell to the automobile industry as a more efficient alternative to the internal combustion engine. And years after directing movies like this and The Cape Canaveral Monsters, he did actually contribute to some movies as an editor, including Orca and King Kong.

Yet we’re all going to remember him for this movie and to be honest, whenever life gets me down, I remember that at some point, people got together and decided to make a movie about the end of the world and threw a monkey suit with a TV set for a head in it and I think about the startling ridiculousness of that and you know, it’s all better.

That monster is known as Ro-Man Extension XJ-2. He’s played by George Barrows, who made his own gorilla suit to get roles in movies. He’s already used his Calcinator death ray to kill everyone on Earth except for the eight people we meet in this movie.

I mean, that’s pretty through. There were 2.6 billion people alive in 1953, so to wipe out that many people, much less be able to find the eight you missed is pretty good work, if I can commend the outright annihilation of a planet.

Sure, this movie outright rips off the ending of Invaders from Mars and recycles footage from One Million B.C., Lost Continent, Rocketship X-M and Captive Women, but it’s in 3D, shot all over Bronson Canyon and was made in four days for $16,000. That is also worth celebrating.

It also has a score by Elmer Bernstein, who was currently being held back from major movies because of his liberal views. He also did a score for Cat Women of the Moon that year, but soon would be one of the biggest names in movie music.

Look, this is a movie that has a Billion Bubble Machine with an antenna being used for Ro-Man to communicate with the Great Guidance, the supreme leader of his face, who finally gets fed up and blasts not only that gorilla robot but the child hero before he causes dinosaurs to come back and then uses psychotronic vibrations to smash Earth out of the universe. If you can’t find something to love there, you are beyond hope.

You can watch the Mystery Science Theater and original version of this movie on Tubi.