The cardboard 1953 science fiction feature Cat-Women of the Moon starred Sonny Tufts (whose overacting proves history correct about why late night talk show hosts poked fun at his talent) and Marie Windsor (constantly looking embarrassed onscreen) in a heavy-breathing tale about these sirens living on the moon who lure a spacecraft crew to the lunar surface, so the gals can hijack the ship and take over Earth. It was remade just a few years later, as the far more inventive Missile to the Moon, but both of these movies remain camp favourites. In 1987, the premise of Cat-Women was reused in the underrated sketch film Amazon Women on the Moon, released by Universal: a disarming collection of skits, television spoofs and fake commercials, much in the spirit of Kentucky Fried Movie, made ten years earlier by John Landis, one of this film’s five directors. Although it flopped in its day, Amazon Women has actually aged better than many lame comedies of the period.
The movie is a pastiche of skits and gags in an attempt to replicate the experience of watching a movie on late-night television (in this case, on the fictional WIDB, Channel 8). The film’s title is also the name of the science fiction movie spoof (“from 1955”), which is presented in segments through the second half of the feature. While borrowing the plot from Cat-Women, it is however a melange of elements from vintage genre films, beginning with the logo from Universal-International (which released Jack Arnold’s films, surely the best sci-fi films of that decade), borrowing costumes from Forbidden Planet (re-used in the camp classic, Queen of Outer Space), the score from Night of the Living Dead (which was actually library music also used in such cheapies as Teenagers from Outer Space), and even dropping Lyle Talbot’s name in the fake opening credits. Sadly, he does not appear in this spoof, but Famous Monsters legend Forrest J. Ackerman (natch!) has a cameo as the Earth’s president. The look of this sequence is note-perfect, due to its low-tech design Flash Gordon rocket ship models (where the strings holding up models are given their own key lights), and the antiseptic photography with the bright palettes from the era’s higher-budgeted fare, such as This Island Earth.
This movie-within-a-movie (these segments are directed by Kentucky Fried Movie co-producer Robert K. Weiss) is so evocative of these same kind of campy films we’d watch in the midnight hour, and it is purposely presented in such a haphazard way that recalls the conditions in which we’d often view them. Twenty years before Grindhouse, the Amazon Women sequences have scratches in the film, jumpy soundtracks, missing reels, melting emulsions, and in one deleted scene on the DVD, a well-placed hair in the gate. They even have representative title cards on which any TV station would announce: “We’ll be right back”, or “We now return to our movie, with no further interruptions”, with a soft announcer’s voice and cheesy easy listening music in the background. The Amazon Women sequences are broken up in between the movie’s fake ads, which also perfectly represent the cheesy commercials that would play late night, thus further enhancing the authentic feeling. Amazon Women on the Moon is a note-perfect evocation of the late night viewing experience, in content and form.
Updated from an article originally published in Vol. 1, Issue #21, “A Tribute to Late Night Television”.
Greg Woods
Greg Woods has been a film enthusiast since his teens, and began his writing "career" at the same time- prolific in capsule reviews of everything he had watched, first on index cards, then those hardcover dollar store black journals, then an old Mac IIsi. He founded The Eclectic Screening Room in 2001, as a portal to share his film love with the world, and find some like-minded enthusiasts along the way. In addition to having worked in the film industry for over two decades, he has been a co-programmer of films at Trash Palace, and a programmer/co-founder of the Toronto Film Noir Syndicate. He has also written for Broken Pencil, CU-Confidential, Micro-Film, and is currently working on his first novel. His secret desire is for someone to interview him for a podcast or a DVD extra.