Cat-Women of the Moon (1953)

Pretty Good

A story that's too fascinating to pass by...

The tone of this movie is interesting -- the stakes are both dramatic and high, but it's balanced with a lot of fun, tongue and cheek dialogue.

This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

CAT-WOMEN OF THE MOON is one of those cheesy little science fiction flicks of the 1950s about a race of powerful women colonising outer space; they seemed to have designs on the Moon, Mars, anywhere else you can think of. This film's story has the usual group of astronauts heading off to the Moon, where they're captured by a black-clad race of warrior women who have designs of them. A giant spider also pops up at one point. It's all very straightforward and ineffectual, not quite cheesy enough to be a so-bad-it's-good classic, but lively enough that it never becomes a bore. Marie Windsor, of NARROW MARGIN fame, plays one of the crew and is the best thing in it.

Arrogant space lesbians, confident of their superiority, subvert humanity's first mission to the Moon, and lay in wait with their plan for world domination. Lured into the trap by the mission's only woman, three of the four male crew members are wined, dined, and corrupted, revealing all the cat-women need to know to fly the spaceship. One astronaut is killed after revealing what he knows. The one man who has been wary throughout ruthlessly digs out the plot. Yet another has the plot revealed to him out of love. Ah, love. These two then inform the captain. After the cat-women are killed, the crew return to Earth.On their way to the moon, the ship is struck by a whistling meteor, which looks much more like a comet. It damages the atom chamber, spilling nitric acid. Would you find nitric acid anywhere in an atomic reactor? No. A fire extinguisher is used during the emergency, but there are no flames. Let that pass. The mission apparently hadn't been planned with a landing site chosen, so the cat-women's proxy convinces the captain, her main squeeze, to land on the dark side, though he's concerned that it's too cold there. The temperature on the dark side is the same as on the light side, which is the temperature of space itself. To make his point, after leaving the ship the captain drops a cigarette onto the light side, where it bursts into flame. Since there's no oxygen on the Moon, the Sun's heat couldn't have ignited it. Oh well, on with the show! The crew are lured into exploring a nearby cave. They discover an oxygen atmosphere, and are attacked by giant spider puppets. What's preventing the atmosphere from disappearing out of cave opening into the hard vacuum of space? We never learn. While the rest are distracted, a cat-women touches the female astronaut, leaving a moon mark on her left hand and making her one with the cat-women. Or so they think. When Victor Jory's caveman-like character confronts her, he embraces her and grabs that hand, breaking the hold the cat-women have on her, at least temporarily. She reveals her love for him while spilling the beans on the cat-women. He does this again later, but caught by the captain, fights with him over her affections. The captain gives up easily, though. No great love there. The cat-women do a mildly sensual dance, with musical accompaniment from some mysterious source, once they have the information they want. Preparation, celebration, pandering, or padding, you decide. The driving force behind the cat-women's desire to leave the moon is the continual loss of atmosphere there, which they say has lead to the necessity of a slow genocide over the centuries. There are only a handful of cat-women left. Adding the fact that only cat-women and giant spiders are still living on the moon, one can guess the gruesome method by which the population has been winnowed.I'm thankful for the lack of exposition on the extremely implausible and impossible in this movie. It often was and still is a real problem with scriptwriting. Not that this movie had a good script. Best to just let those things slide, and keep moving. Enjoy the corny dialog on the way to the moon. Revel in the anachronistic attitudes. Ponder the cat-women's nonsensical plot for world domination. Some would call this movie campy or kitschy. I just call it a lot of fun. Enjoy!

Bwah Hah Hah! If you want to see one of the direct inspirations for the 50's sci-fi parody in AMAZON WOMEN ON THE MOON, then this film is for you.All the hallmarks of low-budget 50's sci-fi cheeze are here: hilariously unconvincing rubber puppet monsters, aliens who speak English with American accents, the least convincing spaceship set EVER (using metal office chairs, just like the ship in AWOTM), matte paintings that look like they were done by a somewhat talented child, spacesuits that are probably beekeepers' outfits, and hilariously dated misogynistic dialog directed at the one female astronaut (seen in many other z-grade flicks, including THE DOOMSDAY MACHINE and SPACE PROBE TAURUS).I did like the look of the sexy female aliens, a sort of a Beatnik meets Goth cocktail waitress in space look. Some of the acting here is hilariously bad, but others are a little better. These are professional actors, but the acting here never rises above the level of barely acceptable.How to rate a film whose only entertainment power comes from laughing at its incompetence? This, friends, is the eternal dilemma of the Badfilm reviewer. What I usually do is split the difference between a 10 (CITIZEN KANE) and a 1 rating (MANOS: THE HANDS OF FATE), which heralds a movie so bad that it also manages to be boring, the one sin which cannot be forgiven. Cat Women on the Moon is boring in spots, but I loved the concept, silly spider puppets and and hilarious dialog so much. I'm going to go with the default rating of 5. Just bad enough it gives some entertainment, but not SO bad you'll be jumping out a window. Fans of 50's sci-fi cheeze should check it out, but more than once? I don't think so. For a much funnier movie with a similar plot, check out QUEEN OF OUTER SPACE with ZsaZsa Gabor. Or, for a movie that DIRECTLY RIPS OFF almost every plot element in this film, only comes up with an even funnier and more incompetent result, check out Richard Cunha's MISSLE TO THE MOON from 1958. That's a real howler, that one.

This movie is really hard to rate. As a "Film", it is a two at best. As Fun, it rates right up there with some of the classic and much more earnest sci-fi flix of the fifties.Even my ten year old son laughed at the science mistakes in the movie, but he liked it despite (or because of) them. The idea that "spacemen" (and a spacewoman, the always interesting Marie Windsor)would bring Cigarettes with them to the moon is wacky - but not as wacky as the fact that, to show the temperature difference between a shaded spot of the moon's surface and a spot in the sun, one of the heroes throws one of the cancer sticks into a sunny spot where it instantly bursts into flame. (For a more complete list of the goofs in this movie, I suggest you see Bill Warren's book: Keep Watching The Skies).I enjoyed it thoroughly, and have seen it many times. Watching Sonny Tufts try to act is worth the price of admission. Victor Jory is also fun to watch trying to act as if this was a good movie, and he struggles earnestly against the script and the premise."Every man a Tiger!"