Cat-Women of the Moon (1953) watch online HD

Thanks to Jeff Joseph of Sabucat Productions, I recently had the pleasure of seeing this film in all of its original polarized 3D glory at the Egyptian theater in Hollywood with 600 of my "closest friends"! ;-) (www.3dfilmfest.com) Sadly, though, while the presentation this time around was flawless, the print was in very poor condition, and it may not get too many more public performances - if ever again - which is a real shame. You see, this is one of those movies that has to be enjoyed in a theater, with a LOT of people, for maximum funness. It might be fun to sit around the living room and laugh at the campy dialogue and bad acting and VERY bad special effects with your friends, but to see it in a theater... well, there is no comparison. Especially when seen in polarized 3D... the fun factor goes up by a factor of at least ten!

If you're in the mood for a bad sci-fi film from the 50's, give this one a try. The more people you have watching it with you, the better. You'll get a real kick out of it, as this movie has some of the funniest lines ever, including my personal favorite, "You're too smart for me, baby... I like 'em stupid." Definitely recommended for a good laugh, and a great time. And if by some off chance you ever have an opportunity to see it in 3D, do not miss it!

This is one of the best. So-bad-it's-great! A cast of stars (including Sonny Tufts, Victor Jory and the delicious Marie Windsor) land on the far side of the moon and discover a race of beautiful women (there not cats, that's just the title.) Oh, yeah, and some giant spiders, too. But enough of that. Any film that has Ms. Windsor in 3-D has got to be tops on any bad sci-fi list.

This is probably the first film of it's kind. No, not camp, but the plot of "male astronauts go to extraterrestrial planet and discover race of sex-starved women dying for company". Invasion of the Star Creatures, Fire Maidens from Outer Space, and Queen of Outer Space all follow in its footprints. There was even a direct remake, Missile to the Moon!

All in all, if you liked Robot Monster, chances are you'll be gaping at your television screen for the next 64 minutes (another great thing about these films - they're extremely short if you don't like them. But if you didn't, you probably wouldn't be reading this.)

What we have here is a good old 50's sci-fi B movie that's a great example of the expression "It's so bad it's good". The conflict here is that when this movie was made, it was meant to be serious stuff. Man breaking the confines of the earth, exploring the moon and encountering hostile alien life forms. It's not exactly how the movie seems today. You have a hard time taking a space ship equipped with lockers, a desk, and old office chairs too seriously. There are all sorts of scientific bloopers in this film. Three men and a woman embark to land and explore the moon. What last minute preparations do you make? Well, naturally the woman has to fix her hair and another astute astronaut is thinking of selling souvenirs when he gets back home. It gets even funnier; they bring along cigarettes and for protection against who knows what, a revolver. The conversations are equally amusing. They sound as if the space explorers were picked up off the streets and asked, hey! you want to go on a trip to the moon? The landscapes and backgrounds are mostly painted but actually they did a pretty good job at that. They're not bad at all. Times have changed though and this film doesn't quite hit the mark that it was once intended to attain. If you try watching this as a serious sci- fi drama, You will be extremely disappointed. You can find faults and pick this movie apart until it is shredded to bits and you would be rightfully so in doing it. I suggest watching it with the understanding that it's a part of sci-fi movie history. View it with an easygoing fun attitude. Look for the blunders. Laugh at the cheapness and corny dialogue. How can you not love a line like, "You're too smart for me, baby, I like em stupid". I mean, come on, it was made in 1953 and the title is "Cat-Women of the Moon" what do you really expect? It's a fun movie. Relax and enjoy it for what it is.

This film was originally released in full stereoscopic format in 1953, and a regular B/W print was released later under the title "Rocket to the Moon". The film is of historic interest as it was one of the first (perhaps the first) of many Sci-Fi movies about space travellers who encounter a "lost" civilization of nubile young women, not only in attractive dresses and perfect coiffures but also speaking perfect English. This theme was so successful that it has been repeatedly followed right up to today when everyone has a much more sophisticated understanding of the realities of space. Historically, it is interesting to compare this film with those of the same genre released more recently such as Femalien or the Emmanuelle in Space series. Over the two generations since Rocket to the Moon was released, films of this genre have gradually changed their intended appeal by becoming primarily skinflicks rather than Sci-Fi thrillers.

It is unfortunate that Hollywood quickly lost interest in the complexity of producing good stereoscopic films (which are most often now featured in specialist theatres such as the IMAX), and instead has followed what I feel has been a largely disasterous attempt to explore the potential of anthropomorphic lenses even though in the majority of cases these have no conceivable artistic contribution to make to the final product. Although produced for polarised projection, Catwomen of the Moon is one of the very few 3D films which has been made available on VHS tape in analglyphic (dual colour) stereographic format. It has also been released as a DVD, but in non-stereographic format. Whilst the analglyphic tape version will remain of interest to a most people interested in the history of the cinema, I find it very hard to understand the choice of this film for release as a regular DVD.

This film was not produced on such a low budget as some of its successors. The view of the rocket itself gives the impression that at a pinch this might be large enough for a small monkey, but for its period it makes a serious attempt to show the need for features such as spacesuits for the crew of the rocket. After their rocket lands on the dark side of the moon the astronauts find a deep cavern where air still exists and where these suits can be dispensed with. Scientific improbability returns when they travel back to the surface wearing casual sports clothes and encounter a fairly normal gravitational pull. More surprisingly (?), the cavern is occupied by giant spiders and a group of nubile catwomen who are threatened with extinction, not by the complete absence of any men but by the gradual loss of their air. Logically they therefore plan to steal the rocket and return to Earth in it. The whole plot is worked out in just over an hour (64 min) of quite easy watching; however the story (plot?) does not have the charm shown by the film Fire Maidens of Outer Space which appeared three years later. This is unfortunately not currently available in any home video format, although in my opinion it provides a more enjoyable example of movie nostalgia than the Catwomen.

Don't believe the detractors. This is great cinema. See Marie Windsor (Always worth the price of admission), Victor Jory as a good guy (with his constant 'I'm a bit constipated,' broken smile) and catch a glimpse of rich boy turned bad boy Sonny Tufts (scion of the Tufts family of Tufts University fame)on the down slide from hero roles of the late 40s. The F/X are dazzling, the ... well, OK. It's, shall we say, not quite up to some of the other sci-fi thrillers of that era, e.g., When Worlds Collide, War of the Worlds, From the Earth to the Moon, Rocket X-9, the Man from Planet X, etc., but it's a lot friendlier. And, the cat ladies dancing are great too. This movie is fun...and Marie Windsor is still a delight to see!

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!"

Obviously Sonny Tufts was really hitting the bottle when he appeared in this film. He was touted as a new star in the 40's but his messed up personal life really did him in and he was reduced to playing in Grade Z movies and barely getting by. In several scenes he loses his train of thought and because of the low budget the scenes were not re-shot. What a hoot but at the same time pathetic.

This is one of those little sci-fi films that were so popular in the 1950s, usually low budget and inept. But if you are a bad film buff, you can't help but love Cat Women. There are some good actors in this film.....Victor Jory (how far he had fallen!); the wonderful Marie Windsor who made any film in which she appeared worth watching; and Douglas Fowley who was a film staple for years. And then there were the Cat Woman, slinking around in leotards and dog collars.

I won't go into the "plot" but suffice to say it was the same as all the other films which involved lost civilizations on distant moons. It is such fun and if you love low budget films with ridiculous special effects, bad acting and dialogue that makes you cringe, see Cat Women of the Moon. It's a treat!!

For several years this movie had the reputation of being one of the worst movies ever made. Now it seems that bad reputation has cooled off since many other worse films have been remembered. Cat-Women Of The Moon is the story of four men (Sonny Tufts, Victor Jory, William Phipps, and Douglas Fowley) and a woman (Marie Windsor) who blast off in a rocketship, and land on the moon. On the moon they encounter large spiders, and the cat-women. The moon no longer has any male inhabitants, and it is learned the cat-women plan on stealing the rocketship to take a few of them back to our planet. The cat-women would then take over the world! The cat-women have telepathic powers to gain information from the male crew members, and make the female crew member a sort of guest cat-woman. The movie has some stuffy dialogue, but a lot of dialogue is hilarious and will bring unintended laughter. The repeated shots of cat-women silhouettes against cave walls becomes humorous, and there's a well known flub in which a cat-woman calls one of the crew members by the wrong name! The "exotic" dance number the cat-women do may also bring laughter. The special effects and large, cave spiders may bring on even more laughter. The acting of the rocketship's crew members is certainly not good, but it is certainly not the worst that can be seen in movies. Victor Jory and Marie Windsor probably do the best where acting is concerned from the crew members. Acting by the cat-women is worse. Most of the cat-women were billed as The Hollywood Cover Girls, which alone should indicate this movie contains a high amount of camp and unintended laughter. Music by Elmer Bernstein is mostly unnoticeable, and when it is noticed it is clearly not his best work. The mental telepathy aspect between the cat-women and the earth woman is interesting. Watching Cat-Women Of The Moon with a friend or in a group may be a laugh riot! How can you not laugh at those sappy, facial close-ups of crew man Doug (William Phipps), and cat-woman Lambda (Susan Morrow) as they fall in love; Marie Windsor's screaming; the way the cave spiders scream while being stabbed and shot; the painting that is supposed to be the city of the moon inhabitants in the distance; etc? Cat-Women Of The Moon can be enjoyed in a low-budget, comic book way, and may bring on a lot of unintentional laughter!

Mission Commander Sonny Tufts and his crew of space explorers brave the perils of a hostile Moon. They are threatened by a giant Moon spider and captured by telepathic lunar Amazons in black tights. A love triangle develops between Sonny, one of the Moon women, and a fellow crew person (Marie Windsor).

Okay, so it's not a great movie, but it was originally filmed in 3-D, and the music is by Elmer Bernstein (who scored both `The Ten Commandments' and `Robot Monster'. What a career!).

The 1958 film `Missile to the Moon' is essentially a remake, complete with the giant spider. The only improvement it makes is to give the girls more colorful costumes.

Just for the record, the other films with all-girl alien worlds are `Queen of Outer Space', `A & C go to Mars', and `Fire Maidens from Outer Space'. The girls in `World Without End' are from Earth, and there are a few men, but they're wimpy compared to the astronauts who show up to romance them.

In the early part of his career, Victor Jory appeared in some great films, starring alongside the likes of James Cagney and Errol Flynn. He even had a prominent role in Gone With the Wind. His co-starring role in Cat-Women of the Moon represents a descent to the depths in a film that resembles an amateur high school production. He must have been desperate. This is about as bad as it gets with a horrendously unimaginative miniature rocket and a plot that makes you wonder why they bothered. The absolute highlight occurs midway through the film when the head Cat Women slaps one of the underlings. The slap misses by some margin despite the sound effect of hand making contact with flesh. This scene is so bad that it has been mimicked by comedy writers ever since. The original print has been remastered for some unknown reason. Whoever made the decision to do that wasted their time.

Bottom of the barrel sci-fi. It's about a manned mission to the moon with three guys and one beautiful woman. You have to love any movie where they land and the first thing the woman does is check her make-up and hair! On the moon they find a race of beautiful women who dress like cats. They treat the men like royalty but secretly plan to steal their rocket, fly to Earth and take over.

It's just bewildering how bad this movie is. The sets are cheap and the special effects are the worst I've ever seen. The "giant" spider was so pathetic I broke out laughing :) Also there's an incredibly fake stabbing and an even worse faked slap. Really rushed ending too. Acting doesn't help. Top billed Sonny Tufts is lousy. Only Marie Windsor gives a good performance. She later admitted this was the only film she was ashamed of...and she was in hundreds of B movies! It's not unwatchable but it's pretty poor. A 1 all the way.

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.

CAT-WOMEN OF THE MOON is a truly terrible movie, but it is so bad and so horribly produced that it is a must-see for bad movie fans. In fact, it was so bad that it was the inspiration for the main plot for AMAZON WOMEN ON THE MOON. However, oddly, the plot idea was actually originally in ABBOTT AND COSTELLO GO TO MARS!

The film begins on board a space ship bound for the moon that is captained by the great Sonny Tufts. In typical schlocky sci-fi fashion, the inside of the ship looks ridiculous--with lots of inappropriate equipment, no zero gravity, etc.. However, the real action didn't begin until the ship landed on the moon--at which point it's painfully obvious to everyone but this brain damaged crew that their female crew member (Marie Windsor) is working for the aliens living on the moon. It seems they have used their superior intellects to steer the ship there--in the hope that they could steal the ship and invade the Earth. Considering there only appears to be about four of these "cat women", such an undertaking does seem a bit silly, but this is a film you best watch without thinking too hard! Eventually, after battling horrible giant spiders suspended from very visible wires as well as watching the cat-women's exotic and seductive dance, the humans are able to escape their imprisonment and return to Earth safely--minus one crew member who was stabbed. How did they manage this? Well, one of the men is heard yelling off screen that he killed the cat-women as you hear gun fire! Wow, talk about sparing no expense in the final showdown!!

This film epitomizes schlocky 50s sci-fi. The plot is childish, the sets silly and the space suits comical--so much that the film turns out to be a great comedy--unintentional, of course. Bad, silly, poorly done in every way--this film is one of the worst films of the decade BUT is also strangely campy and worth watching--especially if you are a bad movie freak like me.

PS--I still have no idea what a cat-woman is. The film didn't explain this at all and I saw nothing feline in the film.

I picked up a copy of this because of its alleged stereoscopic content. Much of the tape had such poor registration that the stereo effect was lost. A couple of scenes were close enough so that one could see a little depth, but not most of them.

In the copy of the Rhino videotape, there was the tape and two sets of anaglyph glasses. For standard color anaglyph presentations, the left filter is red; the right, blue or cyan (or sometimes green). This one has it reversed, and on the glasses it says to use them in the red-right orientation to see this film, and the standard way to see Robot Monster or The Mask. Well, it's cheaper than redoing the film recording, but if they'd done that, they might have avoided the misalignment.

The film story is pretty weak, and rather silly. In the opening scene, the rocket, which looks similar to a radiator hood ornament, is blasting along, and someone at White Sands is trying to contact the ship. The crew starts to recover from ... what? ... the strain of takeoff? ... without responding for the longest time. Eventually, the commander responds with the equivalent of, "We're okay, now shut up." The rest of the crew objects so strongly that he lets each one of them report his or her conditions, but advises them to keep it short.

As has been observed, the command area of the ship employs office furniture. Each crewmember has a locker, like those found at high schools.

When they go to explore the lunar landscape, it's interesting to see that the space suits are of two different designs. How hot the lunar surface is can be seen by dropping a cigarette onto the surface, where it bursts into flame. Pretty good trick for a part of the moon that ostensibly had no atmosphere.

The technical gaffes ... no, make them howlers ... are so great that it propels the film immediately from science fiction into pure fantasy. Children's fantasy at that.

This is not a film to be taken seriously. If you like honest camp, though, you might find it fun.

Talk about déjà vu. I feel like I've seen this movie several times recently. It may be older than either Missile to the Moon, Queen of Outer Space, or Fire Maidens from Outer Space, but I saw those first. So for me, watching Cat-Women of the Moon is like watching what is essentially the same movie for the fourth time. And despite the familiarity and a whole slew of other weaknesses, I found myself enjoying it. The 2.5 IMDb rating seems a bit harsh – especially when you consider the rating for Missile to the Moon. Not only does Missile to the Moon follow almost the exact same plot, but it appears to even reuse some of the props (giant puppet spiders) from Cat-Women of the Moon.

The story – five astronauts blast off for the moon only to meet a race of women whose world is slowly being destroyed. The women (known for some inexplicable reason as Cat-Women in this movie) want to use the astronaut's spaceship to take them to Earth to find a new world to conquer.

Maybe I'm just weird, but I get a kick out of some of the same things that a lot of other comments bang on. Weak set design (metal rolling office chairs with a seat belts used in the "spaceship"), poor special effects (once again, the giant puppet spiders), bad acting (could Sonny Tufts be any worse), and bad science (just watch as a cigarette burns on the moon!) – you'll find them all in Cat-Women of the Moon. But it's this naiveté to the whole thing that I can't help but enjoy. It might not be for everyone, but I'll give it a 6/10 even with all its flaws.

The purpose of this review is not to comment on the artistic quality (or lack thereof) of Cat Women of the Moon in 3-D, from Rhino Home Video. The laughable dialog and cheap production values of Cat Women of the Moon have already been adequately trashed by legions of others before me. I am an aficionado of 3-D movies and I want to comment on the quality of the 3-D effects in this video release of the film. I purchased the video specifically to see the 3-D, since this is one of the few 3-D movies from the nineteen fifties that I did not see during the original theatrical release.

To the best of my knowledge, this is one of only three full-length theatrical 3-D movies from the 1950's that are available on the home video market in the two-color anaglyphic format. The others are Robot Monster, the ultimate classic of bad taste, and The Mask, which only contained 3-D sequences. One might argue that a low budget film and technically inferior stereoscopic photography go hand in hand. This is a logical argument; however, I decided that I had to see this video myself before passing judgement. I expected to see poor 3-D in this video, but I expected to see some 3-D effect. The shock was that there is no viewable 3-D in this video at all! The title of the video should be changed to Cat Women of the Moon NOT in 3-D. This is the sort of presentation that will give you a headache. It is the type of shoddy product that has given 3-D a bad name.

The problem with this video is extreme vertical mis-registration of the left and right images. Stereoscopic viewing can tolerate some horizontal mis-alignment within the limits of eyestrain. However, significant vertical mis-alignment makes it impossible for the brain to fuse the two images. This is especially true in anaglyphic video presentations, where separation of the images is usually not strong. The result is that the 3-D images in this video, when viewed through the provided red and blue glasses, look like a normal 3-D movie when viewed without any glasses. I can't find a single scene where there is a viewable stereoscopic effect. In addition, many of the scenes are totally flat (2-D). In the flat scenes, the anaglyphic colors are not present, indicating that only one of the two views necessary for 3-D is presented. Normally, this would be negative comment; however, the flat scenes are the only tolerable parts of this video, considering that the anaglyphically encoded segments are completely worthless. I do not know if the original film contained these flat segments, or if some of the film has been lost. Considering that the flat and anaglyphic parts are randomly intermixed, I assume that parts of the two original films have either completely deteriorated, or been lost. The only sin that was not committed by those who converted this film to video is the lack of frame synchronization between the left and right views that sometimes plagues 3-D movies. However, considering the alignment problems present in this video, the consistent synchronization is small compensation.

In fairness to the original producers of the film, one cannot evaluate the stereoscopic photography of the film as it was shown in theaters by the quality of this video. According to Amazing 3-D, the excellent book on 3-D by Hal Morgan and Dan Symmes, Cat Women of the Moon was originally shown in theaters using polarized projection. This was probably done from two B&W films in separate, synchronized projectors, the standard technique at that time. To present the film as a video, the two film images had to be color encoded in red and blue/green, and then superimposed during photographic printing, or during the video transfer. It is possible for an excellent 3-D film to be ruined during the process of converting it to the anaglyphic format if care is not taken. The fault is either with Rhino home video, or some third party that made the anaglyphic conversion, and paid no attention to the vertical alignment during the conversion process. Rhino Home Video may argue that this is such a hokey film that it does not matter if the anaglyphic conversion was done properly. I say that no film should be advertised as being in 3-D if it is so poorly converted that there is absolutely no 3-D effect in the finished product. As far as I'm concerned, this is a case of outright and intentional false advertising.

Some people will argue that is it not possible to achieve true stereoscopic 3-D in home video. I can say from personal experience that it is entirely possible to achieve acceptable stereoscopic 3-D in video using the anaglyphic process. The Mask, also from Rhino Home Video proves this. Although the 3-D in The Mask video is not as good as I recall from seeing the film in a theater, it is passable as 3-D. In this case, Rhino did not have to do the anaglyphic conversion, because the original film already contained anaglyphic sequences. I have also seen several full-length B&W films on TV that have been successfully presented in the anaglyphic format. These films include The Mad Magician (with Vincent Price), Inferno, and It Came from Outer Space. As well as a short subject, Spooks, featuring the Three Stooges. These films reproduce in 3-D very well on a properly adjusted TV set, and are almost as good as the theatrical presentations. I don't understand why these technically superior conversions are not available on home video.

This is the movie where Jory and Marie Windsor are in love; he's in very fine shape, though perhaps just a bit put off by the undignified slapdash, yet at ease.

At 1st, I believed they supposed that the Moon had atmosphere and gravity, since the crew members could hear each other and were walking normally, there was the cigarette gimmick; but then it turns out they're surprised there's oxygen, atmosphere and gravity. Later, there's a scene with the sky with clouds.

The architecture on the Moon is ancient European, and Asian.

But the movie, meant occasionally humorous, is, despite three actors, in the hands of the cretins. And these cretins are worse than indifferent: they are wrong, and their minds are sleazy. The storyline has two ideas which could have worked: one is generic (the fight with the spiders), and it failed; the other one, the objects (the cigarettes, the gun, the box). Women are cats because they are sneaky. They also look like cabaret fetishist fantasies. The result of the travel to the Moon is that the Terrestrials loose the engineer, but murder all the Moon survivors. The story ends with the swiping out of the last Moon people. Greed and altruism alike lead to death. The matter of this tale is sleaze.

'Cat-Women …' is watchable, because it's moderately amusing, the actors save it (though Marie Windsor seemed to go with the bombast of the thing); the scenes in the Moon city are the less appealing. The producers tried to bluff it somehow, giving clumsiness as nonchalance. It's a bombastic movie, deprived of any emotion, an outing of uninspired hacks; and there's shamelessness in this absence of any affection or care for their movie. There's no thrill, no dramatic drive, no suspense whatsoever. The fact that the scenes, the dialogs are contrived has nothing to do with the budget. It's badly scripted and badly directed (but nicely acted and scored): the encounter with the giant spiders didn't need to look so ridiculous, and the cat-women themselves, and the seductions, and the ciphered dance. Because there are some silly inadvertence, some wish to attribute most of the movie to thoughtlessness; but this is to misinterpret the movie, which actually indulges in goofiness, in word-plays, etc.. Some things aren't errors, but meant to be amusing (the cigarettes, the gun and the box, which are funny, good for characterization (the copilot is brave and combative, the woman is addicted, unreliable, manipulated, vulnerable, the 3rd person is greedy and selfish), and later useful (the gimmick with the cigarette, the gun-play); Jory anxious to find out whom does Marie Windsor love). This might not be top humor, but shouldn't all be attributed to carelessness and stupidity.

Jory has a love scene with Marie Windsor.

It's also a cautionary tale. Tufts and the engineer fall prey to the crassest seduction, the pilot is practically degraded by his misconduct; and the one who wishes to be shown the golden cave is the most severely punished.

'I'll show you the cave of gold.'

Howlingly bad dialogue dominates this obviously intentionally badly made science fiction film about, as the title says, cat women on the moon.with the crew of astronauts lead by Sonny Tufts, Victor Jory, and Marie Windsor, the mission to the moon is about as intelligent as the children's nursery rhyme about the cow who jumped over it. While there are certainly no dish running around with a spoon,the dishes who run around desperate for men look like something that popped out of the air ducts on the Starship Enterprise.as juvenile as the times when Abbott and Costello and the Three Stooges took separate trips to outer space, this up there with some of the worst films ever made. There is a reason why Sonny Tufts is considered one of the worst actors of all time, and his performance here doesn't betray that reputation. Windsor, with her cat like eyes, could have played the leader of the cat women, who plays an Earthling instead. Here she looks like a poor man's Loretta Young, although her hairstyle is closer to June Allyson. The presence of giant spiders bring on laughter, not fear, and I was grateful that I wasn't sipping anything at the time.

The first shot of the cat women is them actually stroking Windsors legs, giving indications that they've made do without men in other ways. Then there are the dwellings of the cat women, replica of ancient cities and looking like something you'd find in a biblical epic rather than in the outer space science fiction movie. what is truly amazing in this film is the fact that the actors actually speak their lines seriously, not even cracking the slightest grin which it would be very difficult for me considering how blame the majority of the dialogue was.so if you are in the mood for something so thoroughly beyond silly, come join the cat women on the moon. This just seems to get more deliberately bad as the film goes on as the moon women get more crazy. One scene involving a stabbing is so phony that I had to rewind it several times to confirm what I had just seen. The writers may have had craters in their head, but I will give them credit for one thing; it is still a slight notch above plan 9 from outer space.

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.

"Cat-Women Of The Moon" is an unusual entry in the "male explores find a civilization with women but no men" for a couple of reasons. One is that one of the explorers is a woman, and the other is that it was filmed in 3-D. But nothing much is done with those two bursts of originality - the woman explorer could have been a male with very little rewriting, and there is almost no effort made to exploit the 3-D filming process. (I'm not asking to be hit in the face every few seconds, but some carefully composed shots would have been nice.)

The lazy efforts on those parts can be felt in other parts of the movies. Oh, there are a few things that made me laugh - the interior of the moon rocket, wobbily scenery, people shouting when in their spacesuits, and the "stabbing" scene. But most of the movie is kind of dull. It takes about 2/3 of the movie before the explorers directly interact with the cat women, and before that point (and afterwards), there is talk talk talk, little of which is amusing. I was kind of glad that the movie lasted just barely over an hour, but the ending is so sudden, so "That's it?!?" that part of me wished they went on a little longer to end things properly.

If you want to see a funny example of this genre, I suggest you watch "Queen Of Outer Space".

One might remember the parody "Amazon Women on the Moon". It made fun of all those 1950's films where astronauts travel to a body in the solar system and discover a race of women with no men (and therefore, no standards, to a 1950's Sci-Fi geek, a true paradise.)

This was the first such film, and many of the elements Amazon did for fun were originated here. The moon with a breathable atmosphere, a crewman looking for a way to satisfy his greed only to lead to his demise. Fem-aliens who do exotic group dances like showgirls for no apparent reason. (Incidently, it is interesting in how standards for erotic have changed. these gals are much chunkier in the hips and smaller in the bosoms than their contemporary counterparts.)

This film is cheesy fun, and if you approach it from that point of view, you can enjoy it.

True, good Science Fiction was being made about this time, like "The Day the Earth Stood Still" and "War of the Worlds". But sometimes the cheese stands alone.

Things begin going downhill at break-neck speed about the time our hero is forced to wrestle what is obviously a giant rubber spider. While the idea that the dark side of the moon resembles Hugh Heffner's penthouse is appealing, this is one of those movies, made in the early 50s, that made an evening at home in front of the TV seem like a better choice. The FX, such as they are, are transparent, almost as much as the acting. I suppose this could be a 'good watch' if one wanted to see what we had out there during that time frame. This picture was released both in 3D and 'flat' simultaeneously, so Dad took us to see it twice, so we could 'compare.' I think he really just had a thing for the lovely Ms. Windsor.

Cat-Women of the Moon (1953)

** (out of 4)

Five astronauts (four men and a woman) land on the moon only to discover that there's oxygen on the thing but not only that but there's some "cat women" who want to steal their ship and go to Earth. For every masterpiece like The Day the Earth Stood Still you had fifty movies like this one and if you have a sense of humor towards bad films then you should enjoy this one. The film runs a very short 63-minutes and it's the type of film where you keep waiting for something to happen and it never does. I'm really not sure what the idea behind this film was other than to cash in on the sci-fi genre as the screenplay offers up nothing. I guess the so-called story deals with the cat women wanting to get back home but none of this really takes place until ten minutes to go and everything leading up to that point is just the astronauts walking around being amazed at what they see. There are some really campy moments including one sequence where the group walks into a cave only to be attacked by giant spiders on strings. Other campy moments include the cat women trying to seduce the men as well as a laughable scene where the astronauts learn that there is oxygen on the moon. Another funny thing is that there are several instances where the astronauts come off so stupid you really have to wonder if they were just homeless men on the street who were picked up and sent on a space mission. Another error happens in the gold cave when the actress accidentally calls the character she's talking to under the actors name. Heck, even future Oscar winner Elmer Bernstein did the score here. If you hate low budget, bad films then you'll hate this one as well but if you like bad movies then there's enough here to make this one "so bad it's good".

After watching Cat-Women Of The Moon I am convinced that Victor Jory signed for this film so that for once he gets the girl so to speak. The girl is Marie Windsor and she and Jory are part of an expedition of five that are going to the moon.

Armstrong and Aldrin never found anything like what Jory, Windsor, Sonny Tufts, Williams Phipps and Douglas Fowley found. In the caves beneath the surface and just inside the dark side is an Amazonian civilization who haven't seen men in hundreds of years. Despite the obvious things they're missing the women have a high degree of civilization developed and they can communicate with Windsor telepathically which they've been doing even while she was on earth.

Marie is doing her usual thing that she does in all the films she was featured in on earth, lead the men to their doom. The women plan to steal this first spaceship and return to earth to conquer. Their underground atmosphere is petering out and they need air as well as what men can provide.

The only thing of note about this silly film is that it was shot in 3-D and got a bit of box office for that reason. Otherwise it's one hoot of a camp science fiction classic.