Cat-Women of the Moon

"Arthur Hilton's 1953 Cat-Women of the Moon is arguably the worst of the screen's space-travel stories of the early '50s, though some of the actors in it tried hard to make it better than it is. Sonny Tufts, a failed leading man of the 1940s, is nominally the star, but he looks rather pathetic through most of this film. The movie is actually carried by the excellent Victor Jory as the co-pilot, and to a lesser degree, by Marie Windsor and Douglas Fowley (who had played a major role in Singin' in the Rain the previous year) as the conniving member of the crew who comes to no good end. Not even Laurence Olivier and Dame Judith Anderson, however, could carry the weight of a space-travel story in which the crew sits on ordinary office desk chairs (on casters) and stores their gear in gym lockers in the crew area. The lunar landscape paintings are good enough, but they're about the only special effects that are special in any way in this delightful mess of a movie, which was remade (in cheesy-looking color) as Amazon Women on the Moon in the Universal feature of that title. Cat-Women of the Moon, incidentally, was remade as the even cheaper but funnier Missile to the Moon in 1958, which is also available from Image Entertainment. The DVD is transferred off of extraordinarily sharp film elements. Alas, the movie doesn't seem to exist intact in 3-D, the way it was originally released, so we have to content ourselves with the 2-D version. It's a complete hoot, made even funnier by the fact that the five-day shooting schedule didn't allow time to get the entire script on film -- so the makers simply tore out the pages. The clarity merely enhances the cheesiness of most of the special effects (apart from those backdrops by Chesley Bonestell); it also gives about the best showcase ever to the score, written by a young Elmer Bernstein -- not that it bears any resemblance to his more successful and famous work of the late '50s. The movie is divided into a dozen chapters, and the original trailer -- which is pretty funny in its own terms -- is included as a bonus. The menu pops up automatically on start-up."