After enjoying last weeks FTW pick, The Phoenix Project, which was a pleasant surprise, my attention this week returns to the main project; working my way through the list of movies considered to be the worst ever made. The last time we were here, I subjected myself to Robot Monster; a movie that fell at almost every conceivable hurdle and featured the most meaningless, needless, and pointless romantic moment I think I've ever witnessed in any visual presentation ever. I'll be honest with you, it wasn't insultingly bad, but in terms of cinematic production, I'm not sure you can get any worse than Robot Monster. But this week's contender for the title; Fire Maidens from Outer Space looks, potentially like it could be even worse. Time to tick this one off the list I guess?
Luther Blair (Anthony Dexter) rocks up at "London Airport" fresh from New York amid much hubbub over the discovery of Jupiter's 13th moon, a potentially Earth-like moon, and already 6 minutes in I feel like we are padding for time here which is never a good sign for your movie... as a good 2 and half minutes is spent watching the Professors Secretary walk down some stairs, take a message and then walk back whilst Blair looks at her like he wants to savage her tits off and the pair make sexist jokes. God I love hate the fifties... anyway back to the movie. Assembling a team of five with; Captain Larson (Paul Carpenter), Dr. Higgins (Sydney Taffer), Professor Sydney Stanhope (Harry Fowler) and... Anderson, just Anderson I presume (Rodney Diak), Expedition 13 takes off for Jupiter's 13th moon! They never give it a name... and we'll ignore the fact they didn't bother with spacesuits and that they can light cigarettes in space... So. After surviving an immediate and extremely repetitive pattern meteor shower, over the course of 3 weeks the team make their way to the moon (beating the 2005 Juno Probe by a week and 4 years...) before arriving and discovering it to be practically identical to Earth. What are the chances? Descending from their rocket the team run around in some fields for a couple of minutes, because padding, before then getting involved in saving Hestia (Susan Shaw), from some kind of weird creatureman thing and then proceeding to comment on her attractiveness, because fifties. Following Hestia to safety, our horny fivesome, are taken to... New Atlantis... what is it with fifties films and the obsession with Atlantis?! Where Blair and Larson are introduced to Prasus (Owen Berry), the last male survivor of Atlantis, and father to Hestia - Princess of Atlantis, who immediately consigns Hestia as property to Blair... because fifties. He then introduces his other scantily clad daughters and they all have a little dance, whilst Blair and Larson pass out from drinking too much wine after being in space for 3 weeks I guess. Back outside and Higgins, Stanhope and Anderson vis a vis Blair's orders make their way back to the ship whilst weird creatureman watches them from the bushes... Waking up in the morning after presumably being sexually molested by Hestia whilst he was passed out, Blair learns that Hestia and her sisters are being held prisoner by Prasus and that they are descendants from Earth Atlantis, before they have a little kiss and Blair looks like the cat the got the cream. Back at the ship the trio become increasingly itchy that Blair and Larson haven't returned yet and decide to tool up and go looking for them and... and I'm sure I've seen this movie before?... Or at least something that very much rips it off? Maybe an episode of Star Trek, or something but everything is suddenly suspiciously similar to me... back in the Palace, Prasus states that Blair and his team will help them to destroy the creature; presumably the strange thing lurking around outside and again attempts to drug Blair with wine, but when his back is turned Hestia switches the drinks and as Prasus passes out the pair scurry off together. Outside the trio tussle with the creatureman briefly, but that's enough of that because Blair and Hestia have to have a romantic moment and plot their escape, whilst back outside the trio make their way to the walls of the palace and plot a way to get inside. Meanwhile inside, the other girls cotton on to Hestia's plan and, remaining loyal to Prasus, take her prisoner with Duessa (Jacqueline Curtis), the eldest of the girls, pledging to sacrifice her to the God of Sun in the morning, but that gets interrupted when a gang of girls bring the trio in from outside into the chamber, seemingly captured off screen, then scamper off to grab Blair and Larson. Back in his chamber, Blair discovers a way to escape and freeing Larson whilst the girls dash around looking for them, but failing, they decide to press on with the execution anyway and Duessa has a dance whilst the others are 'forced' to watch. Prasus awakes and making his way into the garden, is attacked by the creatureman, presumably killed, and the creature goes on to interrupt the execution, swatting Duessa aside like a fly, but not before Blair and Larson burst in shooting and throwing gas grenades at the creature whilst Stanhope looks on from the side with a bemused look on his face... eventually the creature sort of falls into a fire, and suddenly the girls all like the men now. Blair unties Hestia and they all escape the palace. Learning that Prasus is dead, the girls make Hestia Queen of Atlantis, but she pledges to go to Earth with Blair and says she will return. The girls protest, promised husbands by Prasus, and the crew of 5 promise to return to give the girls a good boning on a regular, and everybody lives, happily, hornily, ever after.
Well, I mean, objectively, this wasn't as bad as Robot Monster. In that it had a plot that made sense. And the creature, despite being shot mostly in silhouette the whole movie, actually looked like a creature and not somebody in two different outfits. But this wasn't really much of an actual movie to be honest. It was more of an upskirt soft porn with a story line. Or an advert. For cigarettes.
Terrible special effects. Terrible. Even for a film shot in the fifties, the sequences with the rocket taking off and landing were awful. The so-called landing was a complete joke. They land absolutely perfectly, so softly that none of the characters even feel a jolt. Bananas. And I don't know what kind of guns they were using but they certainly gave off quite a lot of smoke. The creature looked fucking weird as well. Like an horrendous burns victim in a black leotard. Minimal effort. But at least there was a suggestion, an experience, of some kind of effort shown. I can't fault that I guess...
Look, this whole movie is about one thing: women in very short skirts. All the dancing scenes are like, ballet or ballroom dancing designed to make the skirts ride high so you get a flash. Everything else in this film; the five "space travellers", the plot, the whole Atlantis sub-tense is supplementary to the fact that they wanted a movie with scantily clad ladies in it flashing their undergarments. It's essentially softcore porn, nowhere near on level with say, Invasion of the Bee Girls, which is a similar situation, but that's it. Everything else is structured around that one underlying foundation: girls dancing suggestively in suggestive outfits.
And to that end, we have 1 hour 20 minutes of movie with more padding than a mattress factory, and thinly veiled storyline about the girls being descendants from Earth Atlantis, and there being a rushed sacrifice at the end to give Hestia reason to leave. There's a few instances where I picked up on some footage recycling going on, and I swear "mission control" is just the same shot, same sequence, over and over again but with different audio overdubbed. Speaking of overdub, there is this very obvious moment where Higgins asks Blair if he can borrow the "shaver" and it's so obvious that the word "shaver" is dubbed over whatever Higgins actually says. Like it's not even Sydney Taffer pronouncing it, I swear it's Anthony Dexter! It was so painfully obviously noticeable.
Let's not even get started on the acting. I hated everybody. Even Blair. Everyone was so stereotypically fifties male. And it was like they hadn't seen a women in 10 years. There's so much sexual lust coming from these characters it was borderline rapey. Everyone was like an overgrown schoolboy and it got embarrassing to watch sometimes. But when they weren't doing that, they had to pretend to be astronauts exploring an alien world, and they were fucking abysmal at that, so maybe it's best they just stuck to lusting after women...
These absolute movie crippling issues aside, for what it's worth I thought the cinematography was acceptable enough, and it had it's impressive moments, particularly the shot where they first descend from the ship and the shots of the girls in the sacrificial chamber, they were pretty impressive. And casting the creature in silhouette so as to obscure how horrendous the special effects were couldn't have been easy, so I can appreciate that. The soundtrack as well, whilst basic and stereotypically fifties black and white, was adequate enough, although they used this one song that played almost every time Hestia and Blair hooked up and it got a bit annoying by like, the forth time.
There is very little to take away from this movie. Very little. But I had this real nagging feeling about 50 minutes in that I'd seen this before and I knew how it was going to end, and like genuinely, not just that the movie was predictable, although... it was... but I felt sure I'd seen it before and I'm 90% certain that it was recycled almost shot for shot in a future episode of Star Trek: Next Generation so I'm now, annoyingly, going to have to go and find out if that's true or not, I'll keep you posted, but uh, back to the movie, so uh yeah, not much to take away from this one really, but it at least had some semblance of a storyline and if nothing else, Susan Shaw is at least pleasant to look at which is 70% the point of this movie, and even accounting for the thinly veiled plot, the underlying titillating purpose of the movie, the... questionable acting by the five "astronauts", this wasn't Hercules in New York territory bad, and it was at least a completed movie from start to finish, bettering Robot Monster, so it scrapes a star but anything beyond that would just be too generous to be honest. 1 out of 5.
