Cat-Women of the Moon

"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".

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!

It says so much about the production that an early scene in which a character ascends a ladder is capped off by the actor hitting his head on the ceiling of a chamber in the spaceship - at which point the ceiling very obviously moves. The film is easily dated: black and white photography, meager practical or special effects and props, characters and dialogue written from a male-centric perspective on gender, and so on. 'Cat-women of the moon' is direly ham-handed, as one would surely expect of a genre picture from the 1950s. Still, if you can overlook the indelicacies of the timeframe, this isn't half bad.

The set design is actually quite fine, and I appreciate the consideration for details like hair, makeup, and costume design. Though coerced into a certain overtness by the writing and direction, I think the assembled actors give performances that are quite suitable. It's noteworthy that celebrated film composer Elmer Bernstein wrote the score for this slice of cinematic tomfoolery, one of his earliest credits in a long and fruitful career. The music undeniably echoes similar sci-fi fare of the era, but - though I admit bias - I think there's a subtlety and cleverness that shows the beginnings of what Bernstein would go on to achieve.

The scene writing and overall narrative are terribly gauche, but not outright terrible; I've borne witness to far worse screenplays. You'll never see me call this "great," however. Because for whatever strength there is in the concept, 'Cat-women of the moon' also creates a distinct dichotomy in which men are heroes, and strong, independent women are villains. But oh, wait, of course the power of love can overcome the influence of evil. Moreover, the climax is written and executed with extreme, curt, unconvincing inauthenticity, and at that, there are no surprises here - the plot is very predictable. Were this movie made in the 70s or later, one could easily imagine more inventive, subversive directions the tale may have taken - but with rare exception, we just weren't going to get that in the 50s.

Not absolutely bad, but not really good, the movie just languishes somewhere in the unremarkable middle. Surprisingly, there's enough here to keep us mildly engaged and amused, but I think it would be a stretch to claim any greater sense of entertainment. There's no reason to seek out 'Cat-women of the moon' (and no, there are no actual felines here), but so long as you can abide dubious writing and the shortcomings of the decade's technical craft, there are worse ways to spend an hour.

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.

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.