Three astronauts, on a routine trip to a space station, are knocked off course onto the planet Venus when the space station is destroyed by a mysterious laser beam. The astronauts discover, to their delight, that the planet is populated only by women and ruled by the masked Queen Yllana. It turns out that Venus was invovled in an interplanetary war which devestated the planet, and afterwards Yllana led a revolution where she not only took over the planet, but put all the men in a prison on another planet. Believing that the three astronauts are spies gathering information for an invasion from Earth, Yllana plans to use the same weapon that she used to destroy the space station. Earth's only hope for survival lies in the hands of the three astronauts and a motley rebellion lead by the sultry scientist Telleah...

I've said before that Catwomen of the Moon and its remake Missile To The Moon were both embodiements of the kind of cheesy sci-fi they made in the 50s. I was wrong. Nothing can possibly embody that era of sci-fi cinema-and, actually, the American 50's itself-better than this little flick which can be easily considered as one of the biggest inspirations for the classic spoof/sketch comedy Amazon Women on the Moon.

Really, though, this movie requires no satire. It makes fun of itself well enough. Besides what you'd normally expect-like bad acting, slow-budget set design, etc.-you also have tons of whacky pseudo-science, mostly coming out of the mouth of one of our heroes, Prof. Konrad. After the crew gets stranded on Venus and debates their next move, Konrad determines that the air is safe to breathe because, "This planet's gravity is so close to Earth it stands to reason that the atmosphere would be similar as well." OK, I'm not an astronomer, and I never got anything higher than a C in Physics, but, even assuming that Venus does have a similar gravitational pull to Earth's (which, if my memory serves me right, it doesn't), what the hell does that have to do with its atmosphere? In another scene displaying the brilliance of the human intellectual elite, our man Konrad ponders, "Is this a dead planet?" while standing in the middle of a freaking exotic jungle.

As if Konrad's scientific wisdom wasn't enough, you also have Lt. Larry's boundless respect for the fairer sex. I watched this film with my friend Jen, and it took a suprisingly long time before she wished a horrible, agonizing death upon Larry (a death which, unfortunately, was never delivered). She sat through Larry's frequent scoffing of the Venusians, even his outraged statement at the hostility of Queen Yllana's gaurds, "Why don't you girls knock off the Gestapo stuff and be a little friendly?" Like a brave trooper, she never flinched at his overuse of the word "dolls" or his overall lewdness. However, when Queen Yllata reveals the weapon that destroyed the space station and would destroy the Earth, Larry quips, "Oh, come on now, how can women invent a gizmo like that?" My friend Jen glared at the set for a while, smiled sadly, and said, "OK, now I'm offended." It says a lot about Jen that the breaking point for her should be Larry's questioning of a female's ability to produce weapons of mass destruction, but I digress.

The two central female characters are Zsa Zsa Gabor, who plays the secret leader of the resistance, Telleah, against Yllana, and Laurie Michell, who plays the paranoid tyrant Yllata. As you might expect, Telleah quickly falls in puppy love with the astronauts' leader, Neal Patterson, while Yllata "hates all men" for causing the horrendous scarring of her face which occured during a war. The fact that Yllata's attempt to seduce Neal is successful until Neal sees Yllata's true face shows that Yllata's hatred may be more than just a little bit justified. It's interesting to note that, despite the misogynistic nature of the film, these two women come across (at times, but definitely not when either are drooling over our hero Neal) as more complex and even more resourceful characters than the men. It's Telleah, and not Neal, that usually thinks up ways to save the men from Yllata and her soldiers.

While Queen from Outer Space may not sit on many people's list of classic sci-fi, its rarely, if ever, boring (which, in my humble opinion, puts it far ahead of quite a bit of the stuff you'll find among so-called "classic" sci-fi.) Give it a try, at least for the sake of seeing what its like to see a movie in pre-P.C times.

Choice Quotes:

"Apparently this is a civilization without sex."
"You call that civilization?"

-Prof. Konrad and Larry