| The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review |
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CAT WOMEN OF THE MOON
Rating: 
USA. 1953.
Director – Arthur Hilton, Screenplay – Roy Hamilton, Story/Producers – Jack Rabin & Al Zimbalist, Photography (b&w) – William Whitley, Music – Elmer Bernstein, Special Effects – Rabin, Zimbalist, Irving Block & Wah Chang, Makeup – Harry Thomas, Art Direction – William Glasgow. Production Company – 2-M Productions/Astor.
Cast:
Sonny Tufts (Laird Grainger), Marie Windsor (Helen Salenger), Victor Jory (Kip Reisner), Douglas Fowley (Walter Wallace), Bill Phipps (Doug Smith), Susan Morrow (Lambda), Carol Brewster (Alpha), Susan Alexander (Zeta)
Plot: A rocket expedition under the command of Laird Granger makes a landing on the dark side of the Moon. Navigator Helen Salenger guides them to a cave. There they find a world inhabited by cat women who have eliminated all the men of their species. The cat women reveal that they sent telepathic messages to Helen to draw the expedition to them so that they can commander the spaceship and return to Earth to liberate women there. To do so the cat women must seduce the secrets of how to operate the rocket away from the men.
Cat Women of the Moon is regarded as one of the classically awful science-fiction films of the 1950s and is frequently mentioned in the same breath as the likes of Robot Monster (1953), Attack of the 50 Foot Woman (1958) and Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959). Although in seeing it, it seems more dull than it ever really does awful. Its effects are cheap but mostly passable – the Moon’s surface consists of several limited but adequately convincing painted backdrops and the model rocket shots are okay. On the other hand the wires can be seen on the giant spider and there is one hilarious shot where the Moon outside the rocketship window is seen as a topographical map of the Moon replete with meridian lines. The sets are not much better – most amusingly the Cat Women’s temple on the Moon appears to be a set rehashed from a higher-budgeted historical feature, even down to the lace curtains. The film also contains some of the least convincing fights ever conducted on screen – you can clearly see the punches not even connecting. The film’s 70 minutes are somewhat of a stretch to get through.
Perhaps the worst thing about Cat Women of the Moon is not necessarily any of the effects but rather Sonny Tufts. Sonny Tufts, a non-star of 1940s wartime romances and Westerns, looks exactly like someone has taken a Western actor and placed them in a science-fiction film. He moves through with the macho stolidity of a John Wayne, even the same bowlegged stance. One expects that at any moment he is likely to pull out a six-gun and really sort the Cat Women out.
Cat Women of the Moon falls into one of the peculiarly 1950s brand of outer space sex fantasies, which also include the likes of Abbott and Costello Go to Mars (1953), Devil Girl from Mars (1954), Fire Maidens from Outer Space (1956), Queen of Outer Space (1958), Attack of the 50 Foot Woman and The Astounding She-Monster (1958). These films have a fascinating dual edge to them. On one hand Cat Women of the Moon is about finding a world of ethereal, mysterious, alluring virgin queens tame for the conquering; on the other hand they embody all the fragile conservative fears of the era’s male chauvinism – the fear of women gaining freedom and independence. In almost all cases these films equate the women having dispensed with men with their having become coldly superior. One must remember that these films were made just after World War II where women had found themselves inadvertently forced to take over jobs in traditional male service industries and in so doing gaining a whole lot more freedom than they were previously accustomed to. These films operate as lessons for men to teach women the value of traditional subservience, of letting them recover their emotions by turning away from this cold-hearted superiority that lets them think they can run things on their own – with those who don’t learn such lessons being killed off.
Cat Women of the Moon was remade as Missile to the Moon (1959).
Copyright Richard Scheib 1996
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