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Tonight's Feature: AMAZON WOMEN ON THE MOON

© Elizabeth Burton

Should you find yourself wide awake in the wee hours of the morning these days and there's nothing on your video shelf that appeals, the viewing selections on the tube are fairly consistent. You have talk shows of a more or less entertaining variety and you have reruns of syndicated TV series. On some cable channels, your only choice may be mind-numbing infomercials.

There was a time, however, when those dark hours before dawn gave access to a wide variety of really dreadful B-movies, many of them SF. They were chopped into mincemeat to make room for commercials that were often more entertaining than the film, albeit unintentionally.

This era of TV schlock is hilariously rendered in a movie written by Michael Barrie and Jim Mulholland, Amazon Women on the Moon. It is loaded with sophomoric in-jokes and silliness and that's what makes it a movie I make a point of seeing again at least once a year.

Amazon Women's premise is that you're watching some local TV channel in those wee hours I mentioned. Their feature presentation is the eponymous SF movie, variously alleged to have been made in 1953, 1954 and 1957.

But before you even get that far, Arsenio Hall gets trashed in a John Landis-directed Yuppie's nightmare called "Mondo Condo," in which he is on the receiving end of a residential version of Murphy's Law. That opening sets the tone for the rest of the movie, a series of vignettes interspersed with "scenes" from the "movie," a marvelously funny satire of every space-flight flick ever made starring Steve Forrest, Robert Colbert, Joey Travolta and a monkey. It also features a beautiful dead-pan appearance by "Forrie"--SF fan extraordinaire Forrest J. Ackerman.

Indeed, this movie is full of familiar faces doing totally ridiculous things: Ralph Bellamy, Michelle Pfeiffer, Carrie Fisher, Robert Picardo, Steve Guttenberg, Rosanna Arquette, Griffin Dunne, Kelly Preston. Joe Dante directs a segment titled "Roast Your Loved One," in which a schmuck named Harvey Pitkin gets a roast ala Dean Martin instead of a funeral. Steve Allen, Henny Youngman, Charlie Callas, Rip Taylor and Slappy White spend ten minutes doing dead jokes as they lead up to the guest of honor--Pitkin's wife. If I go, I want to go like Harvey.

Then there's "Bullshit or Not," also directed by Dante, where a stone-visaged Henry Darrow posits the theorty that Jack the Ripper was, in fact, the Loch Ness Monster--and offers a "re-enactment." Or B.B. King selling an album of Muzak sung by a smirking Don "No Soul" Simmons (David Allan Grier) to raise money for an organization to help black people who lack soul.

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