FANTASIA OBSCURA: The First Beauty Queens on the Moon!
There are some fantasy, science fiction, and horror films that not every fan has caught. Not every film ever made has been seen by the audience that lives for such fare. Some of these deserve another look, because sometimes not every film should remain obscure.
Sometimes, though, you should just pass on reheated leftovers…
Missile to the Moon (1958)
Distributed by: Astor Pictures
Directed by: Richard Cunha
In 1953, Astor Pictures released a cult classic that was embraced by lovers of cheesy cinema, Cat-Women of the Moon:
The film found love among people who were into so-bad-it’s-good movies, and played roles in the legends of such music acts as Pat Benatar, Is It Man Or Astro-Man?, and Shakespeare’s Sister. It never garnered or deserved much respect, but enough folks saw it and could not forget un-see it that it became a touchstone for that decade, a point that would help start a number of conversations, some of which were actually good.
So of course, a few years on, when Astor needed another hit to distribute to theaters, they went and remade the film…
Our second trip to the poisoned well begins out in the desert, where Sheriff Cramer (Lee Roberts) calls in to HQ. He’s not having much luck looking for two escaped convicts who broke out and are on the run, and he decides to try his luck at the Dayton Compound.
We get there before the Sheriff does, where we watch Steve Dayton (Richard Travis) as he receives Colonel Wickers (Henry Hunter) while Steve’s associate, Dirk Green (Michael Whalen), looks on unhappily. Wickers is there to federalize the rocket project that Dayton and Green have been working on; he’s especially smitten by the use of solar energy for the power supply, complimenting Green, who doesn’t want to hand over his rocket to the feds. Dayton’s a bit more sanguine about it, especially as his fiancé June Saxton (Cathy Downs) believes that with the government taking over, she’d get Steve to pay a little more attention to her.
Soon, the Sheriff arrives, and Dirk volunteers to help him find his wanted men: Lon (Gary Clarke), the hardened criminal looking at the gas chamber, and Gary (Tommy Cook), the bright kid who made one mistake when he pulled off a robbery for which he was jailed, and a second one when he was talked into helping Lon break out of the joint even though he only had six months to go on his sentence. (Maybe three mistakes if you count his being in this movie…) Both of them are hiding in the rocket, hoping to stay there until the coast is clear.
Dirk Catches them on board however, but surprises them by making them an offer: They crew his ship for a trip to the moon, he’d let them have the rocket to return to Earth in. Not having a lot of options, both boys agree to the bargain, which gets slightly complicated when Steve and June get warned about the impending launch of the rocket, come aboard to investigate, and end up being shanghaied along for the ride.
The five of them speed through the void towards the Moon, though only four of them land. Dirk, after defending June from Lon who was in the middle of committing a Class D felony, gets whacked by loose gear that lands on him during a meteor strike. Before he goes, he hands Steve a medallion as he gives accolades to a “Lido” with his dying breath.
The four survivors soon land, where they encounter creatures made of rock who shamble after them, unrelenting and unaffected by the two guns brought along for the ride.
The rock creatures force the party into a cave, where they find there’s enough oxygen to breathe unaided. They also discover the inhabitants of the moon, gorgeous ladies whom the producers spared no expense in bringing to Hollywood from all over the world:
Yep, from places as exotic and far-off as… Minnesota, and, um, Florida…
So anyways, our not-so-fantastic four end up before their leader, the Lido (K. T. Stevens) whom Dirk was going on about. Ends up that Dirk was actually a moon man himself, perhaps the last male in the place, and the intended for Alpha (Nina Bara in her last feature), who decides that since Dirk didn’t make it to his own wedding, that Steve will do in a pinch. This leads to a catfight between Alpha and June, who gets sent to the giant spider cave as punishment for biting and scratching.
In addition to having such abilities as keeping giant spiders and winning the swimsuit portion of the contest, these moon women also use their psychic mind control powers, which Alpha exhibits through extreme eyebrow sculpting sheer force of her mind. With these abilities, she carries out a coup against the serving Lido, makes Steve give up June for her, and paralyzes Lon and Gary when they get troublesome.
One thing her advanced powers couldn’t do, however, was make this mess of a film work. The script by H. E. Barrie and Vincent Forte takes many of the aspects of Cat-Women of the Moon wholesale, not even bothering to change some of the names of the villains between the two. However, unlike the, “aw, what-the-hell” casualness of the prior film, they try and earnestly offer a plot that attempts to be better grounded than its predecessor, with the whole “spaceship stolen by convicts” wrinkle that tries to be I Am A Fugitive from a Chain Gang in space, while also giving more depth to the space travelers than the predecessor did.
And for all they try, it ends up being a mistake. The premise of the original, about space travelers going to the moon and finding cheesecake intelligent life under the moon’s surface, looks even sillier when you try and ground it in something more realistic. Astor’s efforts to twiddle with the formula, giving us a movie about space exploration that draws in the kids while adding in a matriarchy on the nubile side for the chaperones bringing them to the theater, just could not support itself.
As Cunha was no Arthur Hilton, who made the original work despite itself with actors less earnest than the ones in this film, there was no chance the film would meet its own personal moonshot, saving Astor Pictures. The distributor would hang on for a while after this feature broke them and distribute foreign films, allowing for Astor to do one good deed to make up for this, bringing Fellini’s La Dolce Vita to the US, before disappearing, along with this film.
Missile to the Moon ended up being a wasted effort to save its producers, and could be considered the lowest of the low, a mark of true ineptitude that couldn’t have been worse…
…until the film ended up getting a re-release in a colorized version in 2007, which managed to make the original seem like 2001 by comparison.
And you thought it was bad the second time around…
NEXT TIME: We start making our way back from the moon, taking a few moments rest at a revolting space station…
