CAT-WOMEN OF THE MOON

1953/ Director: Arthur Hilton/ Writers: Al Zimbalist, Jack Rabin

Cast: Sonny Tufts, Victor Jory, Marie Windsor, William Phipps, Douglas Fowley, Carol Brewster, Susan Morrow, Suzanne Alexander

For this double feature I decided to write about two pretty good old time sci-fi flicks that are almost identical in their storylines. I even fear I am going to accidentally muddle the two together if I am not careful and wonder now if just one review for both films would suffice. But there are a couple differences that make these two moon mission films unique from one another. The theme is a familiar one for the 50’s and 60’s. A group of men, with maybe one female in the gang, are stranded somewhere, an island, lost civilization on the far side of a secret mountain or a planet like Venus or even the earth’s moon, and there they encounter an all female race of something similar to Amazons. The race may or may not be dying off and what men there are, if any, are kept as slaves and the occasional stud service. Some similar films would be Abbot and Costello Go To Mars (they actually went to Venus in the film) Invasion of the Star Creatures, The wild Women of Wongo, Mesa of Lost Women and quite a few others. The plots are usually the same and some recurring themes would be a young and cocky guy who is fast with the wisecracks who feels he has died and gone to heaven and hits on anything that breathes, a greedy opportunist who wants to pilfer the wealth the Amazon type women horde and a romance between the queen and the group leader. The virility of the male leader awakens feelings in the queen she has not felt in a long time and clouds her better judgment which usually dictates she execute all the outsiders. There is usually a power struggle as well within the female society between the old school led by the queen and a group of usurpers who are simply wanting for the right moment to strike, such as when the queen is weakened by her feelings of love for a big hunk of man. Both Cat-Women of the Moon and Missile to the Moon contains almost all of these essential ingredients and despite being cheese fare they are actually well made and enjoyable movies.

MORE MOON MOVIES HERE >>

EYES WITHOUT A FACE (Les Yeux Sans Visage)

1960/Director: Georges Franju/Writers: Jean Redon, Pierre Boileau

Cast: Pierre Brasseur, Alida Valli, Juliette Mayniel, Edith Scob, François Guérin, Alexandre Rignault, Béatrice Altariba

I cannot say honestly that I have seen much French cinema. I went through a phase almost a couple decades ago where I watched a batch by the big names like Jean-Luc Goddard and Francois Truffaut but other than the Truffaut film The 400 Blows I can’t remember any of that stuff. I do now recall I saw Goddard’s Breathless and it was so much better than the remake with Richard Gere. I guess the only French filmmaker I may follow at all would be Jean Rollin. Well I had read about the film Yeux Sans Visage for a while and had had it on disk for months before I was in the mood one night for some Euro-fare. I did not expect too much going into the film other than maybe some nice black and white cinematography and loads of spacey acting. I am happy to report that I was surprised by this film and it deserves the praises it normally receives in reviews. The cinematography was great as was the score by Maurice Jarre and the acting was down to earth and believable. I mean, for a French film. I am not into the European ‘existential’ school of depressed method acting. For example like Catherine Deneuve in Polanksi’s Repulsion. Damn, I can’t finish that film no matter how hard I try. I guess depression is scary. I mean just watch Woody Allen’s Interiors. That’s some scary stuff!

MORE EYES WITHOUT A FACE HERE >>

The only movie from this assortment of posters I have actually seen is the Takashi Miike film Imprint which I reviewed way back in the early days of the Café. Technically it is not even really an actual Asian film as it was made for the English language Showtime series Masters of Horror. But I love the design and like Miike’s work in a general way and a poster showing a Japanese girl with pins jammed through her face is about as Asian as you can get. I love the artwork on these posters. Even on the cheesy schoolgirl vs. zombie stuff from Japan. It can truly be said that in Asian film the posters are typically much better than the actual movie. I am not a fan, for example, of the technically well made South Korean schoolgirl/ghost films that are so popular here in China with students. But the poster art is usually great and spooky. I just don’t see what is scary about a ghostly young girl or child staring through its hair at you but it sends people up the walls here. I have seen my fair share of modern Asian horror (Japanese horror in particular) and the reason I watch the stuff is I am lured in by the promising poster art. The Japanese and South Korean posters are simply nice looking pieces or art and make great desktop wallpapers. Just hope a day comes when most of the films can half way live up to the promises these eerie and haunting posters make.

SEE MORE CREEPY ASIAN POSTERS HERE >>

A while back I uploaded and posted the entire album for the obscure but great rock opera album Flash Fearless vs the Zorg Women Parts 5 & 6 which featured people like Alice Cooper, John Entwistle, Elkie Brooks and Jim Dandy. The album was a spoof of sorts of the old Buck Rodgers and Flash Gordon comic strips with an overt sexual theme running through it. A Uranium Café reader, Keith Firman, was generous enough to take the time and energy to share the comic book that came with some releases of the album. The Chrysalis releases I had owned in a couple different version never had a comic book on in the inside. The scans were pretty good but some of the text is a little blurry as I had to resize the files a bit. Sorry. It was the best I could do. The panels where the text is super tiny actually are showing the song lyrics. Should not effect any story continuity.This thing is really hard to come across and I have not yet seen scans of it online. If you are not familiar with the album check it out free here at the Café and maybe the Rapidshare on the post link is still good if you want to download all of it. Again, thanks to Uraniumphile Keith for these. I do not get many comments here at the Café but what I lack in quantity I make up for in quality from my dedicated readers.

SEE THE ENTIRE FLASH FEARLESS COMIC BOOK HERE >>

Myron Fass was to magazine publishing what Ron Ormond and Al Adamson were to film making, only consistently lacking their sometimes dubious scruples and ethics. His best remembered for his wild assortment of magazines published from the 60’s to 70’s by the company called Countrywide Publications that he partnered with Stanley R. Harris. Harris would leave the partner ship after he was beaten to a pulp for some reason by Fass and would go on to form Harris Publishing who would purchase dwindling Warren assets and then later revive some of the Warren titles such as Vampirella. If you are of the middle ages as I am and thumbed through magazines during the 70’s you probably picked up more than a couple at any one time while at the stand. He covered everything from unauthorized celebrity mags to UFO and occult books that were hot at the time and even gun magazine and some porn titles. There is no doubt that a man of Fass’s questionable character deserves some place here at the Café but details of his life are few and most likely apocryphal.

Photos are  by Jeff Goodman and are used with his permission.

Originally from Bad Mags

Most of what he published is lost in eternal obscurity but some titles that I definitely remember from way back in my book buying days are the ones published under his Eerie Publishing company name. The name of the company is an obvious rip-off from Warren and the magazines were pale imitations of the finely done Warren books. Many of the stories were pre-code reprints and artist/writer credit is usually lacking. The covers were really the item here. They were graphic and lurid and unlike anything else on the magazine stand at the time. Truth be told I never bought one of these as a young lad. I was into Neil Adams, Barry Windsor Smith, Frank Frazetta and the other gods of comic book art and design. I found the Eerie titles cheap looking and I could tell the inside art was mostly reprints. I now have almost all of the Eerie titles in digital format and actually do not find them so terrible. I am posting a couple complete stories here. One from Tales of Voodoo, Vol. 2 # 2 and  one from Weird Vol. 3 # 2. I actually like the drawings in the stories I selected and as time has gone on I have to admit I think these covers are just great in a classic exploitation fashion. Expect more covers and maybe some more stories from publishing shlockmeister Myron Fass and Eerie Publications here at the Café. More covers for sure.

SAMPLES FROM TALES OF VOODOO AND WEIRD HERE >>

Recently downloaded a batch of these movie posters from Ghana without having any idea what I was getting into.  it was a horrifically pleasant surprise. Seems that during the mid 80’s to mid 90’s there was in Ghana some thing that has come to be known as ‘mobile cinema’. VHS tapes of western films (and African films as well) were transported from village to village and shown on a television set that was powered by a generator. To promote the shows artists painted images from the VHS cover when available, or from the film if they had the chance to see it or sometimes they created a painting based on what they thought the film might be about without ever having seen it. The paintings were typically done on old flour bags and one see the damage and wear many of them accrued after countless displays in the isolated rural villages where the films showed. The paintings are raw and intense and are in many cases more entertaining than the originals. In particular I like the Cujo painting that really seems to have little connection to the actual film, and the Friday the 13th painting seems to show some woman who looks a lot like Hillary Clinton terrorizing a puppet sized Jason. The mobile film movement did not last long but its brief history is recounted in the book Extreme Canvas: Movie Poster Paintings from Ghana from where these exciting images were scanned. I don’t know what most people think but I find these much more vibrant and enticing than the glossy, Photoshopped stuff you see in cinema lobbies these days. Makes me want to see Hostel and Evil Dead II one more time each.

MORE EXTREME CANVAS FROM GHANA HERE >>

I saw a post over at Gilligan’s My Retrospace and it ignited a little flame in me. I have often found myself searching the net for damsels in distress pictures. I had long had the idea for a them like this and seeing what he did with Monsters Love to Carry to Girls made me realize how much I liked this line of thinking. Maybe even more than my Girls with Guns fetish. Not sure. The image of a hapless female being carted away by a monster or brute is simply an integral part of the horror mythos. It cannot be taken away. It is one of the main pillars that hold up the temple of horror. I did not want to focus my theme only on woman being carried away but decided to find assorted images of women generally being menaced, threatened and harassed by apes, mutants, madmen, aliens and God knows what else. This will probably become a recurring theme and will eventually earn a category listing after another post or two. I guess one day I can go into some deeper analysis of the whole girl over the shoulder of a brute fetish but I would have to admit I am not sure what the appeal is. No doubt there is a lurid and fetishistic nature to some of these images, and what is wrong with that? A couple are publicity stills and seem designed to simply show off the ample curves and cleavage of the frightened females. I have been looking to broaden out what I do here with simpler posts. I simply get worn out doing my long treatises on the films of Al Adamson or Ted Z. Mikels that no one probably reads and want a break sometimes. Maybe will get back to posting more comic book and poster art as well and give myself a rest while I am working on some posts in my drafts folder. Have no fear, there will be more monster and girls themed posts in the future. There is certainly no end to such images to be found online. Also, expect another Girls with Guns post soon as well to keep the balance. Sometimes girls get tired of being carried off and they pick up a big long barreled gun and blow the heads off their tormentors. Both theme have their place here at the Café.

MORE GIRLS BEING MENACED BY BIG, NASTY MONSTERS HERE >>