Cardboard Science: Women Are From Venus

Year: 1958

Director: Edward Bernds

Cast: Zsa Zsa Gabor, Eric Fleming, Dave Willock

Run Time: 1 hour 20 minutes

So, now we sally forth into phase 2 of the Great Switcheroo, where Hunter Allen of Kinemalogue has assigned me three 50's science fiction B-pictures to examine for your spooky season pleasure, in exchange for three of my 80's slashers. He has already apologized to me for the trashiness of this particular slate, but I agree with him that the movies are short enough that it's hard to complain about literally anything they do. Also, today's subject, which is 1958's Queen of Outer Space, is another film with an incredibly misleading title but a not altogether dishonest poster design. If your pleasure lies in the form of watching scantily clad space ladies, look no further. 

This project also has a connection with previous years, coming from the director of 1959's Return of the Fly and starring Hungarian-American ultra-celebrity Zsa Zsa Gabour, who appeared in the Census Bloodbath entry A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors a scant 30 years or so later.

It's probably not a good sign that Elm Street 3 is listed higher than Queen of Outer Space on her "known for" page on IMDb, considering she's in that movie for about 12 seconds. Although, it's probably not a good sign that Queen of Outer Space is on her "known for" page in the first place.

So, I suppose there's a plot lying around somewhere. Interchangeable white squarejaws Capt. Neal Patterson (Eric Fleming), Lt. Mike Cruze (Dave Willock), and Lt. Larry Turner (Patrick Waltz) live in a not-too-distant future where space travel is still pretty exclusive, but people are out there doing it. They're charged with the inauspicious task of bussing the scientist Professor Konrad (Paul Birch) to the space station he created along with some supplies. However, somebody drew on the film reel with a marker they are attacked by a super deadly space laser that destroys the space station and sends them rocketing off into parts unknown.

After an undetermined amount of time (they've been knocked unconscious), they crash land on the surface of a planet, an idyllic indoor forest land with obvious blue wall backdrops. It turns out that they are on Venus, and they soon find themselves captives of the Venusians, which are a tribe of sexy minidress-clad women who have banished all the men they haven't slaughtered onto an orbiting moon. They are led by the masked Queen Yllana (Laurie Mitchell). Soon the men discover that not all the women are happy living under her iron thumb, because well... they're horny, mostly. And they have all these pickle jars that nobody can open. Talleah (Zsa Zsa Gabour) attempts to help the men escape, leading a vague sort of revolution in the process. It turns out that most of the women on the planet aren't too keen on the Queen's plan of destroying Earth with a big evil nuclear space laser, because they aren't shrill man-hating harpies like somebody we know.

Her motivation for being evil is literally that she's ugly, because the 50's.

To be completely honest, I like almost nothing about Queen of Outer Space. At least in the previous trashy Cardboard Science entry, Robot Monster, there was a shirtless man wandering around for the entire run time. Obviously, I understand that for many straight people at the time, Zsa Zsa Gabour in a minidress was to this film what "the leading man is getting married with his nipples showing" was for me in that one. But I'm a gay. I need some great outfits to go on the pretty ladies in order to get me through, and only the Queen's jewel-encrusted cricket masquerade ensemble really delivers in that respect.

Obviously, this film wasn't ever going to depict an Amazonian feminist utopia, but it really is a shame that the humor is couched in such egregious sexism. It's so bad it does occasionally circle back around the horn to be ironically amusing for how unabashedly terrible it is ("how'd you like to drag THAT to the senior prom?"), but generally the jokes are the same basic-ass, stale "take my wife... please!" gags that cis male comic have leaned on for decades before and after this. As delivered by a bunch of wooden performers who cackle and smirk at one another incessantly. And this is a movie that really relies on its comedy, because it's too low budget to really do almost anything exciting visually.

The entirety of their effects budget is spent on a short clip of the space station and shuttle being attacked, a spaceship interior with a tiny little window through which a colorful light is shone, a big spider puppet that takes up about five seconds of screen time but still lands itself prominently on some posters, and burn makeup for Queen Yllana that looks like Mary Lou Maloney's burned face from Prom Night II. Oh, and they clearly got some actual footage of a spaceship blasting off, because they use every. second. of. it. in a hideously prolonged sequence.

They're living by the classic dictum that women are the cheapest special effect.

Let me root around a little more. Is there anything good in here? It's certainly not Zsa Zsa, who absently delivers her dialogue while squinting at cue cards that seem to be a couple yards farther away than they should be. It's also not the camera work, where the lenses warp and distort the edge of the frame every time they pan. Or the production design, which at least has the good sense to make things bright and candy colored, but only delivers a series of identical pink and blue hallways.

Oh hey, I found something! The music might be generic, but it's delivering on the electronic oogly-woogly score I need for a 50's movie set on another planet. And honestly, for all it's a boring slog that doesn't have anything remarkable to break up the monotony, I didn't actively despise Queen of Outer Space, so that's nice I guess. It's a warm bath of enough B-movie tropes that it goes down easy enough, even though I have at least a dozen films I would point you to before this one, thanks to being under Hunter's tutelage for almost a decade at this point.

That which is indistinguishable from magic:

• The comms systems in the futuristic space station look like nothing other than vibrators on their charging docks.
• There is one scene where the Queen vaporizes a traitor with a ray gun and she vanishes in a puff of smoke, so that was pretty cool. Although it's an awkwardly blocked and orchestrated sequence, where the Queen pretends to pardon her before immediately shooting her in the back. It's clearly supposed to show how deliciously evil she is, but it's just confusing and muddled.

The morality of the past, in the future!:

• Hilariously, Professor Konrad tries to smoke on a rocket that's about to lift off, before being reminded that the spark could kill them all.
• The men joke around about how it would be totally impossible for women to invent things, let alone aim them (because they're such bad drivers and what if they get their period, think about it fellas), but then of course it's revealed that the Queen does keep some men alive for the purposes of inventing murder death rays.
• My favorite caricature of Evil Feminism is the random extra who teleports from out of nowhere to throw herself at the captives, beat her fists against their heads, and scream, "I HATE THEM!"

Sensawunda:

• The end credits describe the cast using outsized titles like "The Leaders," "The Lovers" and "The Lovelorn," really delivering the pomposity that the opening credits of The Rocky Horror Picture Show have always promised me.
• My favorite scene is probably the moment where Zsa Zsa puts on the Queen's mask to impersonate her, a trick that works for exactly two and a half seconds.

TL;DR: Queen of Outer Space is a bland, generic, sexist film that just spits out low budget sci-fi tropes hoping you'll be too distracted by beautiful women to notice.

Rating: 3/10

Word Count: 1368

Cardboard Science on Popcorn Culture
2014: Invaders from Mars (1953) The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) Them! (1954)
2015: The Giant Claw (1957) It Came from Beneath the Sea (1955) The Brain from Planet Arous (1957)
2016: Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) Godzilla (1954) The Beginning of the End (1957)
2017: It Conquered the World (1958) I Married a Monster from Outer Space (1958) Forbidden Planet (1956)
2018: The Fly (1958) Attack of the 50 Ft. Woman (1958) Fiend without a Face (1958)
2019: Mysterious Island (1961) Robinson Crusoe on Mars (1964) Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959)

2020: The Colossus of New York (1958) It Came from Outer Space (1953) Rodan (1956)

2021: Robot Monster (1953) Queen of Outer Space (1958) The Cyclops (1957)

Census Bloodbath on Kinemalogue
2014: My Bloody Valentine (1981) Pieces (1982) The Burning (1981)
2015: Terror Train (1980) The House on Sorority Row (1983) Killer Party (1986)
2016: The Initiation (1984) Chopping Mall (1986) I, Madman  (1989)
2017: Slumber Party Massacre (1982) Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II (1987) Happy Birthday to Me (1981)
2018: The Prowler (1981) Slumber Party Massacre II (1987) Death Spa (1989)
2019: Phantom of the Mall: Eric's Revenge (1989) Psycho III (1986) StageFright: Aquarius (1987)

2020: Night School (1981) The Fan (1981) Madhouse (1981)

2021: Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers (1988) Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan (1989) The Texas Chainsaw Massacre Part 2 (1986)

Superfly

Year: 1959

Director: Edward Bernds

Cast: Vincent Price, Brett Halsey, David Frankham

Run Time: 1 hour 20 minutes

This just in, I'm an idiot, and I love what I do way too much. This October I'm already running a Children of the Corn marathon in addition to our annual crossover with Cardboard Science at Kinemalogue. But I did a bad thing. After Hunter assigned me to watch 1958's The Fly, I looked at my shelf and realized I owned the Cronenberg remake, even though I'd never seen it. Then I researched the franchise and learned that the original had two sequels and the remake had one. What's this? A franchise I'd never seen before and barely even knew about? You know I had to get on that crap. 

I was already feeling kind of bad that this Corn marathon coincides with the series we're currently running on my podcast Scream 101, so it's kind of redundant if someone both listens to the podcast and reads my blog (even though that's assuming a lot on your part to begin with). Because of that, I thought I'd do something extra special. So hey! Whatever the twisted genesis, this October I'm running a bonus series on the five entries in The Fly franchise. Maybe I'll get a P.O. box so you can send me those straitjackets with more convenience.

Pictured: Me grappling with my inner completist demons.

Return of the Fly arrived just one year after The Fly sucked a solid chunk of money up through its B-movie proboscis. The studio did what any self-respecting company would do in this situation: rush through a follow-up and slash the budget, reverting this entry to the much cheaper black-and-white, which also helped cover up any seams in the special effects.

So, the plot. The hero of the last film obviously being dead, we pick up with his son, who was eight years old in 1958 but seems to be in his mid-to-late 20's at this point, which would seem to set this film in the late 70's if the filmmakers paid a single shred of attention to detail. But judging by the fact that no fewer than two times we see a door destroyed, only for it to be fully functional and whole in the very next scene, they maybe didn't care too much about such pesky little nuisances as details.

Anyway! The son in question is Philippe Delambre (Brett Halsey, and I certainly don't mind the time jump because he is the cutest), who against the wishes of his uncle François (Vincent Price, the only returning performer) continues his father's research to develop a teleportation device. He does this with the help of his assistant Alan Hinds (David Frankham), who might not be as nice as he seems. Oh, and one of these people is gonna turn into a half-fly half-human monster, but did I need to tell you that?

At cross purposes, the two scientists and the reluctant François pick up their work in a secluded mansion left to Philippe by his grandfather. Also left to him is the housekeeper and her lovely daughter Cecile Bonnard (Danielle De Metz), who becomes an extremely half-assed love interest for Philippe.

But who could blame her?

Return of the Fly certainly indulges in the sequel sin of "the same, only worse" in a lot of aspects (more on that later), but the thing that surprised me is that it's almost as delightful an entry in the 50's science fiction canon. The scenes where the movie shines err on the side of melodrama more than horror, but the first two acts are perhaps even superior. The original has a killer opening but once the filmlong flashback begins, there are many stalls and starts before anything meaningful happens. Here, we don't see any fly action before the 50-minute mark, but the movie is already operating on all cylinders. 

[EN: Be prepared for some medium spoilers, folks, throughout the remainder of the review.]

It is pretty quickly revealed that Alan Hinds is a criminal on the lam who wants to make his fortune by stealing the plans for the teleporter, and his duplicity adds a layer of tension to the repetitive science experiment scenes that wasn't there last time. All three of the characters working on this project have their own purposes and motivations that chafe against the others, and the sheer amount of peering through window curtains and tailing each other in cars is pure confection to any fan of intrigue.

Because Lord knows we won't be sated by eleven more scenes of flashing Science Lights.

There are even two scenes in the pre-fly portion of the film that are extremely effective and harrowing. The first involves a splicing accident that gives a guinea pig human hands in the film's most existentially terrifying special effect. The second is the immediate preamble to the fly-ification (which is actually brought on by duplicity rather than scientific hubris, for a nice change). You see the character in question realize exactly what's about to happen to him, and the dawning horror on his face is almost too much to bear.

Of course, as soon as the fly thing happens, the movie falls the f**k apart. For one thing, it doubles down on a lame element that was only implied in the original film. This film basically posits that the only reason flies aren't bloodthirsty serial killers is that they're too tiny. As soon as it gains human form, it goes on an ill-motivated rampage through town that combines boring shots of him wandering through forests with bizarre slasher-esque kills that don't even involve his giant fly mandibles, which are pretty freaking cool (the fly head here is a much better mask, and while the film indulges in showing it perhaps too much, it nevertheless deserves closer inspection).

Unfortunately, the human-head fly-body situation is a microscopic fraction as chilling as the last time,  and is shown far too early in the third act to be particularly useful toward chilling the spine. And speaking of things from last time that are even worse, we all know Vincent Price was wasted in The Fly, but Return of the Fly treats him like a featured extra, having him deliver a good fifty percent of his performance from bed. The ending is also entirely perfunctory, an unsatisfying button to a film that immediately began deflating the second the horror actually started happening in earnest.

Return of the Fly fails to accomplish its largest goals, but it's still a satisfying romp through the annals of sci-fi history and I'm glad I made the trek. Plus, if nothing else, it gave me a guinea pig moment I'll never forget.

Behold!

TL;DR: Return of the Fly is a reasonably satisfying sequel that ups the ante in pretty lame ways but delivers 50's sci-fi tension like you wouldn't believe.

Rating: 6/10

Word Count: 1150
Reviews In This Series
The Fly (Neumann, 1958)
Return of the Fly (Bernds, 1959)
Curse of the Fly (Sharp, 1965)
The Fly (Cronenberg, 1986)
The Fly II (Walas, 1989)