brilliant actors, brilliant editing

It's fun, it's light, [but] it has a hard time when its tries to get heavy.

Fanciful, disturbing, and wildly original, it announces the arrival of a fresh, bold voice in American cinema.

The film may be flawed, but its message is not.

Please, if you're an MIT graduate, maybe you can explain the plot to me. Between mysterious feline powers, the Greek alphabet, who wants what, and giant moon spiders, I'm still scratching my head. Okay, after all what can be expected of such a catchpenny title, certainly not Citizen Kane or even Citizen Clunk. Actually, I thought the first part was pretty good, more like Rocketship XM (1950) than a Roger Corman shlock-fest. The rivalries among the rocketship crew are engaging and pretty well done. But then the cast is more distinguished than usual-- Jory, Windsor, Fowley, and Phipps, while even perennial joke Sonny Tufts manages a good turn. But once the ship reaches the moon, things pretty much fall apart. It's like the script has no firm idea of where to go from there; so they make it up as they go along. Whatever the case, the movie's a mess from that point on. Maybe what really bothered me was the cat women had no change into bikinis which I was expecting. The black leotards are form fitting, but why give us a guy-stuff title unless you give us good titillating guy-stuff visuals. Anyway, the movie's too good in the first part, but too bad for most parts to qualify as laughable camp. So I guess I won't be traveling to the cat woman moon, after all.(In passing-- sadly, actor William Phipps (Doug) passed away just the other day (June, 2018) at age 96! He was merely one of those unsung Hollywood grunts who carry the industry on their backs. RIP, Bill.)

This is the movie where Jory and Marie Windsor are in love; he's in very fine shape, though perhaps just a bit put off by the undignified slapdash, yet at ease.At 1st, I believed they supposed that the Moon had atmosphere and gravity, since the crew members could hear each other and were walking normally, there was the cigarette gimmick; but then it turns out they're surprised there's oxygen, atmosphere and gravity. Later, there's a scene with the sky with clouds.The architecture on the Moon is ancient European, and Asian.But the movie, meant occasionally humorous, is, despite three actors, in the hands of the cretins. And these cretins are worse than indifferent: they are wrong, and their minds are sleazy. The storyline has two ideas which could have worked: one is generic (the fight with the spiders), and it failed; the other one, the objects (the cigarettes, the gun, the box). Women are cats because they are sneaky. They also look like cabaret fetishist fantasies. The result of the travel to the Moon is that the Terrestrials loose the engineer, but murder all the Moon survivors. The story ends with the swiping out of the last Moon people. Greed and altruism alike lead to death. The matter of this tale is sleaze.'Cat-Women …' is watchable, because it's moderately amusing, the actors save it (though Marie Windsor seemed to go with the bombast of the thing); the scenes in the Moon city are the less appealing. The producers tried to bluff it somehow, giving clumsiness as nonchalance. It's a bombastic movie, deprived of any emotion, an outing of uninspired hacks; and there's shamelessness in this absence of any affection or care for their movie. There's no thrill, no dramatic drive, no suspense whatsoever. The fact that the scenes, the dialogs are contrived has nothing to do with the budget. It's badly scripted and badly directed (but nicely acted and scored): the encounter with the giant spiders didn't need to look so ridiculous, and the cat-women themselves, and the seductions, and the ciphered dance. Because there are some silly inadvertence, some wish to attribute most of the movie to thoughtlessness; but this is to misinterpret the movie, which actually indulges in goofiness, in word-plays, etc.. Some things aren't errors, but meant to be amusing (the cigarettes, the gun and the box, which are funny, good for characterization (the copilot is brave and combative, the woman is addicted, unreliable, manipulated, vulnerable, the 3rd person is greedy and selfish), and later useful (the gimmick with the cigarette, the gun-play); Jory anxious to find out whom does Marie Windsor love). This might not be top humor, but shouldn't all be attributed to carelessness and stupidity.Jory has a love scene with Marie Windsor.It's also a cautionary tale. Tufts and the engineer fall prey to the crassest seduction, the pilot is practically degraded by his misconduct; and the one who wishes to be shown the golden cave is the most severely punished.'I'll show you the cave of gold.'

CAT-WOMEN OF THE MOON is a truly terrible movie, but it is so bad and so horribly produced that it is a must-see for bad movie fans. In fact, it was so bad that it was the inspiration for the main plot for AMAZON WOMEN ON THE MOON. However, oddly, the plot idea was actually originally in ABBOTT AND COSTELLO GO TO MARS! The film begins on board a space ship bound for the moon that is captained by the great Sonny Tufts. In typical schlocky sci-fi fashion, the inside of the ship looks ridiculous--with lots of inappropriate equipment, no zero gravity, etc.. However, the real action didn't begin until the ship landed on the moon--at which point it's painfully obvious to everyone but this brain damaged crew that their female crew member (Marie Windsor) is working for the aliens living on the moon. It seems they have used their superior intellects to steer the ship there--in the hope that they could steal the ship and invade the Earth. Considering there only appears to be about four of these "cat women", such an undertaking does seem a bit silly, but this is a film you best watch without thinking too hard! Eventually, after battling horrible giant spiders suspended from very visible wires as well as watching the cat-women's exotic and seductive dance, the humans are able to escape their imprisonment and return to Earth safely--minus one crew member who was stabbed. How did they manage this? Well, one of the men is heard yelling off screen that he killed the cat-women as you hear gun fire! Wow, talk about sparing no expense in the final showdown!!This film epitomizes schlocky 50s sci-fi. The plot is childish, the sets silly and the space suits comical--so much that the film turns out to be a great comedy--unintentional, of course. Bad, silly, poorly done in every way--this film is one of the worst films of the decade BUT is also strangely campy and worth watching--especially if you are a bad movie freak like me.PS--I still have no idea what a cat-woman is. The film didn't explain this at all and I saw nothing feline in the film.

Obviously Sonny Tufts was really hitting the bottle when he appeared in this film. He was touted as a new star in the 40's but his messed up personal life really did him in and he was reduced to playing in Grade Z movies and barely getting by. In several scenes he loses his train of thought and because of the low budget the scenes were not re-shot. What a hoot but at the same time pathetic.This is one of those little sci-fi films that were so popular in the 1950s, usually low budget and inept. But if you are a bad film buff, you can't help but love Cat Women. There are some good actors in this film.....Victor Jory (how far he had fallen!); the wonderful Marie Windsor who made any film in which she appeared worth watching; and Douglas Fowley who was a film staple for years. And then there were the Cat Woman, slinking around in leotards and dog collars.I won't go into the "plot" but suffice to say it was the same as all the other films which involved lost civilizations on distant moons. It is such fun and if you love low budget films with ridiculous special effects, bad acting and dialogue that makes you cringe, see Cat Women of the Moon. It's a treat!!