Reviews: Bad Scifi Night

So every week or two, a handful of musicologists and I get together and watch old scifi movies. Most of them are truly awful. They are generally chosen with no criteria whatsoever, although a scandalous title or provocative cover art tend to attract our attention. I tend to gravitate toward movies from the '50s or ones with female characters, one of my friends prefers movies set in space. Barbarella and Teenagers from Outer Space have been our favorite choices so far. I can't promise reviews of all our viewings, since I am frequently not paying full critical attention while watching, and many of these films defy all attempts at comprehension, but I thought I would share my experiences when I can.

She Wolves of the Wasteland (1988). aka Phoenix Rising: The film is set in a post-apocalyptic future in which all of the men are dead. A tribe of evil bounty hunters ruled by a creepy Reverend Mother pursue a pair of leggy blondes, one of whom happens to be illicitly impregnated with stolen sperm that will produce a male child. The bounty hunters are delightfully dyke-y in their fashion choices (that's how you know they're bad), while our renegade heroes wear bikini tops and loincloths while they fight to preserve the heterosexual family. The main point of this film is its scenes of girl-on-girl fighting and topless waterfall frolicking. There is a tragic lack of lesbian relationships considering a world without men, but if you're into post-apocalyptic sexploitation films and girls with guns, this one's for you!

Assignment: Outer Space (1960) aka Space Men. In this film, Rik Van Nutter plays Ray Peterson, a self-centered reporter who is assigned to report on a space station mission, immediately clashes with the station captain and finds himself entangled in a disaster that threatens to destroy the earth. Although there are several bases and colonies on other planets, apparently the destruction of Earth implies the end of civilization and thus several people must risk their lives to save the planet. The convolutions the plot takes to get the characters into high-risk situations make no sense whatsoever and for some reason everything is much slower than it should be. There is exactly one African-American in the movie who is kindly, wise, and self-sacrificing and one woman for whom the men risk their lives. This film was a little too slow for me and the special effects were absurdly low-budget and hard to follow. Why in the world couldn't they set fire to the models to show the ships being destroyed? At one point we took to counting how many times the same shot of the spaceship taking off was used. This is not a particularly good movie, and the hilarious terribleness of the special effects is diminished by the plodding pacing.

So those are my responses for this week's scifi selections. I'll take recommendations if there's anything out there you'd like to suggest for reviewing, but all final screening decisions are reached by consensus. As usual, my reviews will tend to come from a queer/feminist perspective, so if you don't want to hear how this movie could be made better by more female characters or explicit homoeroticism, look elsewhere for your recommendations.