Nude on the Moon

Science fiction cinema can truly be said to have come of age with this movie. Years before 2001: A Space Odyssey, while Stanley Kubrick was still wasting his time with half-hearted erotica like Lolita, the great Doris Wishman was hard at work on this little masterpiece that would revolutionize the genre, and also show a lot more tits and ass than Nabokov’s potboiler. What SF movie of the following decades was not hugely influenced by NOTM? The themes of alien life, telepathy, and girls with pointy, bouncy boobs and round butts have never been handled so well. On a very low budget, Wishman accomplished special effects that would not be equaled until George Lucas used some of the techniques in Star Wars, which didn’t show any boom-booms or bada-bings at all. The script by Wishman and Raymond Phelan combines sly wit with moments of transcendent discovery and unbearable tension and brazenly exposed chumbawumbas as a pair of lost astronauts desperately try to escape the semi-nude amazons they find on the Lunar surface before their oxygen runs out. It is magnificently acted by William Mayer as the troubled hero, and in a riveting performance as “The Professor,” the late lamented Lester Brown, star of such seminal movies as The Prince and the Nature Girl, Behind the Nudist Curtain, and Blaze Starr Goes Nudist. But their contributions pale beside the awesome talents of former ecdysiast Marietta and her bazongas and bootie. Sadly, this is the only film she ever made. The entire production was shot in Florida, mostly at Coral Castle in Homestead, one of those roadside attractions built by a person with an obsession to build, build, build, like the Watts Towers or the Underground Gardens in Fresno, but with headlights and tushies. It is a suitably alien environment for the naked moon maidens and their naked hooters to cavort in. The whole production is much enhanced with the plaintive ballad “I’m Moonin’ Over You (My Little Moon Doll).” A must-see for students of the cinema, tweeters, and woofers.

Okay, that’s the Alternate Reality, Bizarro Universe version of my review. After all that, I don’t really have the energy to tell you just how truly awful this picture is, nor all the various ways it is awful. I am not one who seeks out and enjoys awful movies. I’ve seen Plan Nine From Outer Space, and Flesh Feast, Veronica Lake’s unbelievably bad last picture, and that was enough for me. I only rented this because I was reminded of Doris Wishman, the Queen of Sleaze, when we saw one of her stock company of actors in FTA recently. I must say that I saw a lot of Wishman’s oeuvre during my adolescence, and appreciated every one of them. This one is actually a wee bit better, in that it’s possible to laugh at how bad it is. The others were just intensely boring, except for the … well, you know.

I should mention that when I say tits and ass above, it’s really only tits, as all the girls wear tight shorts … so short, in fact, that a lot of butt crack is revealed. They couldn’t show pubic hair in 1961. I wouldn’t want you to get the wrong idea, waste your time looking for squirrel shots.