Women Really Are From Venus, Dahling

Hello there…

As promised, we’re off to Venus to meet the Queen of Outer Space. Oh boy, people, this 1958 movie’s quite the stunner in more ways than one. This is the movie Lorelai and Rory watched at the Black, White, and Red Theater in the “Emily In Wonderland” episode of Gilmore Girls, only they got to jump right to the opening credits. The rest of us, on the other hand…

Queen of Outer Space starts on Earth in the year 1985, where Captain Neal Patterson (Eric Fleming) and his crew, Lt. Mike Cruze (Dave Willock) and Lt. Larry Turner (Patrick Waltz) find out they’re going to be ferrying Professor Konrade (Paul Birch) up to his space station, where some super-secret mission will be taking place. Our three heroes aren’t too happy about their new assignment, but there’s nothing they can do. At least the Professor is an affable guy with lots of stories.

Come the day of the launch, the guys have to wait for Larry, who’s kind of a lady’s man, to say goodbye to his current girlfriend, who, for some reason, wears a green ballgown and the blingiest of jewelry to the launchpad. Once they’re finally done billing and cooing there’s nothing else to do but strap into the ship’s trusty La-Z-Boys and blast off, leaving Larry’s girl behind.

It’s all routine until some mysterious beams of light begin flashing across the sky, one of which destroys the space station and the other damages our heroes’ ship, forcing them to crash land on Venus.

All of this happens before the opening credits. It takes fifteen solid minutes to get there.

When the group lands on Venus, they make camp in a little clearing, sleeping inside the thinnest sleeping bags known to man with Mike installed as lookout, sitting uncomfortably on a pointy rock. He’s nodding off when a group of women with mod haircuts and very short skirts come into the clearing and force everyone to march off into the forest with a few sharp utterances of “Bochino,” which I guess means “Move.”

Once they arrive at the palace they see more women with mod hair and short skirts and they’re all giving the guys the evil eye. Yep. They hate men. They really, really hate men. The women won Venus’s war between the sexes, and now the men are kept away from the rest of the citizens of Venus as slaves or breeders.

The guys are brought before the Queen’s council, facing a line of four women wearing ballgowns and masks, and Queen Yllana (Laurie Mitchell), after explaining the story of the people of Venus, tells our heroes they’ll be executed. They also find out the Queen has a plan to destroy the Earth with a super-powerful ray gun. Yllana means business, too, as she vaporizes anyone who dares go against her.

Fortunately, not everyone is on board with Yllana’s plans. Scientist Talleah (Zsa Zsa Gabor) and a small group of likeminded women, figure out a way to spirit the men out of the palace. There are giant spiders lurking in caves, and naturally things get a bit amorous for everyone except for Professor Konrade, who tries his hardest not to be a third wheel. Naturally, there’s the little problem of stopping Yllana from blowing up the Earth, so a plan will have to be hatched sooner rather than later.

Queen of Outer Space feels hackneyed. The battle of the sexes theme is as old as time. The idea of Venus being the planet of women is as old as, well, it’s old. The movie uses easily recognizable costumes from Forbidden Planet, including Altaira’s studded dress and the crew uniforms. The shots of the laser beams hitting the ship were taken from the film, World Without End. Oh yes, there was a lot audiences would have recognized.

Maybe people sensed the film was going to be a turkey, because it ranked 174th in box office grosses for 1958, pulling in just under a million dollars. The reviews were positive in a mildly amused way, although The Legion of Decency hated the film’s “suggestive costuming.”

Variety, meanwhile, summed Queen up like this: “Most of the female characters in Queen of Outer Space look like they would be more at home on a Minsky runway than the Cape Canaveral launching pad, but Ben Schwalb’s production [based on a story by Ben Hecht] is a good-natured attempt to put some honest sex into science-fiction.”

There’s no doubt that Queen of Outer Space is low on originality, but it makes up for it by being high on kitsch, plus it’s unintentionally funny. Most of the acting is either by the numbers or overdone. Among other things, there’s the fact that Larry’s girlfriend is allowed to stand right next to the rocket as it’s taking off, and naturally she makes a great show of the resulting blowback. There’s the crew’s Amazing Flying La-Z-Boys, plus their ridiculous reactions to the supposed G-forces while the ship is crashing, plus the clearly visible shadow of the boom mic that comes up twice in the bridge scenes and sticks around for at least a good thirty seconds each time. There are also some spatial problems in some of the scenes, especially on the ship, because the bridge always looks way too flat and open to be believable.

A lot of the kitsch value falls on Gabor, whose costumes apparently cost thousands of dollars apiece, and while the rest of us benefit from seeing her perform her lab experiments in formalwear and large diamonds, she was a bit of an ordeal to work with. Director Edward Bernds later remembered, “she didn’t have her lines prepared, she had a kind of giddy attitude toward things…Well, she was very difficult all through the picture. Ben went to the hospital with ulcers halfway through the picture. I was left to cope with her alone, and she damn near gave me ulcers! It always bothered me that here on this planet Venus, she was the only one who spoke with a foreign accent.”

Personally, Zsa Zsa’s accent didn’t bother me so much because we expect that kind of thing from Zsa Zsa Gabor, but Queen messed with my head in other ways. Remember how some of the women kept saying “Bochino,” or whatever it was or however it’s spelled (but who cares because it’s not a real word anyway). Well, after hearing “Bochino” a few times, my brain started thinking, “Bocce ball” for some reason. I don’t know why.

So yeah, I couldn’t hear the word without thinking of lawn bowling. If anyone watches the movie, I dare them to try that anytime one of the characters says “Bochino” and see what happens.

For more intruders, please see the Metzinger Sisters at Silver Scenes. Thanks for hosting this, ladies–it was fun!  Thanks for reading, all, and I hope to see you on Tuesday for a new installment of “During World War Two.” Have a great weekend…

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