THE SHIP OF MONSTERS (1960)

At the top of my handwritten notes taken while watching this movie is, in big letters, "Crazy-Assed!" This Mexican-made science-fiction-western-musical begins by telling us that man has long dreamed of exploring space, sending our seed (as it were) elsewhere to start afresh. But on Venus, an atomic scourge has killed off all the men, leaving the females to find some seed elsewhere. How about planet Earth? Indeed, a ship with Gamma and Beta, two Venusian women in highly abbreviated costumes (they wouldn't be out of place in CAT WOMEN ON THE MOON) with a clunky robot and some male monster prisoners from other planets, makes an emergency landing in a Mexican desert. The women run into a singing, prancing, tall-tale-telling cowboy named Lauriano who is interested in the two women and they in him. The other male specimens are stashed away frozen in a cave for the duration (complaining ineffectually that they should be let go because they are "free men of the galaxy") while Gamma and Beta try to repair the ship and vie for the cowboy's attentions. Lauriano falls for Gamma, and Beta reveals that she is really a vampire and intends to enslave all humankind. When he hears this, one of the monsters says, "I like you more and more!" Lauriano sings lots of songs, one of the monsters eats a cow but leaves its intact skeleton behind, and a robot flirts with a jukebox.

Yes, this is crazy-assed and it's also a lot of fun. I don't know how I had never heard of this, but it does seem to have an old-fashioned underground cult following (as opposed to a mainstream cult following for something like Rocky Horror or Plan 9 From Outer Space). Comedian and singer Eulalio González (aka Lalo Gonzalez Piporro) who plays Lauriano starred in dozens of films in the 50s and 60s but never broke through in the States, perhaps because few of his movies were ever released here. Given the laid-back feeling of the entire enterprise--you can tell no one is taking things very seriously--he makes an appealing lead. Lorena Velázquez (Beta), Miss Mexico of 1960, and Ana Bertha Lepe (Gamma) both had long careers in Mexican sci-fi films. But this kind of movie is acting-proof; we don’t watch for inspired acting, we watch for the monsters, the cheap sets and costumes, and occasionally outrageous situations, and we get all those here. One of the monsters threateningly boasts, "I will devour your entrails by the light of Utare and its seven moons!" One of the cowboy's songs says love is always best between two because with more, it's a fling--and love with three, why that's French! He uses another love song, "You, I, The Moon, The Sun," to seduce and disarm Beta. The Venusian women use an iPad-type device to control the robot. The climax is a good old-fashioned outdoor fist fight with the monsters. A decent print is available on YouTube. C'mon, you know you want to see it! [YouTube]