KYMM'S 365 DAY MOVIE CHALLENGE #15: THE QUEEN FROM OUTER SPACE (1958, Bernds, USA)
“The ray that destroyed the space station and knocked us off our course may have originated right here!”
“Oh come off it, how can a bunch of women invent a gizmo like that?”
“Sure, and even if they invented it, how could they aim it? You know how women drivers are!”
In the far off future of 1985, some astronauts are tasked with taking a professor up to the way station in space that he designed, because something hinky is going on up there. I have tried and tried to make it sound more interesting, but it just won’t work. Some dull men go to space in BarcaLoungers on a literal cardboard set? That really isn’t better.
The take-off sequence is five minutes of a real rocket, I assume because they got the footage and wanted to wring every bit out of every penny they spent. Either that, or the movie is only 80m long, and they needed to pad it out. I’m betting on both.
As they approach the space station, they see cartoon laser beams zoom across the sky for an inordinate amount of time, and then the cartoons blow up said space stations! The dull men have to go very fast, strapped lightly to their BarcaLoungers, to try to get away from the cartoons. You can tell they are going very fast because they all make faces. They wouldn’t make those faces if they weren’t going super fast! They are all grown men who are seriously professional astronauts, not performing chimps!
Fifteen minutes into the film, the title card comes up, extremely dramatically, accompanied by spooky space music. The movie stars Zsa Zsa Gabor and a bunch of randos. If you were in this movie and it’s your first pinned credit on IMDb, that doesn’t say much for the rest of your career.
The astronauts all pass out due to the extreme exhaustion of making faces, then crash land on a snow-covered planet. Fortunately, there is oxygen just everywhere, so they don’t need to wear space suits. Handy for the costume budget!They go out to explore, apparently wandering briskly past the snow and getting to the jungle, which the professor fingers some leaves and states definitively that they are on Venus. Because he is familiar with the plant matter of Venus, a place no earth person has ever been to because it’s 26 million miles away from Earth? And also that Venus cannot sustain life? Stop asking difficult questions! They wander around, then go to sleep. One of them keeps watch, but falls asleep, and then! Suddenly! Hott Laydeez with short skirts and laser guns surround them and march them off to a building full of more Hott Laydeez.
Everyone is like, but where are the dudes? What kind of a planet is this with no MEN? UNTHINKABLE!!Then some masked women march in, one identifying herself as the Queen of the planet. She tells the men that they cannot leave because they will come back to make war, and they are marched off to prison. One of the Hott Laydeez, after making eyes at one of the dull men, scurries off to tell Zsa Zsa all about them, and how she believes that they are telling the truth when they say they are peaceful, so that’s alright then. I mean, she’s not wrong, but her reasoning isn’t exactly sound.
So it seems that the Queen of Outer Space is kind of an a@$h@le, women when left to their own devices will dress for the male gaze just in case some men happen to crash land on the planet, apparently, Venus has all of the Maybelline products imaginable, and Zsa Zsa Gabor sure looked amazing in 1958.
This is a silly, kind of boring film, but on the other hand, what do you expect from a Zsa Zsa Gabor film called Queen of Space? It’s exactly what it says on the tin. Ultimately, it’s kind of fun, and at an understuffed 80m, it doesn’t overstay its welcome.
Kymm Zuckert is an actor/writer/native Angelino. When Kymm was a child, her parents would take her to see anything, which means that sometimes she will see a film today and say, “I saw that when I was eight, I don’t remember any of that inappropriate sex stuff!” Check out her entire 365 day blog @ https://365filmsin365days.movie.blog