Surprisingly, Cat-Women of the Moon is not the most exciting picture you will ever watch.  Hard to believe, sure, but it is true.  It really is not all that it is cracked up to be.  You think so, and how can you not?  The title practically screams at you to watch this film.  Sadly though, it falls a little flat, just a little, and does not actually feature any cat-women.  Merely normal women.  Who live on the moon.  But, on the dark side just so you do not get confused or think that it is utterly implausible.  All joking aside, this film is the type of 1950’s science-fiction malarkey that never fails to entertain no matter how cornball or even bad it might be.

As far as story goes, the film finds a group of astronauts headed to the moon when the only woman on board, Helen, starts receiving telepathic suggestions on where to go and what to do.  After landing and following Helen’s hunches, the crew meets up with a race of women who are far more advanced than humanity, but one that is also on the brink of extinction.  So the women need two things – a means of getting off the moon and back to Earth, which this group of explorers has so readily supplied and secondly, men.  To repopulate of course.

While this film might fall on the border on being just slightly worse than a B movie, it does have a few things going for it.  One would be the whole absurdity of it.  Like all great science-fiction films, it features not necessarily the impossible, but the implausible.  It is a kooky story, one that is actually laughable, but one that works because of that very fact.  Written by Roy Hamilton, he makes it enjoyable enough that despite anything else, you find that it really is not that bad of a film.  There are little to no special effects which is another bonus for the movie as being on a budget and all, wasting money on something that would most likely take away from it is simply not sensible.  Another plus for the film is that while it was a little disappointing to find that these women were not actually part cat, or some hybrid type of alien, the women were quite good looking and actually more talented than the main cast.

Victor Jory, who plays Kip, is not very good in this film and the same can be said for Sonny Tufts and the especially bad Marie Windsor.  Thankfully, it was a ‘so bad, it’s good’ situation otherwise the enjoyment factor of this film would have taken a nosedive.  The only members of the cast who seemed to be any good at all were the cat-women played by Carol Brewster, Suzanne Alexander and Susan Morrow.  The difference between the two groups is noticeable, simply because it was like these women wanted to be here and were an actual part of the picture while the ‘main’ cast seemed to have wandered in from another backlot, realized what movie they were in and then just went through the motions.  Unless they were actually doing their best, which would simply be a little sad if it were true.  But, you cannot expect the best of everything from a little no-budget film.

So perhaps there were a couple of things lacking from this Arthur Hilton directed picture, but overall, it was fun and entertaining, which is the main reason anyone should watch any type of film.

3 out of 5