Amazon Women on the Moon (1987)

(Second viewing, On Cable TV, July 2022) There’s a good reason why, in the remarkable pantheon of 1980s spoof comedies, Amazon Women on the Moon barely gets any attention compared to Airplane!, Top Secret!, or Hot Shots!—or even compared to the more directly comparable Kentucky Fried Movie—it’s uneven, clunky and frequently laborious. A sketch comedy trying to ape late-night channel hopping, its most sustained element is a parody of 1950s science-fiction films interspaced by ads, trailers, snippets and other material coming from a brainstorm between the film’s five directors (including Joe Dante and John Landis) and two credited writers. I first saw this a long time ago—at least if I go by the moments that were predictable or familiar to me—but can’t guarantee I watched it from beginning to end. Not that it matters, because the sketch comedy means that (save from “Amazon Women on the Moon” segments and a man zapped into his television set) there are very few callbacks or buildups from one segment to another. From a twenty-first century perspective, the film is clearly of its era—and that means quite a bit of sexism (including a number whose sole lame joke is a woman doing everyday tasks in the nude), ironic racism (“Blacks without soul”) and very familiar stereotypes played for easy laughs. Some numbers have gone from satire to reality in the interval (such as a telephone number where the woman vets her new date—old-hat stuff at an age of social media), while others feel more solidly comic now. It’s probably no accident if the film is at its most reliably funny when satirizing older material than the mid-1980s—the “Amazon Women on the Moon” segments are much funnier if you have seen such 1950s SF films as Queen of Outer Space, and the segments riffing off Reefer Madness or The Invisible Man are somehow funnier than the then-contemporary segments. (Although the revelation of Jack the Ripper’s true identity is the film’s most absurd laugh.) There’s an impressive roster of actors at play here—from people with enduring fame (Michelle Pfeiffer, Joe Pantoliano, Rosanna Arquette, Carrie Fisher) to 1980s references (Paul Bartel, Steve Guttenberg, Griffin Dunne) and older stars (Steve Allen and the rest of the roasters). Star power isn’t much of a substitute for real laughs, but it does elevate the film above its strict and disappointing minutes-to-chuckles ratio. Uneven by design but disappointing in general, Amazon Women on the Moon is a time capsule of 1980s comedy that doesn’t compare to much better examples of the spoof comedy form.