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seneschal

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The Ship of Monsters (1960)

Sexy space women in search of virile Earth mates land their rocket ship in the middle of a Mexican singing Western. If they don't get the volunteers they want, they'll unleash a quartet of monsters capable of devouring all terrestrial life. Unfortunately, their first "recruit" -- a boastful cowhand with a penchant for verse and falling off his dancing horse -- turns them down. Guess who Earth is now depending on to save it?

The space babes look good (females always pilot spacecraft in evening dress, don't they?), and so do the monsters: an evil brain, a spider-thing, a cyclops, and a talking saber-toothed skeleton. The sci-fi gear is cool in a 1950s sort of way, sort of Rocketship X-M meets Things to Come.

All you Atomic Age Cthulhu and Astounding Adventures fans take note! ;D

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No problemo. Who watches a football game, boxing match, Miss American Pageant, or a Godzilla movie for the snappy dialogue? In the same way, Mexican cinema is all about action, emotion,and attractive women in form-fitting garb. When El Santo or Blue Demon start slapping around zombies, who cares what the finer details of Doktor Muerte's plot were?

In Ship of Monsters, a duo of nubile explorers is sent to Earth from a space matriarchy (Venus? Mars? Does it matter?) to find males to bring home so their cosmic civilization can continue. Along the way they pick up specimens of dangerous alien species they plan to use to coerce cooperation if the masculine population doesn't prove cooperative. The first man they encounter is a boastful singing cowboy, who explains that he can't leave the planet because he has to care for a boy (Son? Nephew? Orphan? Does it matter?) One of the space babes gets jealous when the cowboy demonstrates a liking for the other. She traps her companion in their rocketship, deactivates their robot, then releases the monsters they've collected. She reveals that she is a monster herself and wants to set up a queendom of her own. The creatures are agreeable. ("You eat all the small children. You devour all the women. You eat all the animals. And you gobble up all the men!"). The cowhand realizes something is up when one of the monsters attacks his herd. Kidnapped, he seduces the space vampiress with a romantic song in order to seize the gadget that will free the other explorer. He and the boy find the rocketship, release the other space babe, and proceed to battle the monsters. As Stan Lee might say, "'Nuff said." ;D

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  • 2 weeks later...

Thanks for the link. I'd kind of doped out the gist of the mission on my own, but the subtitles are nice to have. I had my kids, who are taking Spanish I, watch the movie with me to see how much of their vocabulary they could pick out. They enjoyed the film but subtitles would have helped make the cowboy's energetic rants more sensible. My son had the same reaction I did -- Beta was the space vixen he preferred ... until she sprouted fangs and decided to have farmer for lunch. ;)

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