Cat-Women of the Moon - 1953

Released Sept 3, 1953. Directed by Arthur Hilton.

Cat-Women of the Moon is deservedly laughable most of the way through the 64 minute run-time, but is often enjoyable for unintended (by the filmmakers) reasons. Legendary within "bad cinema" circles, this film isn't really on par with the incoherent messes that many independent filmmakers were capable of in the sci-fi genre, rather Cat-Women of the Moon is competently but cheaply made and has the fatal flaw of being harnessed to a story that pretends to contain science (and psychology) but is instead almost childish in how it defines characters, situations, and of course, regarding what our cast is preoccupied with, motivations.

Is Cat-Women of the Moon really sci-fi? Well, it has a rocket ship. The cat-women are dressed in tights and they perform a couple of exotic dances that seem appropriate for a mid-twentieth century Vegas floor show, and perhaps that was exotic enough for the rest of America in 1953. Space-exploration films are generally sci-fi versions of classic adventure tales of sailing ships coming across hitherto-unknown islands full of strange customs, foreign people, and, often enough, young woman impressed with the arrival of someone new and different looking.

In this film, astronauts from earth land on the dark side of the moon and discover a race of "cat-women" who are what's left from a population that once ruled the surface millions of years before. From their ruined city they've been using a secret hypnotic power to lure the space explorers closer (primarily through mind-control over astronaut Marie Windsor as navigator Helen Salinger). Though the cat-women are hospitable and friendly, they've got a plan to steal the rocketship of the visiting earth-people and go to earth and rebuild their population (there's only eight of them left) and to, of course, rule (after-all, they're cats!)

Low-budget sci-fi effort makes do with corrugated steel for the inside walls of a rocketship that is cylindrical on the outside but a square movie set on the inside. Stationed in rolling office chairs the small crew mimics the stress of space travel with rather limited success. The set design includes office desks and non-functioning empty tape reels mounted on the wall, apparently to imply reel-to-reel supercomputers of the 1950s.

Though we do have almost acceptable sci-fi sets and nice matte paintings for Cat-Women of the Moon, most of the time we are watching melodrama and petty leadership conflicts, along with a brusque love-triangle that has Marie Windsor in the middle between Victor Jory and Sonny Tufts. Most of that conflict seems lifted from romance back-stories of war films (and not sci-fi) and the emphasis within the script is that too-easy writer's tool for withholding important information from the characters: nobody wants to hurt anybody else's feelings.

As an unwilling double-agent working for the moon's cat-women who have powers of mind-control over the female brain, Windsor and the leotard clad cat-women struggle for dominance while the men try to (mostly unsuccessfully) dumbly figure out what is happening. When it finally dawns upon them the threat the leotarded women pose, the men recognize the issue is chiefly psychological, though this is not particularly well defined in the script for Cat-Women of the Moon (script credits go to Roy Hamilton, Jack Rabin and Al Zimbalist).

Marie Windsor complicates (and improves the film when she's on the screen, for what it's worth) this mostly mundane tale of a girl stuck in the middle of a war of the sexes (and species) who eventually has to declare for which guy she really loves (and which specie she trusts). Desert and caves are used as moon-landscape and there are small bits of science thrown in, but Cat-Women of the Moon is mired in following the plot of any number of World War II combat films about a bickering squad in hostile territory and how a girl, bruised egos and jealousy jeopardizes everyone.

Mounted with complete seriousness but dogged with ludicrous story situations, Cat-Women of the Moon has a uniquely awful follow-through from the combined effort of the entire cast to treat the material with respect.

AMAZON Streaming: Cat-Women of the Moon 1953

Original Page June 2017 | Updated May 2026

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