Amazon Women On The Moon (1987)

Five directors contributed to this scattershot collection of bawdy sketches satirising everything from dating to late-night TV via B-grade sci-fi movies and advertising.

The anthology is assembled in the spirit of Saturday Night Live and while some of the gags are clever and inspired, the majority fall flat. A myriad of cult performers invest the only sporadically amusing proceedings with a surface gloss of credibility. Ironically, the project seems best suited for late-night TV.

The real fun – apart from a segment pontificating on whether or not Jack the Ripper’s true identity was the Loch Ness Monster (‘Bullshit or Not?!’) – is to watch this on DVD in the US and then play regular TV and try to spot the difference. There isn’t much . . .

The full list of segments is ‘Amazon Women on the Moon’; ‘Hairlooming’; ‘Bullshit or Not’; ‘Pethouse Video’; ‘Critic’s Corner’; ‘Roast Your Loved One’; ‘Reckless Youth’; ‘Murray in Videoland’; ‘Silly Paté’; ‘Hospital’; ‘Titan Man; Son of the Invisible Man’ (in which Ed Begley Jr. plays a man who thinks he is invisible but is merely running around naked to the amusement of the locals); ‘Art Sale’; ‘Video Pirates’; ‘Blacks Without Soul’ (including an appeal by BB King); ‘First Lady of the Evening’; ‘Two I.D.’s’; ‘Don ‘No Soul’ Simmons’; ‘Mondo Condo’ and ‘Video Date’.

The “Amazon” segments were directed by Robert K. Weiss, who gets a lot of the subtle physical details right. For example, the actors keep walking past the same rocks on their little set, and the control room of their rocket ship is furnished with typing chairs from an office supply store.

Rosanna Arquette
Griffin Dunne
Ralph Bellamy
Steve Guttenberg
Ed Begley Jr.
Arsenio Hall

Directors
John Landis
Joe Dante
Carl Gottlieb
Peter Horton
Robert K Weiss