Fire Maidens From Outer Space

Poster tagline: SHOCKING SENSATION!!! SEE THE MOST AMAZING OF ALL RITUALS IN THE TEMPLE OF LOVE!!! SEE THE SUPERSONIC THRILL OF HURTLING THROUGH SPACE TOWARDS A LOST PLANET!!! SEE THE FIRE MAIDENS, DESTINED FOR ONE PURPOSE – THE CREATION OF A NEW RACE OF SUPERHUMANS!!! I've seen about 200 films from the Golden Age, and I'd put this one in the top 10. A clear tip for local fans who don't hesitate to give 1* or Boo! to mainstream films, you’d be speechless. Everything is bad here. The direction is completely off, the shots are stretched to fill time (a secretary walks down the stairs for 10 seconds, pulls her chair up to write a note, tucks her chair away for 5 seconds, and walks up the stairs again for 10 seconds, all that in a single shot). The actors routinely stare at the camera when they're supposed to be acting scared, some of them are obviously laughing, the extras honestly stare and stare for a long time, the girls – the Jupiternians – dance and dance....and dance, the routine activities are stretched out in one take and the runtime swells and swells to make it at least the 80 minutes it needs to be, and even that's too much. The sets are non-existent, except for one room with decorations and a static view of the spaceship. There are no special effects, not even any of the famous rear projection, even though they would fit here, and the shot of the spacecraft stationary on Jupiter is a scanned photo. From a technical point of view, it's rubbish. During the launch and the flight, the astronauts sit comfortably in their chairs, as if they were watching football in the living room, untethered, wearing only white medical gowns, the rocket is controlled by a steering wheel and two levers, and because there was no money, no one bothered with the decorations of Jupiter, so the surface of the planet is an ordinary Central European landscape, and quite ugly and dull at that, overgrown with bushes. They talk about the land of New Atlantis, its lake, its temple, but you don't see any of that because the budget probably was spent on catering. Thank God for the monster (a skinny guy in a black jumpsuit with a hockey mask), it's funny, so at least you can laugh in between banging your head against the wall. Ed Wood gets demonized here on FilmBooster, but folks, compared to this, he’s Fellini. I had the "privilege" of seeing the HD version, yes even these obscure titles are being remastered. (13.08.2016)