Amazon Women on the Moon

Amazon Women on the Moon

The film is a ramble through television but it sometimes gives the impression that you are just flipping channels yourself; in one segment, game show contestants start sentences that are finished by Bugs Bunny. Five directors handle the episodes, which feature a host of show-biz celebrities; at the center of it all is a satire on 1950s science fiction movies called “Amazon Women on the Moon.”

Robert K. Weiss directed the “Amazon” segments, and he gets many of the physical details subtly right: The actors keep walking past the same rocks on their little set, and typing chairs from an office supply store furnish the control room of their rocket ship. But does this kind of satire make any sense? Actual grade Z 1950s science fiction movies already have covered this territory more convincingly.

Other targets include Playboy video centerfolds, hospital soap operas, singles bars and TV charity marathons (including B. B. King’s appeal on behalf of “Blacks Without Soul”). The funniest episode is probably Carl Gottlieb’s “Son of the Invisible Man,” in which Ed Begley Jr. plays a man who thinks he is invisible but isn’t. In classic invisible man style, he amazes onlookers by swooping coffee cups and overcoats through the air but since they can see him holding them, it doesn’t have quite the desired effect.

I also enjoyed Joe Dante’s new angle on satirizing TV movie criticism shows: Instead of having critics roll around on the floor choking each other (the usual approach), Dante has them team up to savagely critique a viewer’s miserable life; after dying in front of his set, he is buried at a celebrity roast where Henny Youngman, Rip Taylor and Charlie Callas tell jokes over his bier.

Many sketches contain an original (and even funny) comic idea or two but then go on too long without fresh ammunition. John Landis directs the B. B. King spots, which are a running gag through the film and also feature David Alan Grier as a specimen black without soul a singer so unhip that his greatest hits include “Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Old Oak Tree” and “Ballad of the Green Berets”; the idea gets a quick laugh, but then Landis goes nowhere with it; each repetition is just more of the same.

There may have been a time, 20 years ago, when the sophomores of “Amazon Women on the Moon” might have seemed faintly daring; but even Mad magazine has moved on from simple satire to a more off-center view of its subjects. Satirists are in trouble when their subjects are funnier than they are. My notion for a funny movie about American television would be, quite simply, a compilation film a series of real moments from real programs presented without comment; I have a feeling we wouldn’t believe our eyes.

Watch Amazon Women on the Moon For Free On Gomovies.