Love-Starved Amazons in Outer Space

This trend had its heyday in the 50's, when astronauts were always landing on paradisical but fatally flawed planets full of sex-starved women who were just waiting for men to show up and make their lives complete. Not that I'm denying that for straight women, having no men around would get awfully frustrating, but the genre tends to high camp.

Fire Maidens From Outer Space
Astronauts visit one of Jupiter's moons to discover that the last living refugee from Atlantis has already settled there, and somehow created an entire planet full of daughters to keep him company.

Abbott and Costello Go To Mars

Queen of Outer Space
On Venus, an evil queen prevents scientist Zsa Zsa Gabor (!) and other straight women from getting back to Earth where they can enjoy male companionship.

Cat-Women of the Moon

Missile to the Moon

Devil Girl From Mars
On Mars the war between the sexes became literal, and there are only a handful of men left. Despite their advanced technology, the Martians haven't figured out any method of reproducing aside from the traditional one, and since the few males left are kinda sickly, they've sent a Martian woman to earth in search of what she euphemistically calls "new blood".
Her spaceship lands on a Scottish moor and she terrorizes the random occupants of an inn by summoning her robot. They are all terrified as they watch a man in painted cardboard boxes lurch out of the spaceship at a rate of nearly two feet per minute. Eventually he gets around to vaporizing a pickup truck, so you see, they were right to be scared.
As in most such movies, the men are all horrified at the thought of going to a planet full of gorgeous women in black leather for stud service.
There's a review here with a priceless beginning: "One of the hazards of reviewing a 'bad' movie is the all too real danger of winding up liking it; a type of cinematic 'Stockholm Syndrome'."

Queen of the Amazons (1947)
This movie begins in India for no reason except that the makers wanted people to get mauled by tigers as well as lions. As soon as a few people have been attacked by tigers, someone tells the main characters that the guy they're looking for is in Africa, so they go there to find him and get mauled by lions. They have a great deal of trouble getting native guides and bearers to take them to the area their friend is rumored to have gone to, because the natives are terrified of a fearsome tribe of Amazons who live there. When we eventually find the Amazons, they turn out to be a bunch of pretty young women like the above. Seems a plane or something crashed in the area about 15 years ago and only the women on it survived. It seems there were a great many little girls on that plane, and now there are a great many young women. They're excellent hunters and keep lions as pets, but just what the Africans were so afraid of is a mystery. Indeed, as soon as these Amazons meet the British, all they want is to be taken where they can find husbands.

So one day I decided to rent a Hammer film, and I came across one called Prehistoric Women. I wasn't sure if I wanted to rent it till I read this from the blurb on the back: "David Marchant runs through the split in the temple wall and enters a prehistoric world where he meets the striking blonde Saria, who is one of several fair-haired tribeswomen oppressed by a rival group of dark-haired women led by the evil Queen Kari."
So I rented it, hoping I might pick up some pointers on how to oppress fair-haired tribeswomen. Turns out, when this chap David Marchant goes back in time via the ancient African temple, he lands in this tribe of brunette warriors who have the same designer as Xena and who keep blonde slaves who have the same designer as the Viking women in Roger Corman's The Viking Women and the Sea Serpent. (In that "Viking Women" movie, you could spot the villainess instantly, because she was the only brunette.) Turned out the men were all chained in this cavern doing hard physical labor. There was no visible result of their labor, but it was certainly grueling. I'll be moving there as soon as I can pack up some things to trade with the local brunettes to ensure my acceptance by the tribe. (Let's see: some Chanel No. 5, a few tubes of Revlon's Cherries In The Snow, and maybe some bleach for that embarrassing brunette problem of pale grey peach fuzz on the upper lip. [Even Elizabeth Taylor and Vivien Leigh had it. It's a curse.])
Anyway, Queen Kari, who hasn't seen a clean-shaven man in years, promptly presses Marchant into stud service. Marchant, however, is evidently a gentleman, because he refuses to, er, replenish the gene pool of the gorgeous brunette queen wearing skimpy furs because he prefers the gorgeous blonde slavegirl wearing skimpy furs. Some guys are just picky. As a penalty, he gets tossed into the cavern with the other men.
Meanwhile, the blondes plot to overthrow the brunettes. Turns out trying to escape is pointless, because the area where this tribe lives is surrounded by a really fierce tribe that captures all escapees in return for the occasional blonde. Which seems like a perfectly reasonable exchange to me. While the blondes are plotting, Saria asks the others, "Where is he?" "Who?" the others ask, as if there's been more than one male outside the cavern since the movie started. They decide to ask him to help them overthrow the brunettes. "He wouldn't betray me," Saria says. Blondes.
So at Saria's request, Marchant makes the huge sacrifice of joining the gorgeous brunette queen in her chambers. The scene goes like a sort of reverse bodice-ripper, a codpiece ripper. The strapping dark-haired alpha female smacks the hero around a little, forces a couple of rough kisses on him, enjoys his feisty resistance which she can tame at her leisure, and shoves him onto her sleeping furs.
In the next scene, however, Saria cannot endure seeing Kari parade her new arm decoration around and blurts out the entire plot. (Blondes.) So he gets tossed back into the cavern, and Saria gets picked to be the next offering to the fierce tribe.
But it's too late. The blondes and the men conspire to overthrow the brunettes. All the characters run around the jungle, apparently fighting or something. Matters come to a head when a white rhinoceros shows up. That's the god they worship, you see. Everyone runs away from the rhino but the queen, who stands right in front of it, announcing, "He is our god! He wouldn't hurt us!" Apparently she's been hanging around too many blondes.
So the rhino gores the queen, the men and blondes settle down to enjoy a life free of brunettes, and the hero is hustled back through the time-travel portal, where a reincarnation of Saria is waiting for him. The End.

Amazon Women on the Moon
A hilarious spoof of the 50's all-female world genre of movies. (It doesn't actually have Japanese subtitles; I got this image from a Japanese website.)

The Wild Women of Wongo

"They had never seen a man. They just knew this fascinatingly yucky creature couldn't be one!"
Only the female colonists ever arrived on this planet. When men failed to show up, they reproduced by cloning, turned to Lesbianism, and after a few generations deified men as godlike creatures who would one day come to their planet to make everything great. When one finally shows up, some are disgusted, some awed, some threatened by the challenge his very existence presents to the existing power structure, and a couple simply fall in love. A playful and somewhat sophomoric story.

The War Against The Yukks by Keith Laumer
This short story (which is included in the anthology linked above) is an amusing addition to the "Lost Planet of the Love-Starved Women" genre. Two men land on one of Jupiter's moons (Callisto, suitably) and the women there have not seen men, who they call "Yukks", for so many thousands of years that they assume the men are simply flatchested women. (I found this an interesting counterpart to the oft-cited theory that the Amazons of antiquity were actually male warriors who were mistaken for women because they shaved their beards.) Men, or "Yukks", have become creatures of legend: "The Yukks are evil beings who tried to enslave all Girlhood, once, long ago, before we were driven out of the Heavenly Garden. They were great big ugly creatures, with hair growing all over their faces, and huge, bony hands - six of them, I think - and whenever they could catch a poor, defenseless girl, they'd.... They'd do Strange Things to her."
The girls all instinctively gravitate towards the men despite their total ignorance. The propaganda isn't doing much good, though, as many of the women find the legend of the Yukks sinfully compelling. They all keep thinking "Strange" (heterosexual) thoughts. It isn't really very logical, but at least for a change the men rejoice at their good fortune instead of being horrified at the thought of spending their lives surrounded by sexually frustrated women in need of their attention. As always, their role in reproduction makes them politically valuable, but luckily for them, the women's ignorance about how it all works (a few millenia and you forget about these things) means that they get to be esteemed citizens rather than put under lock and key as previous commodities.

Also published as Father of the Amazons. A spaceship crash-lands on a planet on which a lost colony of humans has been residing for centuries. Something in the environment makes many of the men sterile and makes most babies girls, and accordingly men are rare and a precious commodity. To ensure the survival of the society, men were forbidden to do any dangerous or strenuous jobs that might endanger them, and as a result, the women become female chauvinists, expecting to protect and shelter men.
As soon as our hero lands he is pressed into stud service, until he is able to figure out what is making most of the men sterile so they can be cured.

Jo-Jo, Congo King, a Tarzan clone, meets a tribe of lilliputian women.

Mesa of Lost Women
This is one of those movies often billed as an "all-female world" story that disappoints. A mad scientist is experimenting with injecting spider DNA (or something) into the numerous young women who live in his retreat with him. Most of the movie is about the normal people who figure that the vicinity of a mad scientist's lair is a good place to go camping.

Back