Stuff To Blow Your MindAre you ready for a 1960 Mexican sci-fi comedy involving multiple alien monsters, space vampires, interplanetary politics and several música norteña songs? Also a robot falls in love with a jukebox. Rob and Joe discuss it all in this classic episode of Weirdhouse Cinema. (originally published 9/3/2021)
Hey, welcome to Weird House Cinema. Rewind. This is Rob Lamb and oh we have a fun one for you today. This is our discussion of the nineteen sixty Mexican sci fi comedy musical Ship of Monsters. So I hope you enjoyed this one. This one originally published nine three, twenty twenty one.
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, welcome to Weird House Cinema. This is Rob Lamb.
And I'm Joe McCormick and Rob. I am so thrilled to be talking about the movie that we've selected for today. Lea Nave de los monstros or The Ship of Monsters, an astoundingly, shockingly devastatingly awesome Mexican film from nineteen sixty in the exquisite genre of science fiction, horror, romantic comedy, music goal. This is a movie about women from the planet Venus who are roaming deep space on a quest for the hunkiest aliens in the galaxy and skip from planet to planet collecting reptile cyclops hunks, kissy face brain mutant hunks, fang head skeleton hunks until they finally meet the hunkiest hunk of all a rascal writer of the Chihuahua Planes, played by the incomparable Lallo Gonzalez aka l Pipoorro. More on him later. This movie is so much fun.
Yeah, this was a real pleasant surprise when you brought this title to our attention. I did like some preliminary research. I looked it up in the Psychotronic Video Guide and I was like, all right, it's listed there. Sounds like it might be good. So I went into it expecting there to be something awesome about it. You know, i'd find a monster I liked or a performance I liked. I was also expecting a certain amount of dead space in there is sometimes the case with films from this time period of this caliber, but this one is just wall to wall excellence.
Yes, totally. They're not a dull moment. I mean, we've we've watched some sci fi horror movies from the fifties that, you know, they might have a really fun, goofy looking monster, or they might have elements that work really well, not of this Earth comes to mind. But then there'll be other moments that are kind of some dead space, yeah, or kind of dull square lug dude, it's just standing around delivering dry dialogue. This movie has essentially none of that. It's all killer, no filler exactly.
Oh man, Yeah, this one's This one's great.
Would this count as our first science fiction, horror, romantic comedy musical.
Yes, it definitely would, and it I guess you could. You could rank it as one of our first true musicals. Or it's as close to a true musical as we've covered. Certainly, some of the movies we've looked at have complete songs within them, but this one has multiple musical numbers. I mean they're not I mean they're very they're definitely lip SYNCD. Yeah, there's there's maybe only a limited amount of dance choreography going on, but still there's enough music in this film that it feels like a musical.
Oh no, I would defend the dance sequences. There's one dance scene in this movie that is just divine. It's the one later on where Lalo Gonzalez is dancing and singing to the to the Vampire Queen. Spoiler we'll get to some twists about this later on. But he's also trying to steal her, like her technology, her space weapon, and so they're dancing around and she's making eyes at him, and he's singing a song about the seasons.
Yeah, true, okay, but that that felt also very organic. It felt like organic dancing that just came out of the music in the moment.
Yeah. So of course, folks out there, you know, we love our unlikely genre mashups. We've talked about supernatural wrestling movies, supernatural biker movies, but this has got to be one of the biggest like you know, suicide soft drink kind ofups of all time. It's got really almost every movie genre in the same thing. I think it is most often referred to as a science fiction comedy, but it's also definitely got horror elements. Like some of the things about the monsters in this movie gets surprisingly dark in a way that you would not expect for a light comedy. And the musical numbers are just just wonderful.
Yeah. Like when we say they're alien monsters and they're hunks or males, you might think of' what's that movie the Head Jeff Goldblum in it where they were all alien hunks?
Oh? Is that Earth Girls or easy?
Yeah, you might be thinking of Earth Girls are easy, but no, these are entirely non human aliens. Some of them are not even remotely human, So just go ahead and exercise that image from your mind.
This movie might be called earth males or liars, but lovable liars. But so anyway, having read about this movie before I watched it, I expected the plot to be bonkers, which it absolutely It is just like Goober's Inside Out. This movie will give you hard boiled egg eyes. But also the musical numbers are charming, the comedy scenes are really funny. It just works on almost every level. It pretty much rules. Yeah.
Yeah, the humor I found held up pretty well. I was laughing at some of the intentional humor in this picture. I also have to throw in that, oh man, I love a good movie poster, and if you look around for movie posters for this film, you'll find some kind of boring images. But there's also a terrific image of the sort of lizard cyclops monster, way bigger in the poster than he is in the film, and he's holding a woman in one hand like palm, like a baseball, and it's got this wonderful orange and red look going on. It's absolutely beautiful. And in fact I showed this to my wife, and she has agreed that if we can find this, we are going to put it on a wall in our house. It's just that lovely.
Godspeed on your quest. I hope you do find it now. You've been having trouble, right, it seems like merch for this movie is rather scarce on the ground.
Yeah. Yeah, so far, all I've seen is somebody in Italy selling this poster on eBay. So I'm going to continue to look around a little bit.
Now. I think this poster is the Italian poster for the movie, right, because it's the title is a little bit different. It's Lenave del Monstrim.
Yes, that would be it. Yeah, that now I think. Yeah, I think I've also seen maybe the Italian DVD has this art on it. So yes, I highly recommend looking this up. It's just gorgeous.
Maybe we can hit a little montage of some audio from the films Bigle and Our Well.
I hope that conveyed at least some of the magic of this of this this film, because there's a lot visually going on here.
Are Are you ready to talk about some of the people involved.
Yeah, let's get into it.
Okay. So the director of this movie was named Rogalio A. Gonsalez, and I was looking around for good biographical info about him. I couldn't find much in English, but I found a biography in Spanish on the website of the National Autonomous University of Mexico website, and I had to run this through Google Translate. So I hope nothing significant is getting lost, but just to summarize some of the stuff that covered in there. Gonzalez was a Mexican actor, director, radio host, radio producer, film producer, and screenwriter who worked throughout the Golden age of Mexican cinema. He was born on January twenty seventh, nineteen twenty two, in Monterey, Nuevo Leon as Antonio Rogalio Gonzalez Villarial, and apparently in his younger years, Gonzalez was preparing for a career in medicine, but at some point he got that movie bug. He quit his studies and he went into the film industry, first as an actor and a screenwriter in the forties, and then as a director beginning in the fifties. And he directed a ton of movies in the fifties through the early eighties, though I don't think I have seen any of them. Other than this one.
Now, yeah, I agree. I don't think I've seen anything on this list, though there's some interesting looking titles. I noticed that his last picture in eighty three was Mexico two thousand, which, yes, some sort of a sci fi political commentary, sad attire sort of a thing.
Yeah, And there was one title of his I came across that I don't remember if he wrote this one or directed it. What was called like the Skeleton of Missus so and so, I don't.
Know, Missus Morales. Oh, yeah, okay, Yeah, And I've also heard that Conquistador di la Luna is also supposed to be rather weird.
Oh, Conqueror of the Moon. Yeah, Actually, Michael Weldon mentions that one.
Yeah, he mentions that as being a stand out weird as well.
I was trying to find a copy of this that could be watched. The only thing I can find is it's on a DVD that you can get somewhere that I think does not have dubbing or English subtitles as far as I can tell, so, but I don't know. It looks so visually strange that it might be worth it. Even if you don't speak Spanish, you can probably kind of suss out the plot. Yeah, But anyway, a little more about Gonzalez's Regalio Gonzalez's biography. There are actually two major Gunzaleses in this movie, but Rogalio Gonzalez the director. He was also a union leader in the Director's Division of the Mexican Union of Cinema Production Workers, and he passed away due to a tragic highway accident in nineteen eighty four. But as for personal descriptions of his sort of you know, his presence and personality, the website I mentioned cites a description of Gonzalez from a magazine called Cinevos in the year nineteen forty nine, so this would have been before he started directing, back when he was just an actor and a writer. But the description through translation goes like this, He has a clear intelligence and his sentences are logical and precise, despite the passion he puts into them. He is tall, with blue eyes, thin, almost transparent. Sometimes he hunches over as if overwhelmed by excessive work, since he writes at all hours, sometimes living exclusively at night. Oh wow, Now this profile was written many years before he made Ship of Monsters. Ship of Monsters came out in nineteen sixty. Again, I think this was in nineteen forty nine, but I like to imagine that it was this nocturnal consciousness that birthed the physical forms of the eye popping monsters in this movie, the furry Spider Beetle, the irritable Lizard Cyclops, the Kissy Face brain Mutant, and the wonderful Bone Boy. So, like I said, I have not seen any of Gonsalez's other movies, but given this, he's got a real talent for extremely visually charming, tight well paced cinema.
Yes, yeah, absolutely. Now a quick note about the individuals with writing credits on this film. First of all, the story credit goes to Jose Maria Fernandez Unsein, who lived nineteen twenty one through two thousand and three, an Argentinian film director, screenwriter, and playwright who was exiled to Mexico after the overthrow of Juan Toon. This was because Unsan had connections to Eva Peron, so very prolific. He has I think one hundred and twenty two writing credits on IMDb. But then adaptation writing credit goes to Alfredo Verrella, who lived nineteen twelve through nineteen eighty six. This is a guy who wrote various westerns and now according to IMDb, this is definitely the Mexican born Alfredo Verrella. But there's also an Argentinian novelist and communist journalist named Alfredo Verrella who lived at the same time, like with birth and death dates just like two years off. So I was a little confused by that at first. I was trying to figure out could this be given the Argentina connection here, but it seems to be two different people.
Okay, Now coming to the cast, this movie again just has a wonderful cast, and we should start with the lead actor Ulalio Gonzalez, also known as Lalo Gonzalez, also known by the nickname El Pipouro. And I was trying to look it up. What does that really mean? I don't know if it means something different in the context of his nickname. But the only thing I could really find is a translation is that this word means bassoonist, like the player of a bassoon. I'm not sure what to make of that. But Lalo Gonzalez was a musician. He was widely known as a comic, actor and a singer.
Yeah, Gonzalez was a musician, comedian, actor, director and producer. And in this film, yeah, he's playing this Pipooro character, a kind of stereotypical North Mexican rancher. This was an immensely popular character. It was central to his musical identity and it helped make him the face of Musica Nortegna during the Golden Age of Mexican cinema. Now, Musica at Nortegna is the regional music of Northern Mexico. That's essentially what it means, traditionalized, traditionally utilizing the accordion the bajo sexto guitar, and it apparently emerged in the nineteenth century out of elements of traditional Mexican music along with German, Austrian and Czech folk music, very popular in Northern Mexican and also among many Mexican Americans. So within this genre and within Mexican cinema all this period, Pipporo Here Gonzalez is a legend. I think it's important to realize, like this is this is a film that is showcasing somebody that was already at or near the peak of their their initial popularity. Though this is a guy that would remain important throughout his life.
Right and so as we're saying so much about this movie is great, but a lot of it really rests on the incredible star power of La Lo Gonzalez. He is a I would say like he has a once in a generation kind of star presence. His screen charisma is overwhelming. He is just an absolutely lovable liar rascal, and the personality it just sort of like drips out of the TV screen, like fifteen minutes into the movie. Rachel and Rachel and I watched it together and she adored the movie as well, but we were immediate just like googling other La Low Gonzales movies, we wanted to see everything he was in. Unfortunately, I couldn't find anything else he did involving monsters. So this might be the apex, but we'll see.
Yeah, yeah, I mean, his humor really translates even without an actual like I mean, with translation. Obviously we had subtitles. I think we each had slightly different subtitles, as is kind of becoming a tradition here, but you still it still oozes through, you know. Like you say, he's very charismatic, he's very funny. I think you would find him humorous even if you didn't know what he was saying.
I'm not aware that this movie has ever been dubbed into English, but it's the kind of performance where I would recommend watching it with the Spanish audio with subtitles, just because, like the line delivery is so funny. It's like you can hear that. It's funny even if you don't speak Spanish, right, right.
And then also the songs that he's singing there, I think always part of the plot, so you need to know what he's singing as well well.
Right, So, if anyone.
Out there wants to learn more about Nortegna, then there are various sources you can go to. But I was looking around and there's actually a book by Catherine Ragland titled Musica Nortegna Mexican Americans Creating a Nation between Nations. This came out in two thousand and nine. In this book, she explores the topic in depth, but I found this particular summary rather interesting. Quote. Musical Nortaigna, a musical genre with its roots in the folk ballad traditions of northern Mexico and the Texas Mexican border region, has become a hugely popular musical style in the US, particularly among Mexican immigrants, featuring evocative songs about undocumented border crossings, drug traffickers, and the plight of immigrant workers. Musical no'artagna has become the music of a quote nation between nations, and she also points out that it's sometimes seen this particular genre as being maybe less technically refined compared to other genres of Mexican of like folk music, but it is seen as often seen as being imbued with more feeling, And a lot of this seems to come from the idea that this was the music of working people who had to make time for music in the evenings and then put all their passion into that.
That's true, and a lot of the greatest folk music traditions do have origins like this. They're not from people who were, you know, full time professional musicians, but you know, consists of songs and structures and elements created by people who were, you know, just like regular working people who were playing music for entertainment in the evenings. Yeah.
Yeah, So anyway, I was very interested to learn this. So if anyone out there, if you know a great deal more about Nortaigna and you have some experience with it, do write in let us know. I'd love to know more about this interesting genre of music.
But the excellent cast does not stop there. So Lolo Gonzalez is playing our main earthling for the movie. He is Loreano is his character's name. But there are also a couple of other major characters who are Aliens, these Ladies from Beyond, and they are played by Anna Bertha Leppe and Loraina of Alaskez.
Yes. Lepe plays Gamma and Velasquez plays Beta. Both of our Venusians are played by former Miss Mexicos.
Now, I know you could easily make this mistake, but I want to be very pedantic about this. Lorain of Alaskaz's character Beta, though she initially starts the movie on the planet Venus, she is not a Venusian.
That's true.
That's true, they say. They say she is a daughter of or the planet of Shadows, and so she's an alien on Venus at the beginning of the movie and then travels with the Venusian Gamma on her mission.
Yeah. One of the really delectable things about this film is that there seems to be so much world building going on in it that, on the surface would be completely unnecessary for a dumb monster movie that is basically just a vehicle for a popular musician, and you know, in a couple of very attractive actors.
This is a light, romantic musical comedy with killer monsters in it.
Yeah, and yet you get a sense that somebody puts some thought into this about like, Okay, what is Venus's role in the Solar system and realms beyond the Solar System? How is their power arrived? Yeah, because we ultimately have an interplanetary civilization outlined within this film. Yeah, all right, well let's talk about these these two individuals. First of all, Lepe who again plays Gama. She lived nineteen thirty four through twenty thirteen, and she was a big deal. She was a stunning star of Mexico's Golden Age of cinema and a runner up representing Mexico in the nineteen fifty three Miss Universe pageant. Other credits of hers include Renee Cardona's Neutron Traps The Invisible Killers from nineteen sixty five that stars also stars a guy by the name of Jorge Riviero, who is in a film called Where Wolf that I think you're familiar with.
Oh Jorge Rivero. Yeah.
Yeah. She was also in three Santo movies Santo Versus The Diabolical Brain from sixty three, Santo in The Hotel of Death from sixty three, and Santo Versus The King of Crime from sixty two.
Okay, gotta put those on the list. Which one are we doing first? Diabolical Brain? That sounds good.
I don't know. I was looking. I think these all sound like maybe they're more crime based Santo movies. You know.
Oh, diabolical brain isn't like a huge alien brain. It might be like a smart criminal.
Yeah. Now, Velasquez, who again plays Beta. She was born in nineteen thirty seven. I think as of this recording is still around. She was also a big deal during Mexico's Golden Age of cinema. She was in two different Santo movies, both in sixty two, Santo Versus the Zombies and Santo Versus The Vampire Women, and in that she plays Zorina, Queen of the Vampires.
Oh, okay, there's gonna be some crossover here. Warning, I think I already said something to this effect. We will be spoiling some minor twists in this film. I hope you're okay with that. And so here's the spoiler. There is just a delightful twist about halfway through this movie where Lorain of Alaskaz's character is revealed to be a space vampire from the planet of the Vampires. In fact, she's going to become the Queen of the Vampires by h I don't recall the exact plan, suck in everybody's blood and kidnapping Lolo Gonzalez, I think.
Right, And there's some politics in there, you know, like marrying the Prince of Mars and so forth.
Oh yeah, that's right.
Yeah, but yeah, she's a natural to play a vampire queen. You know, she's got the look, she's got the charisma.
And she I gotta say she is so good in this movie and in a comedy performance, because even in moments where she doesn't have any lines, she's really funny. She's often the funniest actor in a scene just by doing hilarious things with her face, Like she does these weird I want that eyes at things, you know, like at weapons, or at monsters, or at a jukebox or at Pipoo when he's dancing and singing a song about the seasons. She just does these eyes that had Rachel and I shrieking with laughter.
Yeah, she's really good. And you know, sometimes in films of this caliber, you have a role like this, go to somebody who just kind of stands there. But no, she's never still, if not physically, at least like energy wise, there's always something going on in her head. She was also in Renee Cardona's nineteen sixty three non Santo wrestling picture Doctor of Doom, in which she stars as female wrestler or luchadora Gloria Venus, who has to stop an evil, mad scientist with an ape named Gomar from carrying out sadistic brain transplant experiments.
What yeah, well, and she's Gloria Venus and in this movie she's on a mission sponsored by the planet Venus.
It makes me think that this film was a big hit or at least impressed enough people where they're like this, this guy's great. We need a we're gonna make a movie. We need a vampire queen. Bam, she's in. Or hey, we're thinking about having a Venusian, let's put her in. She has some sort of tie to Venus because she went on to play that Glory of Venus character again in nineteen sixty four as wrestling women versus the Aztec Mummy. So yeah, a number of interesting films are coming up with these two.
Beta is a queen, Loraina Velasquez rocks the screen in this film.
Now we also have an actual queen in this we have the Queen of Venus. Oh, and she is played by Quinzuelo Frank who lived nineteen twelve through nineteen ninety one. And she has two Santo credits as well, sixty seven Santo versus the Martian Invasion in sixty eight Santo's versus the Villains of the Ring. I haven't seen that one, but that one sounds like the most obvious title. Of course, Santo is going to fight villains of the Ring.
I don't know. I'd also want to fight them.
Yeah, she was also she was active much earlier. She was in I think two different nineteen forty two Mexican adaptations of first The Three Musketeers but then also The Count of Money Cristo. Now, another great thing about this film is that has wonderful costumes, has wonderful monster effects. So I had to look up, well, who's behind this? And I'm not sure exactly. Sometimes the monster credits are kind of lost, especially in limited credits for a film like this, But Julio Chavez is credited for costumes, and I noticed that, among many other credits, they did costumes and wardrobe on nineteen sixty nine's Santo w and the Treasure of Dracula, which was covered several months back.
So this is a Santo heavy connection section.
Yeah. Yeah, And when it comes to the music, we have another direct reference to Santo and the Treasure of Dracula because Sergio Guerrero, who lived nineteen twenty one through two thousand and eight, he did the music in this which has some neat sci fi sounds in there in places which I liked. But this is a guy with two hundred and fifty two composer credits on IMDb, including such Mexican films as Neutron Traps, The Invisible Killers, Le Sombra, Viingadora, and again Santo in the Treasure of Dracula. So yes, lots of Santo connections here.
Now, if Guerrero here did the music, I don't know if that necessarily would include other types of sound design, but I did want to highlight that this movie has some really good sound design, Like there are moments where the monsters are speaking, and it's not necessarily music, though I do love the music in this movie. But it's like the way the vocal effects they've done on the voiceovers, for when the puppets are talking, giving them these raspy voices as if they're emanating from the caves of Hades. You know, just great monster voices.
Yeah, some wonderful Spanish monster voices in this it's pretty great. Well, should we get into the plot a little bit here? We've been talking it up. Let's tell folks what this movie is about.
Okay, Now, we're not going to do a full scene by scene on this one. We might go a little more detail early on and then later for the later parts of the movie, just talk about some highlights and ideas. But I do want to get very granular with the introduction because I think the very intro of the movie really sets the move fast and break things tone. I would say, in the much better sense of that phrase, that's the attitude this film has toward plotting. So the very first thing we see is an atom, you see, like the old school representation of the atomic nucleus with all of its orbitals, and the narrator says, this is an atom, then it shows us a planet. At first I thought it was the Moon, but I think it's supposed to be planet Earth. And then it says, this is the universe. Then it goes on and atom is infinitely small, the universe is infinitely large. However, everything is ruled by the same laws. Man has learned to release the power of the atom, and with it wants to conquer the universe. Some really elegant symmetry in this opening narration. This is almost a strange poem of sorts. And then the narration goes on it says, but he dreams of leaving the Earth and leaving his seed on a distant planet, perhaps with the subconscious desire of starting a new race, one that will remain ignorant of atomic power and warfare. Right, so the idea is that, okay, all species maybe that discover atomic energy and atomic weapons, eventually we'll want to go sort of create a new version of themselves on a planet that is blissfully free of this terrible knowledge. And of course, throughout the well this we're getting a lot of we're getting stock footage of mushroom clouds from atomic tests. But then it goes on to say, and that is a planet known to us. So here we cut to Venus. It says, let's go on a characteristically dark night to Venus, and we see the these creepy images of lights with a hazy four ground, so they're just kind of these very fuzzily defined lights in the background and mist and darkness with these figures and cloaks wandering into the frame, and it's actually quite creepy. It is.
I found this quite evocative early on. Now I understand some of these space scenes we see early in the film or are taken from nineteen fifty seven's Road to the Star as a Soviet film about the possible future of spaceflight. But I'm not sure about these kind of dark, hooded figures here with the cosmic backdrop.
Yeah, I don't know about those. I do think, yeah, I think you're right. I was also reading that some of these early scenes are just lifted from other films.
One thing I want to add is that you could easily you could be watching this and think, all right, here's our sort of out there's introduction, but then we're going to go onto another movie and this will have little more nothing to do with where we're going. But it does come back up again. It seems to be in you know, it seems to be stitched into the plot itself, and it's not just some thing that's just tacked on the front to keep us in our seats for a few minutes.
That's right. I would say that actually this is this is pretty coherent. As as bonkers as the plot of this movie is, it all kind of ties together, like it makes sense even though it's nuts. So, okay, we learned that the planet Venus is preparing for the most important interplanetary space flight in their history, and then we get shots of the surface of Venus where we see a bunch of women lining up in military formations outside of a rocket ship and there is nary a man in sight. So what's going on here? Well, we get some exposition. The region to Venus comes out. I think she's the queen of the planet and she's addressing two women. So you have Annabertha Leppe and Lorraine of Alaskas as the characters Gamma and Beta, respectively, and they are being given a mission. Gamma is the commander in chief of the interplanetary spacecraft. So the region of Venus explains the situation, and the situation is dire. She says, Okay, the last male on our planet is dead. They're all gone. They are dead due to an atomic scourge. And so she is giving a mission to these two brave space pilots. They're going to fly around and go to all the planets and collect the most perfect male specimens to bring back to Venus. And then Gamma says, I will bring you the most beautiful male specimens. The most perfect of them will sire the new generations of Venus. And then we get the part I alluded to earlier where the regent says that Beta, played by Lorrain of Alaskaz, she's a foreigner to Venus. She's the daughter of or the planet of shadows, and she has been assigned to travel alongside Gamma on her mission because she's the greatest space navigator on the planet. And then the last thing she says to them is in you we trust. Question about Gamma's outfit. Did you ever figure out what the thing on her shoulder is? Oh?
Yeah, it kind of has this kind of tassly feathery thing, but also might be an antenna. I'm not sure. Maybe she has like wireless in the suit. I'm not sure.
I couldn't tell if it was supposed to be decorative or supposed to be technology. But yeah, she has this array of sprigs of something coming off of her left shoulder and I don't know what they are, and they're there like the whole movie. She changes outfits, but that's always there. It looks kind of like she had some of those like wire fairy wings, but somebody crumpled them up and moved them all to one shoulder. I don't know.
Yeah, yeah, I mean it's stylish. I mean that seems to have been the main intent here is that these women should look extremely stylish. As they travel through space.
They look super cool. And it is announced via footage from another movie that the orbits have aligned and so it is time for them to depart. So we see Gamma and Beta. They enter the interior of their spaceship, which maybe we should describe because a lot of the action of the film will take place here. So there are like two pilot seats where they're operating these big control panels. I guess Beta is the nownavigator and Gammas the commander, and then behind them there is all this heavy machinery which looked like real heavy machinery, not just like something on the set. I don't know what they were filming. Maybe they were generators of some kind, like these big years working back and forth.
Yeah, the set is great, it definitely. They do a great job establishing it as the command center of the spaceship. I got kind of tones of observatory from parts of it, but I'm not really sure, because clearly huge parts of it are an actual set, so it's not just that they went into an observatory or into a factory and started filming there. There's also some really elaborate stuff they constructed, so I don't know.
Yeah, there are these big clusters of balls up on the ceiling, like gigantic grapes. I don't know what those are supposed to be. And then there is a big platform looking out over the rest of the set like a preacher's pulpit, and there's I don't know, various weird glass bulbs and files in the background, and just rivets and metal everywhere. It's cool. And then while the credits play, we see them setting down on strange worlds, including this one world that's full of crooked spires of rock that are sort of the same size and shape as the rocket that lands, except you know, they're stony and jagged, and I guess this must be happening off screen. But during this credit sequence we're to understand that they're out there collecting all of the mails along their journey, which they tend to keep frozen in giant cubes of ice. And they accomplish this by operating a camera flash at them. And it made me wonder which of the male monsters comes from the spike rock planet.
I don't know, it could be home to. Well, we know this is not the surface of Mars because we know what Mars looks.
Like, so right, that's where brain Boy comes from.
Yeah, yeah, it's not the Prince of Mars, so it must be. It must be one of the others. This would be a suitable planet, and perhaps for the skeletal, fleshless being.
Yeah Billy Bones.
Yeah, but we'll get him in a minute now.
Another major devil on the initial premise is that somewhere along the way, Gamma and Beta acquire an alien robot called Tor, and Tor is a major helper of their mission as they go along. He wasn't theirs originally, but they say that they again in a strange bit of just just ever so briefly alluded to world building. They say that they collected him from a dead planet where all of the humans had annihilated themselves with atomic war.
Yeah. He's key to the whole operation though, because he has the ability to freeze the monsters in blocks of some sort of ice. Otherwise, I mean, they could still handle the monsters. They prove that later on they have space flamethrowers, but this is a huge help.
Well, now I think they can also freeze the monsters with their little camera flashbox.
I think, oh, can they?
Okay, But he's very helpful for he's very helpful because he contains these encyclopedias of knowledge about all the planets.
Right, yeah, that's right, And these are often really funny sometimes with some you know, kind of I guess political satire thrown in there, right when they like asking about Mexico and stuff.
Right, yes, So, so eventually the robot tells them their spacecraft is suffering mechanical trouble and they got to set down on the nearest planet for repairs. Well, what's the nearest planet? The robot says, it is Intarsis one thirty five sub two planetoid of the fourth order. And so how does the robot know what this planet is? Well, he says, you know, before the men of his planet all destroyed themselves with nuclear war, they left these encyclopedias of knowledge inside his computer brain. And the men of his planet had originally wanted to explore this planetoid Intarsis one thirty five sub two. They wanted to explore it, but then they learned a bit of bit more about it and ultimately decided it was not worth it because quote, it is inhabited by beings that seemed to be intelligent, but they do not know what they want and enjoy destroying each other. And of course what planets he talking.
About, it's us and it's pretty spot on.
Yeah. So Gamma and Beta perform a perilous emergency landing and they set down in the Mexican state of Chihuahua, which is in the central north. It's along the border with Texas and New Mexico, and so they're setting down their spaceship and as that's happening, we get our first meeting with La Loo Gonzales as a character named Loreano. What's he doing? Well, of course he is out riding his horse and singing a love song to nobody in particular. And the first scene where we meet him, you just kind of instantly fall in love with this g Like he sees the rocket ship, he thinks it's a shooting star, and he makes a wish and his wish is for is for quote, I hope for a pretty girl, but one who loves me. And then he sings a song about wishing on this star to find a woman to fall in love with. In my translation, he kept saying he was searching for a divine love. But then the other half of the song is about how everybody incorrectly believes that he is no good. So the lyrics include things like they say, I'm a crook and a liar and I chicken out in the end, but it's not true. And then you get you remember when when he gives the horse guarantee, he's like, if you don't believe me, ask my horse. My horse will tell you I never tell a lie. And then the horse starts like bucking and neighing.
Oh yeah, yeah. There's some fun stuff, like when you first see this character, there might be a temptation to think, Okay, this is going to be just a shining White Night. You know that he's going to be a pure hero, but then you quickly realize, no, he's a bard, if not an actual rogue, but a very funny one. Like he's the comedy begins to shine through, and there's some stuff with him, like the way he's riding his horse, either intentionally or accidentally, but I believe it must be part of the character. You get the idea that he's not that good at riding the horse. There's some awkward dismounts, which adds to the comedic nature of this character.
You know. I was trying They may have said it in the movie and it went past me. Was trying to figure out what does Loreano do. I was thinking, maybe he's supposed to be a rancher, but you don't really see much about that. Is he just a professional liar?
He has a cow, and we spend a lot of time with that cow. Yeah, so I think he's technically a rancher. Maybe that's part of the joke, is that he's because the character, I'm to understand his performance character is supposed to be a North Mexican rancher. But maybe the joke is okay, he only has this one cow and it may or might not even be that good of a milk producer, depending on the joke.
But basically all he does is like ride around singing and then go into town and tell awesome lies. Yes, so we see him go into a bar and everybody's drinking and he's telling these tall tales about like how he foiled a robbery with a bunch of bandits and he killed two bandits with one bullet left in his gun by holding a knife in front of the barrel and splitting the bullet in half so it hit them both. And then he starts shifting from here to the increasingly bizarre stories about unusual bears and then dinosaurs. Did your translation include dinosaurs?
It did? Yes, Okay. I wasn't entirely sure what to make of that. At first, I thought maybe it was a joke about chickens, and I was thinking, oh, this is actually scientifically accurate in some respects. But then there's the thing about dinosaurs without bones, and I'm not sure, so maybe something's something is ultimately lost in translation. But it still came off as very fun and funny.
It seems like normally he just he is wont to tell stories about dinosaurs out by the sawmill, dinosaurs without bones, boneless boneless buffalo dinosaurs.
But in this whole situation, he almost sort of gets into a duel. Yeah yeah, like a shootout, shootout a scenarios.
Name Rubiano or something, Yeah.
Yeah, but then kind of talks his way, jokes his way out of it. So they do a great job of establishing his character, like, no, you know, everybody loves him, but also everybody's a little sick of him. You know, he's he's a likable guy, but maybe he's not really doing the most important job in town, whatever it may be.
You almost get the impression that if he were to encounter real monsters later, nobody would believe him because he has cried dinosaur too many times.
True.
Meanwhile, after Gamma and Beta land on Earth, they come out to explore their surroundings and there is this hilarious scene where they just appear to get extreme pleasure from the discovery of breathable atmosphere.
Yes, yep, this is a great part. My wife actually walked in the room and saw this part and she was laughing as well. They're just totally turned on by this planet's atmosphere and they do a great job of playing this up.
Yeah, and so the two aliens come across Loreano on the road while he's out wandering, and they are just immediately smitten, right, as I guess nearly anyone would be. But so there are some jokes about them trying to find a language where they can both communicate, but it turns out the aliens do speak Spanish. I think they've got sort of encyclopedic knowledge of all languages in the Solar System and a radio uplink to their robot Tour. They like they look things up. They like, in the middle of the conversation, freeze Loriano and then look up like Mexico to learn things about it. And then also when he asks are you two from the circus? I assume because of the strange way they're dressed, they have to look up what a circus is, and this was really funny. Tour gets back to them and says, well, a circus is where animals do human jobs and humans do animal jobs.
I love that part.
Yeah, yeah, but so oh, and then they're also like, soh hey, Loriano, are all earthmen as gorgeous as you? And he's like, no, I admit it. No, they're not, because it should be stressed.
All the males that they have kidnapped thus far are literal monsters. Yeah, they're not even remotely human. They're big, like scaly or shaggy or pulsating monsters, and so yeah, like it makes sense that they see this guy and they're like, well, well, heck, we can stop the project right here.
Right, So they split. They tell him they'll meet him later, and then they go to their ship to phone home. They're like, Commander, we have hunks and they're going to bring him back to Venus, And so I think some other stuff happens here. But then eventually we get back to the home of Loreano, where he also he lives with his little brother who he takes care of named Chewy, and Chewey plays a decisive role in the climax of the film in a big violent showdown with some monsters. But eventually Gamma and Beta come by Loreano and Chewy's house where they want to learn about love. Like they show up at the door and they're like, hey, we don't have love on our planet. Can you explain to us what love is? And he explains love by singing a song accompanied by a jukebox that's in his house.
Yeah, I didn't know what to make of this. I mean, it certainly pays off in the plot, but I was asking myself, why would there be a jukebox in the house, not only a jukebox, but a jukebox they have to use a quarter on so they're having to pay to use it. And I don't I'd never heard of this being a thing, and maybe it wasn't. Maybe it just makes sense in this film.
Who would come and collect the quarters for the jukebox inside your house?
I don't know. But this man loves music, so maybe it's a good investment.
But I think here actually is where we start to get a taste of conflict between the visiting aliens, because because it starts to become clear that maybe both Gamma and Beta want Loreano for themselves, but Loriano seems to only love Gamma. He's just like not into Beta.
Right, He's just not into her. And you know, he's very upfront, you know, he's he's very clear that he's not French. Yeah, he's not interested in two women. He wants one woman and there has to be this mutual attraction there. So yeah, he's just not feeling it with Beta.
It's literally in the song, he's like singing lyrics about how he says love is when two people love each other. If there were three, that would be French.
Yes, there are at least a couple of digs at France in the picture, and also a really awesome dig at Texas at one point.
So the comedy's pretty much I forgot that part.
It's something about, oh, they like big things in Texas, what would they think of this? But I can't remember what they were referencing.
Oh, okay, was it a monster?
Probably a monster, yeah, or spaceship or something.
Loriano is also so lovable in the gentlemanly way. He sort of explains things to Beta, so she also wants him for herself, but he's like, hey, you know, you can't make somebody love you. Look I like this other lady.
Yeah, And luckily he has some songs prepared about the nature of love, right, he sings them for us, and so that's very They're great.
Yeah, Now we haven't really gotten into the monsters yet, so maybe we should explain the monster subplot and then how that links up with what's going on with Loreano and Gamma and Beta.
Yeah, let's let's dive into these monsters and certainly jump in if I if you have a different name than I have, because I think the name did differ slightly. So first of all, let's talk about this big reptilian cyclops character. He's the one on that Italian movie poster that I that I described earlier. This creature's name is Uk spelled uk, and he is the King of the Fire Planet.
Yeah, and so he was also called Uk in mind. And he speaks in a kind of brutish way. He says like me king fire Planet.
Yeah, and he's all actually, he's like, we're gonna fight, you know. That's that's he's he's a very brutal kind of an alien. But then we also have a cerebral alien. And when I mean cerebril, I mean he's got a big old brain, a big pulsating brain. This is the Prince of Mars. This is in my version Tagoul.
In mind, he I think he was Tao waal Okay. But yeah, so he's the Prince of Mars. Yeah. I think you only maybe find that out late. I'm not sure, But at first he just looks kind of like a I mean, I will say again, the monster design is great. He's got these kind of translucent layers over his eyeballs and you can see these obscure pupils moving around back behind the translucent layer. It's a very creepy effect. I want to just emphasize yet again, sometimes how strangely scary the monsters are for this light musical, romantic comedy.
Yeah, a lot of love went into the craft of making these monsters. And yeah, you're not going to watch this and think, oh my goodness, real monsters. You know, they look like movie monsters of this time period, but they're they're really good. I loved watching them do their thing.
But he's kind of like the brain mutant from This Island Earth, except maybe actually even more more lovely. He's got the big brain head, the creepy eyes, and he's got this this fish like kissy mouth, the kind of trumpet lips that work back and forth in a disgusting manner.
Yeah, all of these, you know, all of you can certainly connect to other monster traditions and other films of the time period. But I love how the stinct they are in the stuff to blow your mind. Discord. Somebody had shared a video about the sameness of monsters in modern pictures, which is an interesting argument that maybe I have some critiques on. But you can't. You cannot say that these monsters are all the same in this picture. They all feel distinct. They feel like they definitely arise from different planets, from different different evolutionary paths, and you get a taste of their culture as well.
That's right. Yeah, so we had the brain mutant, he's the Prince of Mars. But then there is also this furry spider beetle. He's like a cross between a giant killer insect and a squatch.
Yeah, this is outr of the Red Planet, and he's ravenous and warlike, but plotting, not just brutal violence like the King of the Fire Planet. No, he's more like, you know, he's sneaky. He has some wonderful lines to his this bit where he's speaking in this creepy voice, and the translation I had was, I am Utyr of the Red Planet, and I will devour your entrails by the light of Utar and its seven moons. So good.
Yeah, like I was saying, strangely dark and good like creepy imagery. In my version, I think he was actually called Crassus, which is the most different of names we've reviewed so far. I'm not sure what explains that difference.
Now, the other male alien in this picture is this fleshless creature that kind of looks like a bear skeleton that's kind of floating there. He has no name as far as I can tell, and all we know is that is his homeworld is a place where the people gave up their material form ages ago, and now they're just animate beast bones floating around and talking and laughing creepily.
Yeah, they're rasping phantoms from beyond. Who are just who are just pure embodied hate? And our fang bone buddy here, Yeah, he's a mockery of life itself. Yeah.
The one thing they all have in common, aside from being males, is that they all detest the fact that they have been kidnapped. They do not like it at all. But they're powerless against the superior technology of.
Venus, Right, Gamma and Beta have it locked down, because as powerful as these monsters are, they cannot overpower science, which Gamma and Beta have on their side. They've got some powerful technology that even a real, real strong, beefy reptile cyclops can't overcome.
But of course, as the plot develops, like we said, love tears this duo apart. You know, Gamma is thirst for blood. Yeah, love and thirst for blood. Beta gets fed up and she resorts to her old ways. We get this big reveal, which I think is an ideal reveal for any movie. This is a great plot twist for any film. Suddenly reveal that one of your main characters is a space vampire. She gives into her dark thirst is essentially you know, cursed by Gamma for her for giving into this thirst. And then Betas basically decides, well, heck, I'm just gonna let the males loose. I'm going to strike a bargain with the males, and we're just going to rampage over this planet and we're going to do what we like with Earth.
Yes, that's right. So Beta vamps a guy she like, you know, there's some rancher guy, and she drinks his blood and then when Gamma finds out, it's like, oh no, that's a death sentence. Back on Venus again. Politics like a vamporism is a political issue in the interplanetary politics of this movie, where it's like a known crime that has been observed and dealt with in the past, and if you drink the blood of a human you will face the death penalty on v.
Yeah, it raises a lot of questions, Like I was wondering, what is it like on the shadow planet? Is everyone a vampire there? Or are these like former Venusians who had to acquire some sort of vampiric infection in order to survive on a shadow world? Like what's going on here? There's something there, There's something under the surface. And it's so tantalizing because it feels thought out, it feels whole. It doesn't feel like just a you know, just a scrap of sci fi thrown into this romance.
Yeah. Again the movie, it's catching you off guard. Every single twist and turn. We were screaming at this, just an amazing twist.
And when we say space vampire, she can turn into a bat and it looks pretty good, looks pretty good a big.
Bat at one point. At one point, Lolo Gonzalez like points at it because it's swooping down to attack Gamma and he's like, look a vulture. But so yeah, from here we get moving into the third act.
Oh wait, wait, There's one more important bit here, and that is that Beta has also a lot with the Prince of Mars. So I don't know if they're going to be married and rule over Mars. There's some talk of this, though it's also pointed out by the Prince of Mars that he doesn't particularly find her attractive. But it seems like they're willing to work through this.
Oh yeah, there's a great part where he's like, you are very ugly, but I what does he say? He's like, you are extremely ugly to me, but I admire your dedication to hatred or something. Yes, And she's like, oh, Like she's really excited by this observation.
Yeah. Her plan now is so with the loose Males, they're going to destroy the initial settlement of Earthlings and then they're going to spread out and just take out the rest of the planet. But she realizes if she's going to lead this, she needs to she needs to assign tasks to the different monsters, so she divides humanity up among the loose males. So Utr gets the children, that's the spider monster uk or Uk. He gets the animals, and he seems fine with this. He's like, yes, let me at those cows.
I will eat cows.
Yeah, and Beta and the Prince of Mars they're going to I think they're just going to get the blood of humanity. They they bond over their thirst for blood, and they're like, let's do it. They seem to leave the Bone Guy out of this entirely. He shows up, lad does he? He disappears from the movie at one point. He is in the scene where all the aliens, all the loose males attack our hero, but he's not very obvious in that scene. You kind of see clattering bones in the background, like maybe they couldn't figure out how to properly bring that to life on screen. I don't know.
I really thought that the Bone Guy disappeared from the movie, but yeah, he could be wrong, so I don't recall him in the conclusion. Does anybody defeat him in the final battle?
No? No, he does kind of vanish at that point because all the other monsters get some sort of a cool death. So Ouk's face is burned off by I think by the robot. They're kind of wrestling.
There's a robot or burns in my thing? Yeah, m hm.
The brainiac guy, the big brain guy is shot in the eye by the boy with like a slingshot I think, right, yeah, yeah, with a slingshot, and then his brain deflates like a punctured volleyball. Yeah, that's a nice grizzly scene. Utyr the spider Beast is forced to bite himself and kill himself with his own venom brutal. Oh, and then Beta has a pretty awesome death scene as well.
Yeah, she goes to attack Gamma, and Gamma sort of like dodges out of the way at the right time, and then Beta gets staked with like vampire staked with a branch that's sticking up.
Yeah, and then all that, the Fleshless One is never defeated, So I don't know, maybe he we don't know what part of humanity was given over to him. Perhaps he just went out and claimed it and he's the one who wins the day.
Oh but there's one last thing I almost don't want to say because I don't want to spoil it because it's so good. But there's a stinger right at the end of the movie. If you don't want to hear it, if you don't want to be spoiled, you want to see the movie for yourself, maybe you should stop right here, but if you're okay with it. The surprise at the end where Tor and the jukebox fall in love. Yes, amazing reveal.
Yeah, because Tour makes eyes at the jukebox pretty early. He's like hey uh. And then at the end they're happy together. They're leaving the planet, they have found each other, and they're flying away in a spaceship.
Yeah. He like compliments the jukebox. He's like going up to the glass saying, like, what beautiful bulbs you have?
Yes. So at the end, everybody's happy, everyone's in love. Monsters and the forces of evil have been defeated, and it seems like political stability has been maintained for the interplanetary community.
Gamma in the end learns that it was wrong to kidnap males from all the planets to take them back to Venus. Instead, she's like, hey, look, I'm not going back to Venus. I found a man on Earth i'm in love with, so we're just going to hang out here in Mexico.
Yeah, though he no longer has a cow, so I'm not sure what he's going to do. Oh yeah, you know a cow, you know, and stripped to bones by.
To bones with a stand. So yo. Yeah, the cyclops reptile comes in and like bites the cow and then the cow is just clean, like a bone model of a cow on a stand with like bars.
Yeah, they did a great job.
But anyway, I was gonna say, Loriano, he's always going to find a way to get by.
It's true. Yeah, he's a survivor.
So ship of monsters what a delight.
Yeah, this one really is a delight. I highly recommend viewing this now. I think I should also add that all versions of this are apparently in black and white. I don't think there's any evidence of an actual color cut of the film. If you think back to our Santo and the Tomb of Dracula episode, we discussed how at least later, at least, you know, close to a decade later, you had this tradition of shooting in black and white and in color for different markets. I don't think that was the case here. I ran across some color images of the film, but I think these were just colored stills that were used to promote it.
Oh that would make sense.
Yeah, but still, even in black and white, this film is just it's so alive you'll just be drawn right now.
People, or oh forever?
All right? Well, if you would like to check out additional episodes of Weird House Cinema, you can find it in the Stuff to Blow your Mind podcast feed. You'll find that wherever you get your podcasts. Weird House Cinema publishes on Friday. We're primarily a science podcast, and you'll find our core episodes of the show Stuff to Blow your Mind on Tuesdays and Thursdays, an Artifact episode on Wednesdays, listener mail on Mondays, and Vault Entry over the weekend. That's a rerun.
Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future, just to sayalo, you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
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