Fire Maidens of Outer Space (1956)

I just love this movie. I can watch it over and over and get enjoyment out of it. I first saw it in 1956 as a child and watched it many times over the years. The musical soundtrack is so captivating. Susan Shaw is very cute. It reminds me of the early Universal Pictures Horror Movies that I can watch again and again. This movie and The Mole People and Zombies of Mora Tau are my favorites from the time period. Please watch it and see if you agree with me. Many of the current movies cannot hold my interest and I have to force myself to sit through them. This movie has a certain charm and holds my interest. It is a low budget but they did a great job with the funds they had at the time.

The problem with this film being in the sci film genre is that the aficionados tend to take films far to seriously.Why else would so many people have rated it at 1'After all the budget of this film was clearly miniscule.The sets are very small.The rocket seems to consist of 5men sitting at a desk.The monster is a man in a monkey suit.Harry Fowler and Sydney Tafler talking with American accents.The exterior of the rocket is only shown as gas as the top of the ladder.The astronauts appear to wander around the nearest local park to the studio.The formaldehyde who seem like the contestants in the local beauty contest.A classic of the genre.

"Fire Maidens Of Outer Space" misses the mark on so many levels that I wanted to travel to England and throw rocks at the window of the room in the nursing home that Cy Young is probably living in now. It's an exercise in tedium, static blocking, and endless padding, weighed down with a tiny budget and zero imagination in production and art design. In its favor: they actually play some music by Borodin and what sounds like the "Saber Dance" at some points in the movie, a nice touch considering the title; the fire maidens are quite attractive (if somewhat blank faced) and the camera spends a lot of time focused on their shapely legs as they walk endlessly from one corridor to another; if you're going to have liturgical dancing in a cheap science fiction movie (and it seemed to be a requirement whenever the plot concerned alien civilizations), you might as well have well choreographed liturgical dancing, and the women are pleasantly limber and graceful. Also the set-up with the alien civilization can't help but serve as a litmus test for the modern male viewer's chauvinism and political correctness (what with the patriarch apparently being a semi- doddering drunk surrounded by nubile women - your reactions to this will tell you a lot about yourself). Against: well, the first third of the screenplay is about as exciting for the viewer as the time my best friend and I camped out in his back yard in a piano crate overnight and pretended we were flying to the moon and back. (We were 10 years old at the time). And the special effects aren't much more convincing. The rest of the movie resembles a slow motion Brtish bedroom farce, only without the slamming doors or humor. I am glad I saw this - once! - if only to assure myself that the movie in no way lived up to the promise of its title and that I hadn't missed anything worthwhile by putting off watching it for 30+ years.

Despite inept dialogue, cramped sets, second-string acting, penny-pinching special effects, and time-wasting "B"-picture shuffling, this low-budget, sci-fi yarn is not all that unentertaining. Decided assets include: (1) The plot, neatly combining the Atlantis legend with Theseus and the Minotaur; (2) a bit of effective Minotaur make-up by Roy Ashton; (3) a few flashes of directorial skill by Mr Roth; and (4) not least, a bevy of really beautiful fire maidens led by the very charming Susan Shaw (one of my favorites, I must admit) and the agreeably villainous Maya Koumani.Camp followers will also enjoy the zippy music score comprising a few snatches of Khachaturian's "Saber Dance" with generous excerpts from Borodin's "Polovetsian Dances". If you close your eyes, you can almost imagine yourself listening to the soundtrack of M-G-M's Kismet.True, Dexter makes a wet hero, and Carpenter is even more soppy, but who cares?