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Greetings, and welcome to VIEWING THE CLASSICS. Here you'll find capsule reviews of vintage movies from the early days of cinema through the 1970s, with a special emphasis on sci-fi, horror, and mystery movies. Be sure to check out the Pages links, where you can find a Film Index of all my reviews, links to the reviews organized by cast members, directors, and other contributors, and links to my reviews of the films of talented young director Joshua Kennedy.

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Thursday, June 23, 2016

Queen Of Outer Space (1958)

Starring Zsa Zsa Gabor, Eric Fleming, Dave Willock, Laurie Mitchell, Lisa Davis
Directed by Edward Bernds
(actor & director credits courtesy IMDB.com)

Astronauts from Earth crash land on Venus, which is populated by gorgeous women and ruled by a tyrannical queen, but one of her subjects wants to help them.

Badly dated today with a great deal of sexist dialogue and situations, the picture's still a lot of fun to watch, with fairly decent production values, costuming, and special effects, although there's quite a bit borrowed from past sci-fi films of the fifties, notably the uniforms from Forbidden Planet.  Gabor doesn't particularly distinguish herself, but doesn't embarrass herself either, and quality actors like Fleming and Paul Birch help sell the story, even though there's not a lot to it.  Perhaps the picture's most endearing quality is the way it nicely fits in with other sci-fi films of the decade as an escapist fantasy that probably no one intended to be taken seriously.    

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