Mystery Science Theatre 3000: "Fire Maidens of Outer Space" (Criterion Films, 1956; MSTeK version, 1992)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

My husband Charles came home from work at about 9:15 p.m. and within half an h our we watched a YouTube movie, a Mystery Science Theatre 3000 presentation of Cy Roth’s 1956 messterpiece Fire Maidens of Outer Space. (Apparently the working title was Fire Maidens from Outer Space, which at least is a more normal cadence, but “of” instead oif “from” is the official conjunction in the title.) Roth both wrote and directed (as well as co-produced) this ridiculous and totally boring film (as I’ve noted in these pages before, a lot of the MST3K targets were selected because of their boredom) which is so dull it makes Cat Women of the Moon seem like 2001: A Space Odyssey by comparison. The plot is your usual machismo fantasy nonsense in which astronomers have discovered a previously unknown 13th moon of Jupiter. (At least that’s what is called in the film itself; in the trailer it’s the 13th moon of Saturn.) This hitherto unknown planetoid not only has an atmosphere almost identical to Earth’s, it also is warm enough to sustain human life. In fact, it’s beel doing that for thousands of years: as the lost continent of Atlantis began to sink beneath the waves, its scientists somehow managed to evacuate some of the Atlanteans to the 13th moon of Jupiter, where they set up a colony called “New Atlantis” – only, unfortunately, the one lone male New Atlantean left is Prasus (Owen Berry), who’s obviously too old to be of much use keeping the New Atlantean population going.

So he decides to guide the five boring astronauts crewing the spaceship sent to explore the new moon and press them into service to have sex with his “daughters” (he refers to them as such throughout the film and only towards the end is it revealed that he’s not literally the father of them all, they just call him that because they revere him so) and thereby repopulate New Atlantis. One of the astronauts, Luther Blair (Anthony Dexter, five years after he played Rudolph Valentino in a Columbia biopic that got lousy reviews and sank at the box office, which explains why within five years he was reduced to making crap like this), genuinely falls in love with New Atlantean princess Hestia (Susan Shaw, who shows signs of genuine acting talent Cy Roth’s script does not allow her to exercise) and schemes to break her out of the New Atlantean compound, take her back to Earth, and presumably marry her. The other astronaut whom the New Atlanteans try to press into stud service whines that he’s married and therefore he’s not interested in the hot New Atlantean babes, who are called the “Fire Maidens” even though they have nothing to do with fire except for one scene, in which they sacrifice one of their number n a large open pit of flames. (This isn’t going to do much to solve their underpopulation problem.) The other three astronauts of the five-member crew remain on board the spaceship, and there’s also a monster roaming the planet’s surface who looks like a cross between the Incredible Hulk and James Arness’s makeup in the 1951 version of The Thing.

I first read about this wretched movie in one of the Michael and Harry Medved books about bad movies, which mentioned that they got the soundtrack music from old Russian albums they had bought as imports (presumably from the Four Continents Bookstore, which imported books and records from what was then the Soviet Union, and you could get yourself blacklisted if you were caught ordering from them), notably the Polovetsian Dances from Alexander Borodin’s opera Prince Igor (including the one that had already become the basis for the song “Stranger in Paradise,” and for Artie Shaw’s “My Fantasy” a decade before that) and the “Oriental Suite” by Ukrainian-born composer Monia Liter. (That’s right: a man named Monia.) The classical selections – which Roth’s production company could rip off with impunity because shortly after he came to power in 1917 Vladimir Lenin abolished all Russia’s intellectual property laws – serve as the basis for three excruciatingly boring dance numbers performed by the Fire Maidens, of which one of the MST3K robots joked, “Can’t they even try to move in time to the music?” It seems like Cy Roth took the dance footage and then just dubbed in whatever records he had on hand he thought would fit. The Medveds said that at one point you could clearly hear the needle drop on the record before the music began, though I’ve only seen this film in the MST3K incarnation and they probably talked over that part.

This version was actually one of the earlier MST3K episodes, from their fifth season (1992), before series creator Joel Hodgson (who played a character named “Joel Robinson,” perhaps because their announcer found the name “Hodgson” too much of a mouthful to pronounce) relinquished command of the Satellite of Love to Mike Nelson (who was first the show’s head writer and then its on-ait host). In general the episodes with Hodgson are more fun – they were still making this for Comedy Central and they didn’t have to do the damnable “story arcs” the Sci-Fl Channel imposed on them later when they moved. Also Hodgson was a more genial host, and a bit sexier to boot!