Nude on the Moon

Hello. I'm Tom Baker, a.k.a. C. Augustine, T. Baker, T. Boneman Bakker (God so help us), T. Bakker, and, as an experimental musician, I’ve gone by monikers such as Extreme Volume Pop, Meat Glue, Two-Headed Lamb, Unknown, Anon Pop, Iggy K., etc. No one on the green rolling hills of Mother Earth knows who the hell I am, nor cares. I have a tremendous body of work—both as a writer and avant-garde musician—as well as dozens of paintings, some of which I’ve sold for hard cash. Recognition eludes me almost as much as the ability to have my work exposed to a greater audience; but maybe that’s for the best. Fame isn’t very desirable, perhaps. Vide the case of Charlie Kirk.

Getting down to it: I write about trash culture, junk culture, cultural ephemera—comic books, roleplaying games, music, cult movies, and trash cinema—usually nothing too serious. Sometimes I write up urban legends or fairy tales; I’ve written several books on paranormal topics and true crime. Even UFOs. I more or less avoid serious topics. Right now, I want to turn out a second volume about cult movies—these ones sub-par examples of Cinema Veri-Bad.

I’m a professional Tarot reader.

To that end, I’m reviewing Doris Wishman’s Nude on the Moon. But I have to warn you: no one here is actually fully nude. They just cheated us. Gals and guys are walking around in loincloths and underwear that, while quite revealing, don’t quite count as them being “Nude on the Moon.” More like “Topless on the Moon.” (Or “Pole-Dancers on the Moon,” perhaps—not “Nudists.”)

Nude on the Moon is a 1961 “nudie cutie” film produced by the one woman who delivered such goods with astonishing regularity and a certain amount of artistic professionalism in 1961, offering up her bevy of doughy-fleshed, pulchritudinous (by modern wafer-thin heroin-chic standards of beauty, “fat”) models to horny dudes packed into X-rated theaters that never dreamed that, one day, they could get a thousand times that and more with WiFi.

They were the “raincoat crowd”—pervos who tortured their wang-doodles while their eyes were peeled open, taking in every minute of those big, beautiful, beehived beeyotches as they cavorted on the Moon—which, oddly enough, looks to actually be Coral Castle in Florida, a mysterious stone “monument,” one supposes, built by a wee little wisp of a man dying of tuberculosis named Edward Leedskalnin, who told friends and neighbors (he didn’t have many) that he was waiting for his mysterious “Sweet Sixteen”—who one fancies may have returned to him aboard a brightly lit Pleiadian beamship.

(For Edward built Coral Castle by himself, you see, and it’s made of massive granite blocks he quarried and lifted by himself, in solitude, and no one knows just how the hell he did it. He left behind a book trying to explain how he used his arcane knowledge to build his astounding castle—but it is largely incomprehensible, I fear. Believe it, or not!)

Getting back to it. Jeff is a scientist who invents some solid-body rocket fuel (shades of Jack Parsons) and then goes to the lab where he and his assistant take off in a long, sleek, not-to-say-obvious flying phallic symbol past some rocks and a Moon hanging from a fishing line. There’s a slow point where Jeff and his assistant discuss some scientific gobbledygook, and the viewer is left pondering why they thought they needed this for a nudie movie about outer-space Amazons and their male castrato in a moon landscape that looks like a resort in the Florida Everglades.

So, they get out, and their spacesuits are red and blue pajamas with scuba tanks, designer motorcycle helmets, and some sort of weird—I don’t know—couch-cover vest things with plastic bulbs on them. Forgive me for running short of approximate descriptors.

They take some Polaroids as big-tittied Moon vixens cavort near the pool and don’t really do much of anything, as not much of anything else happens. The Empress or Queen of the Moon or what-have-you waves a Glinda-the-Good-Witch wand, and the soundtrack does an analog-synth thing that sounds like electrified bubbles—but really, the whole idea of this film is to look. At. Tits.

And by gosh and by gum, there are some biggens here. Al Bundy couldn’t be far from pleased to note the complete lack of women with small, or tiny breasts. Every one of them is more than a handful, mate, I can assure you. The film needs more chicks makin’ it with other chicks (actually it has none at all), but it was 1961, so whaddya expect.

It also has some hot cars, like a 1961 Lincoln convertible that Kennedy would die in two years later. (Okay, so no. I exaggerate.)

If you need to know all the particulars of this unmasterpiece, look ’em up. Doris Wishman, by the way, went on to direct such execrable straight-to-video horror and cultural rot as A Night to Dismember (1983). The only previous film of hers I encountered (and actually kind of liked) was the “diary of a doll molester” picture, Indecent Desire (1968).

I can’t really find any reason Nude on the Moon should exist. It exists today as a cultural artifact of a time when porno this gentle could still inspire weirdos and flashers to whack it in the grindhouse loo.

Going where no man has gone before. Or maybe he has.

Excelsior!

Nude on the Moon (1961) Trailer (No nudity)

Joe Bob Briggs introduces "Nude on the Moon."

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My book: Cult Films and Midnight Movies: From High Art to Low Trash Volume 1

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My book; Silent Scream! Nosferatu, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Metropolis, and Edison's Frankenstein--Four Novels. by C. Augustine

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