Amazing Amazons

AMAZON WOMEN on the Moon brings to mind an image from another film, Being There: Peter Sellers, as Chance the Gardener, away from his TV set and in the real world for the first time, trying to zap some all-too-real muggers out of existence with his TV's remote control.

Amazon Women On the Moon

Written by Michael Barrie and Jim Mulholland

Directed by Lots of Directors

At the Harvard Square Theater

The remote control is the unifying image in Amazon Women, an anthology of satirical sketches about our age of Television and the Short Attention Span. In an early sketch, Lou Jacobi plays a man who accidentally aims his remote control at himself and winds up on whatever program happens to be on his set. For the rest of the movie, an instant of television static, as if someone were changing channels, appears between each sketch.

Most of the vignettes try to show how TV aims for the lowest common denominator, making its programming as shallow as possible. There are commercials for such products as Silly Pate, an hors d'oeurve that picks up newsprint, bounces off walls, and tastes good on crackers. An "In Search Of" type show called "Bullshit or Not?" proposes that jack the Ripper was really the Loch Ness monster in disguise. On a movie review show, the critics discuss in seriousness such films as "Frat Slobs" and the Swedish import "Winter of My Despondency."

Of course, television shows some laughably awful films itself, and Amazon Women offers three of them. One is a 1930s government scare film, a la Reefer Madness, called "Reckless Youth," in which "Mary Brown" (Carrie Fisher) is a corrupted innocent who contracts "a SOCIAL DISEASE!" Another is "Son of the Invisible Man," in which the original's son (Ed Begley Jr.) walks around naked in the mistaken belief that he, too, is invisible.

THE WORST movie of all is the title piece, "Amazon Women on the Moon," a B-grade 1950s sci-fi disaster, whose plot can be deduced from its title. The film's accurate stone-age special effects (rockets hanging from wires, etc.) and sound problems are surpassed in ludicrousness only by the film's overt jingoism, sexism, materialism and xenophobia.

But if the vignettes skewer the shallowness of television programming, they also poke fun at the shallowness of television audiences. One commercial is for a best-selling novel about a prostitute who marries the president, called "First Lady of the Evening," featuring "large, easy-to-read print and no big words." Movie reviewers critique the life of one of their viewers as he watches, calling him a bore and describing his life (from which they show a clip) as uninvolving.

Amazon Women has five directors, including Joe (Gremlins) Dante and John (Blues Brothers) Landis, but Landis' hand is evident in the "Saturday Night Live"-style satire that pervades the movie. That is, each sketch takes one joke and runs with it until it meets an obstacle, like a football player who catches an interception. Most of the time, the sketches "change channels" before they get stale, but some of them don't know when to quit.

Ultimately, Amazon Women on the Moon may be as socially unredeemable as the television and the TV watchers it pokes fun at. Still, it is extremely funny and worth seeing, though perhaps one should wait until it comes out on videocassete in order to watch it where it would be most effective--on TV.