Svengoolie Intro: “Calling all stations! Clear the air lanes! Clear all air lanes for the big broadcast!”
I thought the 1964 film, “First Men in the Mood” was a hoot, mostly because of the antics of Joseph Cavor (Lionel Jeffries), who could yell incessantly “Briggs!” more than a dozen times, at the guy who was supposed to be watching the boiler where the Cavorite anti-gravity substance was cooking but instead was drinking beer and playing cribbage with the other two laboratory workers.
It’s still not clear to me why Kate Callendar (Martha Hyer) insisted on pronouncing “Cavor” with a long A (Kayvoar) while Cavor and Edward Judd (Arnold Bedford) pronounced it with a short A (Kavoar). Whatever.
Anyway, the movie was based on H.G. Wells novel, “The First Men in the Moon) published around 1899, which I tried to read last week on both the Internet Archive and the Gutenberg Project but because the Internet Archive version kept restarting at page 40 every time I took a break and the Gutenberg Project version page setup was annoyingly wide and the warning about the requirement that you have to donate millions of dollars just to read the first 3 pages was so scary, I didn’t get far so I just read the Wikipedia summary.
The movie opens in the 1960s with modern astronauts landing on the moon without incident unless you count the problem with a non-functioning toilet and discovering a Union Jack flag along with note dated 1899 warning “Please hurry up the invention of Raid insecticide!” which wouldn’t happen until the mid-1950s. The rest of the film is Arnold Bedford’s flashback of the 1899 adventure which was actually the first moon expedition.
After Cavor, Judd, and Callendar enter the polyhedron-shaped spaceship and close the Cavorite-swabbed window shades, they blast off to the moon and eventually blunder into the underground hive of a large colony of insectoid beings Cavor calls the Selenites (derived from the word “Selene,” the name of the Greek goddess of the moon), and a synonym for “lunatic” which describes the ensuing adventure as well as the film itself.
Most of the Selenites resemble cockroaches and grasshoppers which Judd beats up at every opportunity over the objections of Cavor, who sneezes on them, giving the game away about the eventual outcome of the conflict. One creature is a giant caterpillar who menaces every other bug in sight until Judd moons it, making it shrink in embarrassment before turning into a monarch butterfly and then heads for South America. Long trip. Callendar fries the chickens she brought along for the trip from Earth and tries to feed it to the Selenites, which they refuse to eat without barbecue sauce.
Cavor is brought before Hopper, the head locust who figures out the best way to prevent any more humans from traveling to the moon is to hold him prisoner and make him paint all the minerals, including gold, a dull shade of gray and transmit telepathic messages back to earth making plumbers rewrite all the instructions for making toilets on spaceships so they work in reverse.
I think this movie is funny, so it deserves a Shrilling Chicken Rating of 3/5.
Go Retire Psychiatrist 