Intensity	Stupidity:Nudity Ratio 8:1	Budget Small

A guy walks into a bar. As he is sitting there having a drink, he hears someone yell out "25". The other patrons chuckle and continue with their drinking. Soon someone else yells out "13" and everyone laughs heartily. Puzzled the guy asks the bartender what is going on. The bartender explains that the same guys have been telling the same jokes for so long that they have just given them numbers. The guy decides to give it a try and calls out "21". No one laughs. The guy looks at the bartender who shrugs and says "some people just can't tell a joke". Which brings us to Space Babes Meet the Monster.

The movie opens with Patrick Mcnee telling the backstory of an incident that nearly changed the course of history. Seems that some other professor (who was not nearly as clever as McNee's character) had created a time machine and nearly caused the end of the world. Soon we are at the other professor's lab where he is being harassed by some mob enforcers due to money owed. After horribly mutilating some vegetables, the gangsters leave the professor and his assistant (played by a man in an ape suit) to ponder their fate. Quickly hitting on a plan to send some patsies into the future to find and bring back an artifact that the professor can sell for millions, they waste no time in putting it to action. We arrive in the future only to find it looks remarkably like a California desert. One of the guys is immediately attacked by a monster and is spirited away along with the time ring needed to return to the present. They meet an old codger who brings them up to speed on the future's history and warns them about the Space Babes. Finally, we get to meet the Space Babes (the queen is, of course, being played by a guy in drag). The girls take the guys into custody from which they promptly escape when one of the girls falls for one of the guys. In short order our heroes encounter a two-headed doomsayer, a harmonica player, some mutants, a cloaked figure, a guy dressed like Rambo who does a prop comic routine, the girls again and finally come face-to-face with the monster. After finding out that using the time machine caused all the nuclear devices in the world to ignite, everyone gets into the space ship and returns to the present before the guys left and stop the professor. The monster and the girls form a band that makes millions and the professor pays off the mob.

Space Babes is obviously meant to be a spoof on the old "Mars needs Women!" type of movies. A rocket ship would go into space with a motley crew that would encounter beautiful women who fall in love with them. Many of these movies were shot at Bronson Canyon or in some Californian desert because of the low cost of using these locales. The plots were usually paper thin and the characters were usually all the same. There would be the Captain, normally a strong and silent by the book kind a guy. There would be the grunts, usually very loyal, patriotic and often cannon fodder. Frequently comic relief came in the form of some kid from Brooklyn who would be sneaky and cowardly. Other characters would be professors who barely noticed the outside world because they were so wrapped up in their work, A second in command who was envious of the first officer. A doctor who would either be useless against the alien disease or phenomenally successful (the patient would either die despite all the doc could do, or the doc would diagnoses an alien bug and create a cure for it in 15 minutes). For a satirist these movies are easy pickin's.

Parody movies can be hugely funny. Mel Brook's "Young Frankenstein" is a classic example of a movie playing a genre for laughs while at the same time playing homage to it. "Scary Movie" played the late 90's slasher movies for laughs but without any subtlety. Rather than throwing in lots of little clever jokes, "Scary Movie" went for big belly laughs every time frequently without success. Space Babes tries to be subtle, but ends up being not funny. At one point the guys are pinned to a wall with spaghetti strainers on their heads. The big guys decides the Babes are using them to read their minds while his partner comments that they look like spaghetti strainers. The Babes inform the guys that they are intelligence amplifiers. This could have been a funny scene, but it comes off very flat.Part of the problem is that we have seen an ape playing a lab assistant, a hula hoop time machine, a bowling ball communication device and no one makes any comments. So adding a half hearted comment now seems odd. The cast was not great and writing was sloppy. If your movie is only going to be 45 minutes long, the writing should be spot on. Take the time to really define the characters and how you are going to play it for laughs.

Of note is that Patrick Mcnee does a cameo for the film sounding like he was just reading off a cue card. He seemed rather bemused by the whole thing. Also, Bob Burns portrays Zots, the professor's Gorilla lab assistant. Mr. Burns probably has more time in an ape suit than any living actor and here he turns in another riveting performance.

I think this was meant to be a "calling card" movie; something novice directors do to prove to producers that they have what it takes to make a movie. Space Babes was originally titled "The Low Budget Time Machine" which may be more accurate plot wise, but the new name fits the spirit of the movie better. A lot of those old Sci Fi movies featured alien beauties who had never heard of kissing before and were extremely susceptible to it. Invariably one of them would defy her heritage and go with an Earthman. Space Babes plays on this theme pretty well and does make a couple of references to the threadbare sets and locations of those earlier films, but just does not deliver enough laughs. When we meet Ramboona he threatens them with a gun made of parts from a flea market. Once he decides to help the guys, he rummages through a chest throwing around various items meant to be funny. Eventually he finds a monster detector that looks like a geiger counter with a nozzle on it. Let's see, Ramboona is referenced in a couple of VooDoo movies as a mystical entity capable of animating zombies. Chuck Williams (who also helped write the screenplay) portrays Ramboona looking like a pudgy, out of shape Rambo who seems to be channeling Carrot Top. Potentially this could all be funny, but it is not. Comedy is hard. When you see a stand up comic telling a joke, you are watching someone tell a joke they have told a thousand times before. A joke they have modified a hundred times, tweaking little bits here and there, making it shorter and longer until they have it down perfectly. A joke that may have originally only gotten a chuckle out of the audience now is getting a belly laugh. Why? Because someone worked their ass off making the joke funny. Space Babes needed that someone.

In the Special Features area of the disc, there is a short film produced by Rolex. There is no dialog and the filming is mostly miniatures and depicts different mechanisms for telling time including sun dials, water clocks, cuckoo clocks and ultimately a Rolex wrist watch. The unfortunate thing is that this film is far more entertaining than Space Babes. Probably because it is a public domain film and has the word Time in it's title, the producers thought they should add it as an extra. I am glad they did because it substantially increases the entertainment value of the disc.

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