‹ Back

In a Reverse Cregger, Some of the Best Minds in 1980s Horror Delivered a Culturally Incisive Comedy with AMAZON WOMEN ON THE MOON

By Preston Fassel

Welcome to Purgatory Video, your friendly neighborhood video store (er, column), offering the finest in unseen, underseen, forgotten, and obscure films of yesterday and today. From the grindhouse to the drive-in to the movie your neighbor shot on VHS and beyond, store manager Preston Fassel hopes to offer you recommendations that will broaden your horizons even as they melt your mind.

What Happens When Horror Directors Do Comedy?

Before we start, let’s get something out of the way: In honor of Weapons, this month’s referral was meant to be the 1974 killer child flick Devil Times Five, aka People Toys and The Horrible House on the Hill. There was only one problem with that plan, though. See, I always go back and watch the movies I recommend to ensure that you, valued reader/renter, are in for a quality viewing experience. After returning to Devil for the first time in about a decade, though, it turns out it kinda sucks. The setup is excellent: a batch of adults on ski holiday are so consumed by their own petty squabbles that they become easy pickings for a quintet of pint-sized insane asylum escapees who’ve adopted the personas of the clothes they’ve stolen, Buffy/Darkwing Duck style. That premise is cool as shit, but, a movie can only pad its running time out so much before you have to resort to gimmicks. Like a scene where the kids beat a man to death. In real time. Shot entirely in slow-motion.

I’m nothing if not dedicated, though, and I refuse to allow my patrons to walk away empty-handed. It only feels right to scratch that Cregger itch, which got me thinking about horror, comedies, and horror comedies. Call me contrarian, but, I don’t feel most horror comedies work as intended. More often than not, what are billed as “horror comedies” are usually either horror movies with some light comedy or—9/10 times—comedies with supernatural threats and copious amounts of gore. Nonetheless, when they decide to stay in one particular lane, horror directors are excellent comedians and comedians can make some incredible horror movies. Case in point: Jordan Peele gave us Get Out and Us, two films distinctly lacking in Key and Peele yuks, while it’s common knowledge that Danny McBride was instrumental in helming the Halloween resurrection of 2018 (though, thankfully, not 2002’s Halloween Resurrection). For a look at what happens when horror hands take their shot at comedy, we can turn to this month’s rental, 1987’s AMAZON WOMEN ON THE MOON, a sketch film boasting the directorial talents of Joe Dante, Jaws scribe Carl Gottlieb, and John Landis (*sigh* yes, that John Landis).

Amazon Women is unique in that it’s something of a piece of performance art. Prefiguring the screenlife subgenre, the movie simulates the experience of channel surfing through local television circa the late 80s, when all-night TV had taken foothold as the insomniac’s entertainment of choice (until the mid-late 1980s, most TV channels stopped broadcasting around midnight and would remain off-air until around six). The sound of a clicking remote accompanies bursts of static that segue us from one skit into another, each of which is a satire of some element of late-80s media or consumer culture. What follows is a string of faux infomercials, snippets of sitcoms from Hell, and b-movie parodies. Through it all, our unseen couch potato periodically returns to an all-night broadcast of the titular b-flick, a loving send-up of 50s-era sci-fi schlock.

                                          

A “Forgotbuster” With a Star-Studded Cast

Film critic Nathan Rabin (whose book on movies about filmmaking, The Fractured Mirror, you should really check out) came up with the name “forgotbuster” to describe a film that had tremendous cultural impact upon its release or which made a ton of money, but which left no lasting footprint. AMAZON WOMEN could safely be a contender for that title. The all-star cast is still impressive but was even moreso when the bulk of the names on display were boffo box office draw, including (in no particular order):

·        Michelle Pfeiffer

·        Arsenio Hall

·        Ed Begley Jr.

·        B.B. King

·        Sybil Danning

·        Joe Pantoliano

·        Rosanna Arquette

·        Steve Guttenberg

·        The Carrie Fisher

…to say nothing of character actors like Archie Hahn, Paul Bartel, Dante regular Robert Picardo, and an early silent role for Bryan Cranston as a beleaguered paramedic. Oh, and a roast sketch—itself kicked off by a Siskel and Ebert homage-- features some of the biggest legends of standup comedy performing loving piss-takes of their own material, including Henny Youngman, Rip Taylor, Steve Allen, Jackie Vernon, and Charlie Callas. (Meanwhile, a trio of wisely deleted bits—including a sendup of M*A*S*H*-- would have pumped up the star factor even more by adding Ronny Cox, Robert Loggia, Bernie Casey, Jenny Agutter, Dick Miller, and CSI’s Wallace Langham).

                           

Meanwhile, Landis had safely put the Twilight Zone tragedy behind him and was one year away from helming Coming to America, while Dante still had all the goodwill in the world from Gremlins. Just to hedge their bets, the filmmakers low-key marketed AMAZON as a delayed sequel to cult comedy classic The Kentucky Fried Movie, a claim buttressed by the presence of producer Robert K. Weiss on the directorial team. Kick in cinematography by the Texas Chain Saw Massacre’s Daniel Pearl, and AMAZON is very much a forgotbuster indeed: an all-star cast and crew churning out a movie that promised to be the sociocultural satire of the Reagan age—and bombed.

So, what went wrong?

AMAZON is a unique example of a movie that’s so much of its time, it couldn’t succeed in that time. In that regard, the movie it most brings to mind in terms of tone and execution is another recent big-swing, Ari Aster’s Eddington. Like that film, Amazon’s greatest strength lay in perfectly capturing what it looked and felt like to be alive during a specific cultural moment. While it may be difficult for modern audiences to grasp, when AMAZON was released, TV was seen in very much the same light as the internet today. People genuinely thought television was going to destroy the world, a fear seriously explored in contemporary media such as Videodrome and Shock Treatment. AMAZON is more satirical in its approach, and the end result is something that can tend to feel less like a comedy and more like a time capsule.

Certain sketches tend to feel less like they’re mocking TV excesses than they are just sincerely replicating what passed for daytime TV in ’87, like a soap opera bit featuring Michelle Pfeiffer and thirtysomething’s Peter Horton (who also co-directed) as neurotic new parents dealing with an even more cracked doctor (An American Werewolf in London’s Griffin Dunne). Others - like Joe Pantoliano as a lachrymose wig salesman and a softcore parody about a nude model who takes her job description to its logical extreme- would have felt obvious and cliched to contemporary viewers. Imagine a circa 2015 movie about internet culture with a star-studded cast and sketches featuring such novel material as popup ads, internet porn, or problems with the Cloud, and you get the gist (wait- did I just describe Movie 43?).

How Amazon Aged Well

The passage of time can be magic. Nostalgia is a powerful drug, and younger generations will always fall in love with the dream of the decades that came before them. AMAZON may have failed upon release, but, by so lovingly capturing (and shit taking) a particular cultural moment, it aged gracefully into a truly hilarious and weirdly heartwarming snapshot of a specific time in American history-- one that feels particularly resonant today.

A rom-com parody with Steve Guttenberg as a glib womanizer and Rosanna Arquette as his horny but tech-savvy blind date will no doubt please any woman who’s ever caught a Tinder date lying. Carrie Fishe and Paul Bartel’s segment will feel particularly resonant for anyone who suffered through abstinence-only sex-ed. Classic horror fans will vibe on what’s arguably the most laugh-out-loud sketch, Son of the Invisible Man, an aesthetically perfect recreation of Universal Monster flicks featuring Ed Begley Jr. as the titular character, who believes he’s found the secret to invisibility but truly only discovers the joy of public nudity. Dr. Johnny Fever himself, WKRP in Cincinnati’s Howard Hesseman, crops up alongside Kelly Preston in an unexpected but delightful Summer of ’42 parody whose presence will probably be the most inexplicable to modern viewers (a perennial cable staple in the 80s, you could not watch daytime TV without finding Summer playing somewhere. There’s even a subtle nod to its ubiquity in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining). The true standout, though, and the one that’s aged the best, is the provocative B.B. King/David Alan Grier -fronted Blacks Without Soul.

It’s a faux-infomercial collecting money to aid black Americans who, as B.B. King informs us, were born missing souls. With a list of symptoms that includes voting Republican, favoring gentrification, and abiding by the tenets of Reaganomics, the sketch is one red baseball hat away from being a vicious evisceration of modern-day MAGATs who happily vote for policies that will only destroy them and people who look like them. The filmmakers were clearly enamored: Grier’s Don “No Soul” Simmons- a rubber-limbed, nasal-voiced, GOP-loving pop artist who prefigures Carlton Banks in aesthetics and dance moves- “escapes” the infomercial to crop up in two further sketches, becoming one of the movie’s few running gags. It’s a joke that would have felt obvious upon release but which has been honed into a razor-sharp bit of social observation by the passage of time.

Why AMAZON WOMEN Matters Today

Like the dead in Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, sometimes, we can only grasp the importance of something once it’s passed. A piece of beloved 80s nostalgia can only be beloved once it’s nostalgic, and it can only be nostalgic once it’s aged. What we think of as a cool old 80s film was once just a new release. People didn’t go to an 80s mall with 80s hair to see it in an 80s theater: they went to the mall with whatever haircuts they had, and saw it in whatever theater they normally attended. There was nothing chronologically unique or significant. Sometimes, we can only love a thing or a person through the safe medium of time and distance.

AMAZON WOMEN ON THE MOON tried to be a movie too much of its time, to the point its time wouldn’t come for another four decades. In 1987, it was lazy and trite. In 2025, it’s both a loving picture of the American television landscape circa the end of the Reagan era and an eerily funny reflection of our own trying and tired times. Kino Lorber did God’s own work in releasing a Blu-Ray disc during COVID, which allows viewers to finally glimpse the detail in the framed works in Arsenio Hall’s uber-80s condo, plus includes a commentary by historians Kat Ellinger and Mike McPadden (of blessed memory), outtakes supplied by Dante himself, and the aforementioned deleted scenes.

Horror comedies can be hard to do right, but damn if comedians don’t make excellent horror directors and vice versa. A truly excellent horror-com can be difficult to pull off. If you want to see some Masters of Horror hard at work making you laugh while taking you on a trip down memory lane, though, be sure to tune your channel to Amazon.

If you want to really get into the spirit of things, AMAZON WOMEN ON THE MOON is currently streaming for free at Internet Archive.