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starring Dr. Hal !
SIX MASS EXTINCTIONS...
January 18, 2019 10:00pm

 

Ask Dr Hal
SIX MASS EXTINCTIONS...
...IN AS MANY HOURS. Yes, the Show That Never Ends threatened to live well up to its name in this lengthy episode. We did Humpty's poem again, together with others (Clark Ashton Smith for one, un-credited) and then discussed the Extinction Events which have troubled our planet's biosphere in previous lustrums and epicycles. When Puzzling Evidence and later, KrOB appeared, we took a jog in another direction, ending up watching and narrating SHIP OF MONSTERS (1960) a Mexican film about two comely Venusians who have captured males of various sentient species from other worlds to take back to the Planet of Love for breeding purposes (!) when stopping on Earth due to a momentary, transient space ship breakdown. They decide to collect a happy-go-lucky vaquero (Eulalio González) named, in the film, Lalo Gonzalez "Piporro," whose bar-room buddies regularly are regaled by his outrageous lies. Naturally, they disbelieve him when he tells of encountering the Space Babes and their retinue of grotesques. To complicate matters, one of the Venusians turns out to be a curvaceous but sharp-fanged Vampire with sinister plans for the Earth. Hilarity, of a sort, ensues. Viewers of this sort of film will remember that Venus is populated by shapely glamour-dolls in sparkly, form-fitting swimsuit-like affairs, as in QUEEN OF OUTER SPACE (1958), ABBOT AND COSTELLO GO TO MARS (1953) et al. (Yes, I know, the funnymen in that movie intend to go to Mars but actually end up on Venus.) The all-female Venereans apparently enjoy a highly evolved technological civilization, which is how they have managed to delude Earthly space probes into reporting that the second planet out from the Sun is a Hell World of super-heated acid rain in a searing black abyss. Good strategy, that. The film's leading ladies, Ana Bertha Lepe and Lorena Velázquez, were crowned Señorita México (Miss Mexico) in 1953 and 1960, respectively. Six hours.


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