MOVIE REVIEWS : ‘AMAZON WOMEN’ ATTACK FUNNY BONE

Like all anthology comedies, “Amazon Women on the Moon” (citywide) is a hit-and-miss affair, made up of 20 vignettes of varying degrees of humor, most of them spoofs of commercials and old movies and all of them written by Michael Barrie and Jim Mulholland. When it’s funny it’s often hilarious and low-down, but when it isn’t, it’s embarrassingly grim. On the whole, however, it balances out as an amiable diversion--provided you’re in a suitably relaxed and undemanding mood.

What’s most amusing is the title sequence, an accurate and affectionate send-up of cheapie ‘50s space adventures. Directed by Robert K. Weiss, the sequence provides the film’s loose frame as a TV late-show offering, often interrupted. Steve Forrest, Robert Colbert and Joey Travolta are its three stalwart astronauts, science-fiction historian Forrest J. Ackerman is our President, and Sybil Danning (who else?) is Queen of the Moon Amazons.

Most of the film’s humor turns upon bizarre reversals. Lou Jacobi, for example, is an ordinary old man watching TV in his shorts and undershirt who pushes the wrong button and finds himself trapped on the other side of the tube, following the Reagans off a presidential plane and caught in the clutch of King Kong.

Joe Dante’s inspired “Critics Corner,” in which Lohman and Barkley take off on Siskel and Ebert, finds the reviewers judging the life of an average TV viewer (Archie Hahn) and finding it not only dull but also soon to end in a heart attack. Dante then turns Hahn’s funeral into a roast, emceed by Steve Allen, with Rip Taylor, Slappy White, Jackie Vernon (who for some reason doesn’t get to do his shtick), Henny Youngman and Charlie Callas on the dais.

There’s much to laugh at in John Landis’ “Blacks Without Soul,” which presents blacks as affluent WASP types and features David Alan Grier as a finger-snapping singer of surpassing squareness.

Along with the title take-off, the other movie spoofs are Carl Gottlieb’s “Son of the Invisible Man,” in which Ed Begley Jr. doesn’t realize that he’s invisible only to himself and therefore runs around in the nude, and Weiss’ “Reckless Youth,” starring Carrie Fisher in a wonderfully precise homage to ‘30s exploitation kings like the late Kroger Babb, who warned us of the dangers of venereal disease and marijuana in the most crudely salacious ways.

Even funnier is Gottlieb’s “Pethouse Video,” in which we watch a centerfold model (Monique Gabrielle) go about her daily routines in the same state of undress in which she posed. Russ Meyer, the king of the nudies himself, pops up in Landis’ “Video Date” as a salesman of erotic videos with amusing, unexpected twists.

Among the film’s many familiar faces, billed simply as “Lots of Stars,” are Michelle Pfeiffer, Griffin Dunne, Joe Pantoliano, B. B. King, Rosanna Arquette, Steve Guttenberg, Henry Silva, Belinda Balaski, William Marshall and Angel Tompkins, who plays the First Lady with a love life as conjured in an overheated novel by Irving (as in Wallace) Sidney (as in Sheldon).

Among those receiving special thanks in the end credits of “Amazon Women on the Moon” (rated R for some raunchiness) is Zsa Zsa Gabor, who after all, starred in the 1958 “Queen of Outer Space.”