Amazon Women on the Moon is a collection of comedic shorts, all of which are held together by a spoof 1950’s B-movie of the same title. There’s not much of the B-movie itself, although you certainly get a lot of the flavor of B-movies — from the bad acting to the miniskirts to the bad sets to the overly-dramatic soundtrack underscoring the drama of walking from one end of the room to the other.

Many of the other sketches are television related. In one running gag, and old guy in boxers and “wifebeater” t-shirt is sucked into his television through his remote control, placing him in the middle of a wide range of television and movies. Other sketches make fun of common television standards, like the pseudo-documentary “Bullshit or Not?,” which explores the strangely compelling theory that Jack the Ripper was actually the Loch Ness Monster in disguise.

“My, aren’t you a big boy!”

I called the movie a “cameo-fest” and it is. Michelle Pfieffer plays a short role as a new mother harassed by a doctor who insists that a Mister Potato-head doll is actually her child. B.B. King urges viewers to support an organization called “Blacks Without Soul” (“every seven minutes, a black man is born without soul”), which features In Living Color‘s David Allen Grier as its poster-child. Arsenio Hall has a very bad day. And Steve Allen, Henny Youngman, and other comedians of many years ago perform at a funeral/roast.

Like pretty much any pastiche of short sketches strung together into a feature-length movie, some parts are better than others. While many of the sketches are pretty entertaining, the uneven quality and lack of narrative cohesion can make for a pretty tiring experience. On the other hand, it’s a lot of fun to try and put names to faces — besides the biggies, there are a lot of character actors in the film which will have you searching IMDB for quite some time.

Arsenio Hall wishes his employer’s dress code was more “business casual.”

And yes, the movies does star Carrie “Princess Leia” Fisher — although you will have to sit through the credits to see her hidden sketch as an innocent woman corrupted by New York intellegincia in a spoof of 1950’s personal hygine educational films. So be sure to keep the DVD running, or — if you’re the impatient type — hit the “scan” button.

Besides the film, the DVD also contains deleted scenes (don’t bother) and outtakes (pretty good, although it demonstrates how Henny Youngman was certainly showing his age by the time the film was made).

At only 85 minutes long, it’s not a significant time investment — but sketch comedy hasn’t played well in the movie theaters, so if this one passed you by don’t feel bad. But you should certainly rent the movie — unlike other spoof-films like Scary Movie, Amazon Women on the Moon as aged very well indeed.

I thought the era of the miniskirt in sci-fi was over.