Dr Jeff Huntley (Lester Brown) is a scientist, and don't you forget it, because he has channelled all his energies into a study of the heavens. Today he has some excellent news for his mentor and colleague Professor Nichols (William Mayer), and he phones him up to inform him that he will be over in five minutes to give him the details, then drives to their offices. As he waits, the Professor chats with their secretary Cathy (Marietta) who he has noticed has something of a crush on Jeff, though she denies it, in spite of spending her time working late, typing the same letters repeatedly under the claim of trying to improve her secretarial skills. Anyway, Jeff arrives and delivers his bombshell: he has inherited three million dollars, which is enough to get him and the Professor to the moon!
For Doris Wishman's second film as director, she used her real name for her producer credit then preferred to go by a joint pseudonym with her cinematographer Ramyond Phelan who was helping out, both as director and writer. That said, there was a definite nineteen-sixties female quality to the script, as mostly it wants the strapping hero Jeff to find a nice girl and settle down, setting about setting him up with Cathy in the most roundabout manner possible. This was filmed in Florida to take advantage of the Coral Castle, a tourist attraction that had been built a few decades before by a mysterious Latvian who claimed to have moved the huge limestone coral blocks by power of his mind.
Which is about as outlandish as what Wishman dreamt up for her parade of nonsense here. For the first half hour you may be thinking "Fully Clothed on Earth" might have been a more apt title as we are treated to acres of shameless padding with the two male leads conducting a bunch of "who cares?" conversations in the build-up to finally reaching our satellite. On the journey to the moon, which appears to have been made in a toy rocket which flies away from a backwards Planet Earth - literally, the continents are in opposite places and it's spinning the wrong way, which funnily enough is the least of this film's plausibility issues, our intrepid astronauts conduct pressing exchanges over the radio. With one another. Even though they are sitting with a foot between them.
Anyway, reach the moon they do, though when their craft lands they are asleep at the time for reasons Wishman did not see fit to explain, since frankly who was bothered? Audiences of the day wanted to see the title live up to its promises, which it does after a fashion as Jeff and the Professor don their brightly coloured spacesuits (which don't offer the degree of body coverage that NASA would deem particularly safe, one suspects) and venture outside only to see the moon looks remarkably like sunny, verdant Florida circa 1960. As they explore, baffled by the lack of craters or moon rocks (though they are delighted to find gold, in a plot strand which is also dropped swiftly), they find the Coral Castle by climbing up a handy ladder, and what do you know, finally the naked ladies are there for all to see.
Except they are not completely naked, they're topless, wearing tiny shorts and with antennae on their noggins which looks suspiciously like a pair of twigs attached to a hairband. Still, it's better than nothing, and Jeff and the Professor take a strictly academic interest in these telepathic women with their knockers out, as if the film was reluctant to admit its female cast members were here to be ogled at, though given the bland scenes they were asked to act out, was anyone expecting a work of pioneering science fiction? It's all very quaint, and not exactly stimulating, though there's always the possibility you would be prompted to laugh at how ludicrous Nude on the Moon was, from its theme tune about losing your heart to a "Moon Doll" repeated ad nauseam to the Queen of the Moon (also Marietta, maybe Jeff doesn't recognise her with her clothes off) deciding she doesn't like a proffered chocolate bar, but she does like the wrapping it comes in and proceeds to polish that off. With a happy ending where Jeff does indeed settle down, this was a relic of a bygone age, as they say, naively silly.
American writer-producer-director regarded by many as one of the worst directors of all time, her idiosyncratic, low budget, often sexually-themed films include Nude on the Moon, Bad Girls Go To Hell, The Amazing Transplant, Let Me Die A Woman and the two "Chesty Morgan" films: Double Agent 73 and Deadly Weapons. Watch for her highly individual use of the closeup and dubbed dialogue, not to mention all those feet.
