In the 1950s and 1960s there was this common thriller plot that would involve young women who may or may not have seen something nefarious but no one believing her. So as an audience we are questioning is this woman crazy or is there a conspiracy against her. Plots like this go all the way to Gaslight, and it was common in the Italian Giallo genre. The best example of this plot is Diabolique (1955), a French thriller where a wife and mistress murder their lover only for the body to inexplicably vanish.

So in 1961, Britain’s largest horror producer, Hammer Films, did its take on this plot with Taste of Fear. The movie starts out with wheelchair bound heiress Penny Appleby visiting her father and her new stepmother for the first time in over a decade. When Penny arrives, she is informed that her father has been called away on a business trip, and also that he maybe sick. The details are very vague, which instantly puts suspicion in Penny’s mind. Her stepmother is constantly acting overly nice, which usually sends red flags for these types of movies. Then one night Penny swears that she sees her father in the pool house, dead. Is Penny going crazy? Is her stepmother and Hammer regular Christopher Lee trying to cover a murder, or even worse trying to drive Penny mad? Penny enlists the help of the family chauffeur to help uncover the plot behind these strange events.

The structure of this movie is very odd, as for the first 2/3rds of it, it seems fairly obvious what’s going on. It’s as if the director was pointing giant neon signs at the stepmother saying “she did it!” And I kept expecting there to be a big twist around the midpoint of the film, but the twist I was expecting never came. And I just assumed that maybe I’ve seen these types of plots so often that I just can tell what’s going to happen… but then… the third act turn comes where Penny and her driver discovers a body, or at least I thought that was the turn, as five minutes later there’s a plot twist that made me say “that son of a bitch” out loud(I should mention I was in the gym on the treadmill watching the movie on my phone). This twist made me realize I was watching the movie from the wrong perspective the entire time. A switch had been pulled on me, and I was unaware.

Other than the nifty plot twist, the movie has some really stunning black and white cinematography. The camera is not afraid to move hauntingly through the large empty house, showing Penny’s vulnerability. There’s a courtyard with a creepy swimming pool that looks gorgeous in black and white, the moonlight almost highlighting the cold water as a point of interest. The only downside to the movie is that there’s a couple of leaps of logic that we are asked to make, there are specifically two really large leaps that’s tough to buy, and could hamper your enjoyment of the film, especially if you’re looking for realism.

The American Astronaut is a low budget indie homoerotic space western musical. And that’s a strange mix of genres. In fact the whole movie is strange. And I found it incredibly charming. It mixes together this odd punk rock aesthetic mixed with like a love of Flash Gordon-esque 1950s science fiction. These elements have no business working together, but when tied together with the dry humor of director Cory McAbee, it all comes together in a Jim Jarmusch-ian black and white minimalist comedy.

The movie takes place in a science fiction world where all the women now take residence on Venus, and astronaut Samuel Curtis is smuggling and making trades all over the Galaxy. In a lonely western dive bar on the moon, Curtis is given a proposition, deliver a real live girl to a mining community in exchange for a healthy teenage male, then take the healthy teenager to the women of Venus in exchange for their recently deceased breeding male, and then take the dead body back to earth to collect a reward from the dead guy’s family. It’s a fairly simple plan, too bad it goes haywire when Curtis’s arch nemesis, Professor Hess, has other plans… oh and it’s Hess’s birthday.

What makes this indie film so charming is the music and the special effects. The punk rock meets western soundtrack makes for something unique and refreshing. The best musical number comes early on in the movie as two bar patrons follow Curtis in the bar’s restroom and start musically accosting him. The special effects are done so well, they are cheap as we see obvious models of spaceships hover over homemade backgrounds. But McAbee never pokes fun at his special effects or the cheapness of them, which is a smart move as they all feel like an intentional stylistic choice.

I really don’t know why this movie works, and I’m not sure if anyone else could mix all these genres together and get the same result. But somehow The American Astronaut is a good science fiction comedy musical, and might be the only one on the planet… but then agin, I’ve never been to Earth.