James Granilla is obsessed by science fiction. Totally obsessed. It’s all he thinks about. It’s got to the point where he’d rather read his science fiction magazines than have sex with his wife Marge. This does not please Marge at all. She does finally manage to persuade him to make love to her but as soon as it’s over he starts fantasising about the life he’d really like to lead. He’d like to command a starship, on a dangerous mission to intercept an enemy space fleet. He’d much rather be doing that than having sex with his wife.
So now the film becomes James Granilla’s daydream of his life as a bold spacefaring hero.
He is a Planetarian space colonel and he manages to infiltrate himself aboard a spaceship of the enemy Terranean star fleet. His first encounter, with a female crew member named Portia, confuses him. When she throws herself at him he thinks she’s attacking him but he later realises it must be part of the strange Terranean love rituals he’s heard about. He realises that in order to blend in he’s going to have to learn all about these love rituals. Fortunately being a Planetarian he can make himself invisible which will allow him to observe Terranean mating behaviour at close quarters. And even more fortunately the crew members of this ship seem to spend a lot of time engaged in these love rituals. In fact they don’t seem to do much else. This might not be good for efficiency but it’s certainly good for morale.
Colonel Granilla does not seem to approve of female crew members or female captains, or sex, or women in general. But he accepts that it is his unpleasant duty to learn all he can about the sex lives of the Terraneans. At some stage, purely for the sake of completing his vital mission, he may even have to engage in some Terranean mating behaviour himself. And Colonel Granilla is not a man to shirk his duty.
He does become very confused when the ship’s female commander, Captain Mother (yes really), engages in mating behaviour with one of the other females, Portia. Even odder, this love ritual involves stripping Portia naked and giving her a good flogging. Apparently this is necessary in order to convince Portia that she needs to remain Captain Mother’s little girl. Portia promises that in future she’ll be a good girl.
So we can see that in typical David F. Friedman style this movie is going to cover all the standard sexploitation bases - copious female nudity, male/female sex, lesbian sex and some S&M. Enough to keep any reasonable person happy.
The opening credits sequence is pretty cute, with the credits painted onto a naked girl’s body. There’s certainly more of an incentive to read the credits when they’re emblazoned on a very attractive young lady’s bare bottom and bare breasts.
This was 1968. 2001: A Space Odyssey had been released a few months before, and the Apollo program to reach the Moon was about to hit top gear, so a science fiction sex movie must have seemed like an obviously good idea. At the time everybody was nuts about spaceships and naked women tend to be enduringly popular.
The special effects are of course ludicrously cheap. We’re talking toy spaceships that look like toy spaceships. But then this movie was made on about one one-thousandth of the budget of 2001: A Space Odyssey (in fact 2001: A Space Odyssey cost around 12 million dollars to make while Space Thing cost $18,000). The toy spaceships in Space Thing probably cost just add to the fun. The special effects budget was probably about twenty bucks. The uniforms of the lady crew members are cute, leaving not a lot to the imagination. Most importantly the uniforms can in an emergency be removed at a moment’s notice. There seem to be a lot of emergencies aboard this ship that call for the women crew members to remove their uniforms. And they have no hesitation in doing so.
The sets obviously cost a lot more than twenty bucks. I’m guessing at least $50. Well, maybe not that much. But they’re fun as well. This is truly a movie in which the cheapness, and the fact that no attempt is made to hide the cheapness, adds to the charm.
Byron Mabe directed a number of sexploitation features for David F. Friedman including the outrageously entertaining A Smell of Honey, a Swallow of Brine.
In 1968 American sexploitation movies were starting to become just slightly more daring. There’s plenty of female frontal nudity in this film but while the girls are fully naked during the sex scenes the guys have to keep their undies on. The sex scenes are in fact nothing more than a bit of naked cuddling. Apart from the frontal nudity this is a classic nudie film in the tradition of the early 60s nudie-cuties, with the engaging innocence of that genre, rather than the kind of softcore porn movie that would soon start to dominate the exploitation market.
The girls are very pretty indeed, they look adorable in their silly uniforms and they don’t keep those uniforms on for very long.
Something Weird’s DVD release offers a reasonable transfer. The colours look pretty good (yes this one was shot in colour) and includes as extras a couple of shorts and an audio commentary by David F. Friedman. Friedman’s commentaries are usually every bit as much fun as the movies themselves and this is no exception.
Space Thing is of course by any objective standards an extremely bad movie. Even by the standards of sexploitation the plot is virtually non-existent. It is however delightfully goofy. Space Thing is all good clean fun. Well, good dirty fun anyway. It has gags and it has nude space babes. Does any movie really need to have anything more than that? And it’s good-natured and it’s engagingly silly. For what it is it’s highly recommended.
If you just can’t get enough of nude space babes you might want to check out my reviews of the goofy 1974 West German 2069: A Sex Odyssey and of course Doris Wishman’s classic nudie-cutie Nude on the Moon.
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