The American Astronaut Movie Review

A documentary about the space program? The sequel to a bad Johnny Depp movie?

Whatever the phrase The American Astronaut sets you to thinking about, you're not even close.

In the grand tradition of such films as Ice Pirates, Astronaut gives us space travel as a vocation for the dregs of society. We catch up with interplanetary trader Samuel Curtis (Cory McAbee, who also wrote and directs), who finds himself being hunted by his old Professor while trying to reach Venus (naturally inhabited solely by women) and deliver them a male stud.

The plot is largely incidental to all of this: Astronaut is a bizarre conflagration of western, sci-fi, and musical, with characters bursting into song at random intervals and the story jumping from one place to another with only the barest of rationale behind it -- not that anyone's looking for logic in a film that features a song called "The Woman With the Vagina Made of Glass."

Take it seriously if you must -- McAbee's black & white photography appears to beg for artistic credibility, and the performances are often giddy, never dull -- but I think the best summation can be found in the title of a posting about the film I recently saw on a random message board: "Come on... Who else saw this stoned?"