The nights are cold and crisp and the stars are twinkling like diamonds through the needles of the evergreen trees.
That means that it’s either Christmas, or aliens abducted you from your bed and deposited you in the forest again.
Damn, but don’t you hate when that happens? I keep telling them I have no idea why Spock didn’t simply go back in time to keep Vulcan from blowing up, but they don’t buy that. So this time, I told them about Christmas.
Aww, yes, Christmas, that most wonderful time of the year filled with good cheer, decorated trees, colorfully wrapped presents and plenty of rum drinks. It’s a time of families get togethers, turkey dinners, cold nights (here in Central Florida it’s down to a chilly 84 degrees) and holiday film festivals.
That’s right. There’s no time of the year that filmmakers favor more than Christmastime. And there’s basically three types of movies they make. There are the incidental Christmas films. Those are the movies that really aren’t about Christmas per se, but are set during the Christmas holidays such as Die Hard, Lethal Weapon, and Batman Returns. Then there are the hard core Christmas films like White Christmas, Christmas Story, It’s a Wonderful Life, A Miracle on 34th Street or any of the two million versions of Charles Dicken’s A Christmas Carol (the best is still the 1951 English version starring Alistar Sim). Then there’s my favorite, the Christmas novelty flicks. Most of these involve Santa Claus in some way, shape or form. Some of these include The Santa Clause, in which Tim Allen becomes Santa Claus after the original Santa falls off his roof and dies; A Nightmare Before Christmas, in which the king of Halloween kidnaps Santa and decides to do Christmas Halloween style; and my personal favorite, The Munster’s Scary Little Christmas, in which Grampa Munster, while trying to produce snow, teleports Santa into his lab and inadvertently turns him into a fruitcake.
But all of these holiday offerings pale in comparison to that cinematic triumph that has become the stocking-stuffing undisputed champion of the 99-cent DVD rack at every Family Dollar Store and car wash in America, Santa Claus Conquers the Martians.
This film has made nearly everyone’s “worst movies ever made” lists since it first came out in 1964, a year that saw the release of such iconic movies as Mary Poppins, The Incredible Mr. Limpet, A Hard Day’s Night, Goldfinger and another movie about the red planet, Robinson Crusoe on Mars starring a young Adam West before Batman. The absolute best review this movie got called it “A children’s film adults won’t mind sitting through.” Apparently a lot of them did since this holiday turkey has the honor of being included in The 50 Worst Movies of All Time right along with Plan 9 from Outer Space and Showgirls.
Actually, I think Santa Claus Conquers the Martians got a bad break. Sure it suffers from an incredibly low budget even by 1960s standards. And, sure, the effects, like the cardboard-box-and-refrigerator-conduit robot that breaks into Santa’s workshop or the guy in the polar bear suit that attacks the children had to have come from Wisconsin since they’re pure cheese. And some of the sets, like the Martian spaceship with a toy box control panel that the children hide in are really bad. But there are good points too. I mean, in all fairness, the Martian exterior where they find the Chochem (an 800-year-old Martian sage) looks an awful lot like a typical original series Star Trek set. And the Martian space ship’s control panel looks like it could have come right off of Doctor Who’s TARDIS.
So what is this movie about? Glad you asked. As the film opens, while the children of earth are happily waiting for Santa Claus to bring them stuff on Christmas Eve, the children of Mars are listless and mostly unhappy. Part of the reason for that, we're told, is because they're watching far too much Earth television that keeps beaming across space to them. More than that, though, it’s because Martian children receive their education directly into the brain through their antenna and aren’t allowed any freedom of expression. So they need something to cheer them up. They need a childhood. And who better to inspire them than Santa Claus? So what else can the Martians do but fly to Earth and kidnap Santa.
As silly -- okay, totally inane -- as this sounds, there are some solid science fiction concepts rolling around in there. The notion of plundering a lab and kidnapping somebody who knows something instead of learning to do it yourself isn’t exactly a new idea. How do you think the U.S. Space Program got off the ground? And the idea of learning through chemical or electrical osmosis is one you’ll find in a number of places. The most obvious ones are George Lucas’ first major film, THX 1138. In this glimpse into a foreboding future children are educated through IV injected bottles. There’s a great scene where Donald Pleasance, after reconnecting some kid’s bottle of economics, tells the kid, “I remember when economics was a bottle this big...took a week!” And who could forget how people learned new skills in The Matrix. Just call the base, ask for a skill, and it got uploaded right into your brain.
Now that I think of it, this sort of notion may seem like a science fiction standard, but THX 1138 and the Matrix flicks came long after Santa Claus Conquers the Martians. Maybe they ripped it off. Stealing an idea from a film like this is, after all, a lot like re-gifting a fruitcake. Since nobody ever eats it, nobody would ever know.
And you know what? There’s something else that may have been “borrowed” from this holiday cult classic (which is a nice way of saying this terrible Christmas/science fiction B-grade drive in flick nobody paid attention to until it fell into the public domain and came out in 99-cent DVDs in 2007). The bad guy who wants to keep Mars the way it is and keeps trying to kill poor Old Saint Nick to make sure of it is called Voldar. Sounds a little like Vadar, doesn’t it? Could Lucas have ripped this flick off twice? Why not? You don’t know the power of the dark side. And while we’re at it, Voldar is only three letters short of Voldamort, isn’t it?
All that aside, however, here’s another cool fact about this movie. This is the first film in which we not only get to see what Martian society is like, but we get to learn part of the Martian language. That’s right. We learn that on Mars, the king would be called Kimar (pronounced “key mar). A Martian mother is a Momar (moe mar). A Martian girl is a girmar (gear mar) and a Martian boy is a bomar (bow mar). I don’t know what Gene Barry or Tom Cruise would have made of that in dealing with the Martian invaders in The War of the Worlds, but it might have helped. The Martians H.G. Wells described could certainly be called a Calamar. In fact, you’d have to be a total damar not to know that. Perhaps they could have bribed them with what is obviously a Martian treat, namely, a Mallomar.
Makes you wonder if perhaps the name of the bad guy was a misspelling that should have been Volmar, which would then roughly translate to “Martian Voldamort.” Then again, some of the Martian names don’t follow this Martian grammar (didn’t know that word came from a Martian dictionary, did you?) For example, the comic relief -- meaning the one guy who actually is supposed to be played for laughs -- is named Droppo. One would expect him to be called Damar (which actually is a word meaning “sap”) But perhaps he is a distant, interplanetary relative of the Marx Brothers. Y’know, as in Groucho, Harpo, Chico and Droppo?
There is a thought that supports this. When the Martians arrive and fly over the earth, they spot Santa Claus’s standing in front of big pots ringing bells on every street corner. So they kidnap two Earth children to identify the real Santa. This goes along with an old Marx Brothers gag in which Groucho says, “Simple? Why, this is so simple a four-year old could figure it out.” Then he turns to someone else and adds, “somebody get me a four-year old cause I can’t make heads or tails of it.”
Part of the problem is that the Martians, for all their technological advancements, aren’t terribly bright. Not only can’t they tell one Santa from another, but when Voldar gets tired of trying -- and failing -- to kill Santa, he does what he does best and re-kidnaps him instead. Unfortunately, he doesn’t get the real Santa. Instead, he gets Droppo dressed in a Santa Claus suit. And he doesn’t even notice that despite the red Santa cap, Droppo still has Martian goggles and antenna on his forehead.
Percival Lowell would not be proud.
The two best things that can be said about Santa Claus Conquers the Martians are A, the DVD was cheap, and, B, at least it wasn’t another version of A Christmas Carol. Of course, it couldn’t have been that, because as we are told at the beginning of the flick, Mars doesn’t have Christmas. And how can you have the ghosts of Christmas past, present and future if there’s no Christmas to start with?
This, of course, brings up an interesting theological point none of the critics of Santa Claus Conquers the Martians seemed to have touched on. If there’s no Christmas on Mars, that means there are no Christians on Mars either, which makes the Martians a bunch of heathens who are much more in need of Father Murphy than in Father Christmas. This would lend itself to an interesting sequel -- Santa Claus Conquers the Martians Part II, Attack of the Missionaries.
There’s probably no reason to resurrect this turkey, though, since one serving is definitely enough. It was directed by a gentleman named Nicholas Webster. Believe it or not, Nicholas was a serious director who made lots of television programs and even received best directorial awards for some of it. When he tried to branch into feature films, however, this was all he got. It had to have been quite a blow, particularly after reading the script and then getting a gander at the miniscule budget. The only way he could have gotten through this was by imbibing in a whole lot of Drymars -- Martian for “dry martinis” -- which had to available on the set. Otherwise the actor playing Santa Claus wouldn’t have looked stoned throughout the entire production.
What’s in a Drymar, you might ask? Why, it’s made from Quigon Gin and Voldamouth, of course. Shaken, not stirred.
Well anyway, Merry Christmas. Happy New Year. And I’ll see you all in 2014 unless the Vikings got it right and Ragnarok kills us all.
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