Sunday, December 6, 2015
Thursday, November 26, 2015
Friday, November 20, 2015
Wednesday, May 28, 2014
Friday, May 9, 2014
Springtime of Mars
 |
| Full Moon, Full Mars |
But in the early spring, April 8, the two planets were in opposition to the sun. So on the 9th, both the full moon and the full Mars were bright in the early evening sky. In fact, the last time I saw the planet that bright was during the extreme close approach of Mars to the Earth all the way back in 2001. Still, last month's close approach was pretty spectacular.
Now, come on boys and girls. Y'gotta admit you liked that. Most of you are probably doing the Martian March all over your living rooms right about now. So let me know. Leave a comment. Give me a smile. Give me a like. Hell, give me the finger. Anything would be useful about now.
Tuesday, April 8, 2014
Attack of the Zipper Monsters
It has been said that the moon is made of green cheese. But if anything is actually made of cheese, it’s got to be those fine 1950s drive-in flicks about Mars and Martians.
It’s likely, in fact, that if you pick up a dictionary and look up the word “cheesy”, you’ll simply find a picture from Santa Claus Conquers the Martians, The Angry Red Planet, The Invasion of the Saucer Men, or either one of my two favorite zipper-monster movies, Invaders from Mars and It, the Terror from Beyond Space.
Zipper monsters ruled back in the hey-day of the drive in. Exhibitors back then needed a lot of product since the double bill -- that’s two movies per showing -- changed every Wednesday. The studios churning this stuff out didn’t have the budgets they have today, so something had to suffer. In the case of the zipper monster, it was costuming. Zipper monsters usually looked like some big lumbering hulk in a full body suit, hood and mask. None of it was subtle or realistic though. And it wasn’t bad enough that the mask was obviously a mask or that the saggy body suit rarely fit the actor. Some of those costumes had zippers that ran down the back like a wet suit. And unfortunately in a flick with a shoestring budget and a deadline of a couple of weeks there wasn’t the luxury, money or time to bother with re-shoots, especially for something as trivial as a zipper embarrassingly exposed in frame. So the directors of these cinematic triumphs, mostly out of necessity, let it slide.
That’s not to say that zipper monster movies were bad story-wise. Cheesy and bad are two different things. Invaders from Mars, for example, is an interesting spin on both the fable of the Boy Who Cried Wolf and Jack Finney’s novel, The Invasion of the Body Snatchers. It’s a paranoid piece of drive in fluff made in 1953 by director William Cameron Menzies from a scenario by Richard Blake based on a treatment by John Tucker Battle that he based on a dream his wife had. In it a boy named David, played by then-kid actor Jimmy Hunt, sees a flying saucer crash into a sand pit outside his home. He can’t be sure it wasn’t a nightmare, so the next morning his dad, who just happens to be a scientist, goes over to the pit to check things out since, as he says, “there have been rumors”. When he comes back, he’s different, and little David notices a thing sticking out of the back of his neck. Dad explains that he snagged it on some barbed wire…just before smacking the crap out of the kid for being so nosy.
It seems that David’s dad is an engineer for a nearby plant where they are manufacturing missiles with atomic warheads that are going to be placed in orbit above the earth. Since, by some weird pseudo-scientific reasoning that‘s only viable in this film, a rocket can reach Mars in “a couple of days” the Martians are concerned about the nuclear threat and have decided to do something about it. So they bury their flying saucer under the sand pit, lure scientists and civic leaders into it, suck them down to the ship and surgically implant probes that allow the Martians to go puppet master on them. Then they send them out as saboteurs to kill and destroy. Once these poor mindless drones have accomplished these dastardly diabolical deeds, the Martians remotely pull the plug on them by detonating the probes. No witnesses. Bonus.
As was the case in the drive in classic made from Finney‘s novel with Kevin McCarthy, it’s not easy to convince folks that their friends and neighbors are actually aliens or in this case Martian spies. So what else can they do but take him to a shrink. But once little David convinces the pretty, sympathetic psychologist, played by Helena Carter, that he’s not nuts or making stuff up, a world of hurt descends on the Martians as Col. Fielding, played to the hard-boiled hilt by Morris Ankrum, and the whole U.S. Army starts digging in the sand pits to free the Martian’s victims and blow up the flying saucer before it can escape. This involves a lot of running through underground tunnels the Martian mutant drones have made by melting the rock with a heat ray (interesting how Martians seem to have a thing for heat rays, isn’t it?) You can tell the rock has been heated to the melting point because the walls are covered with great big bubbles as if someone scotch taped balloons everywhere. Course, those aren’t actually balloons. On a whole new level of cheese, director Menizes decided that balloons didn’t look right, so he had his crew inflate hundreds of condoms and stick them on the walls instead.
From that point on, I guess you could say the Martians were totally screwed, weren’t they?
There were two types of Martians aboard this particular saucer. One is the leader, a little guy (or woman, kind of hard to tell which) with a bulbous head and tentacles or branches for arms inside a glass globe. The globe is carried around by the second type of Martian. This one is over six-feet tall with oversize hands, big bulbous eyes and rubber zipper suits for skin. There are tons of them in the ship and running in pairs through the tunnels carrying bazooka-like ray guns. And one gets the quick impression that the leader mentally controls them, just as it controls its human saboteurs once they’ve been fitted with probes.
This flick was remade in the 1970s with Karen Black, a decent budget, actual special effects and Martian mutants that looked a lot like giant fleas. But personally, for all its flaws, hokum, scientific inaccuracies and zipper monsters, I like the 1953 version better. There’s a certain homey charm about it that has me feeling the upholstery of the back seat of my dad’s 1957 Ford and smelling the shopping bag of popcorn mom always brought to the drive in every time I see it. It’s hard to beat my favorite scene in which David is being hauled through the tunnels by Martian drones yelling “Col. Fieldings! Col. Fieldings!” When Col. Fieldings suddenly hears him, he faces the camera in a dramatic close-up crying “It’s the boy!”
Man, they just don’t make them like that anymore.
Topics like mind control, fear of invasion by ruthless totalitarians and just plain paranoia born from the cold war that grew out of World War II is at the heart of many of these old drive in classics, most notably Howard Hawk’s The Thing from Another World with James Arness as the Thing (which ended with the warning “watch the skies! Keep watching the skies!”), It Came from Outer Space with Richard Carlson, George Pal’s version of H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds and, of course, Invasion of the Body Snatchers. All of these films expressed the fears on everyone’s minds that the commies were coming. They were secretly taking over the country and brainwashing everyone so that wouldn’t see the inevitable nuclear strike. Invaders from Mars certainly embodied these themes. It had a sense of inescapable doom like in The Thing and The War of the Worlds, the same ruthless mind control as in It Came from Outer Space and the total fear of losing identity as so eloquently expressed in Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
But if all these phobias are at the heart of Invaders from Mars, the only one of them plaguing my other favorite zipper-monster classic is pure claustrophobia. It, the Terror from Beyond Space (originally titled It, the Vampire from Beyond Space) is like The Thing from Another World in the sense that both are flicks about isolated groups being stalked by an unbeatable horror in a place from which there is no escape. In the case of The Thing, it’s a remote research station in Antarctica. But the location of It is even more inescapable than that. This nightmare unfolds aboard a rocketship on its way back from Mars.
Set in the distant future -- 1973 (same year David Bowie came out with the album, Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars) -- It, the Terror from Beyond Space tells the tale of Capt. Currothers, played by Marshall Thompson, who is sent to Mars in a mission that has mysteriously failed. When a rescue mission arrives, Currothers claims that his entire crew was killed by something unseen that stole them from the dust storms. The crew of the rescue vehicle doesn’t buy this for a minute - especially after finding a skull with a bullet hole in it - and Currothers is taken aboard under arrest for murder. Once they’re underway and too far out to turn back, crew members begin to disappear. Reluctantly, the crew has to accept that the fact that Currothers was right. There are Martians, and one of them has hitched a ride and is moving around in the air shafts, snatching crewmen and draining them of blood. Enormously strong, the Martian can tear down steel doors and rip through the central hatches. The crew, of course, fights back. But this is one tough son of a gun. He’s impervious to bullets, fire, electricity and even lethal doses of radiation and one by one the crewmembers fall. Finally, with nowhere else to run, the survivors cluster in the top of the ship and wait for the final confrontation.
If all this sounds sort of familiar, it should. It, the Terror from Beyond Space is credited as being the inspiration for Dan O’Bannon’s incredibly scary script for Ridley Scott’s 1979 space shocker, Alien. And that’s for a good reason. For a low budget, zipper monster-flick, this 1958 space opera ain’t bad really, and it has some pretty impressive credentials. It was directed by Edward L. Cahn who, a year earlier, directed Frank Gorshin (the Riddler from TV’s Batman) and Lyn Osborn (Cadet Happy from early television’s Space Patrol) in another drive in sci fi classic called Invasion of the Saucer Men. And it was written by Jerome Bixby, a Twilight Zone writer who would several years later pen four episodes of original Star Trek, Requiem for Methuselah, Day of the Dove, By Any other Name and Mirror, Mirror.
Of course, that doesn’t mean that It, the Terror from Beyond Space is sans cheese. Actually, face-palms abound in this flick. For example, the first guy the Martian snatches is down in the supply level checking out a noise or an open hatch door or something. While he’s there, he raids the supply locker for a pack of cigarettes. That’s right, cigarettes. Smoking was okay in the 1950s. As hard as it is to believe in the health-conscious world of today, nobody knew it was bad for you back then. Cigarettes were sold everywhere for about a quarter a pack and they were even widely advertised on television. You could smoke everywhere. You could smoke in movie theaters, malls, department stores, bars, pubs, restaurants, terminals, buses, trains, ships, airplanes and, as we’re led to believe in this movie, even rocketships.
Of course, the rocketship in It, the Terror from Beyond Space is impervious to everything and absolutely indestructible. Anyone who has ever seen a Bond flick knows what happens if you fire a gun in a jet plane. I mean, Goldfinger didn’t end up on some guy’s lawn by accident, after all. But on this ship you could apparently fire a bazooka if you felt like it. All the crewmen aboard the rocket are packing .45s, and one of them brings out an M1 carbine. So not only is there a lot of shooting aboard the ship halfway between Earth and Mars, but when Currothers and the boys decide to set a trap for the Martian, they booby-trap the air shaft with about a dozen hand grenades. This is like a multiple face-palm. First, wouldn’t one - let alone a dozen - hand grenades blow the ship up? Second, none of the rescue crew believed Currothers when he said a Martian killed his crew cause none of them thought the planet was inhabited. So what did they bring cases of guns and hand grenades for? Was it to deal with the guy complaining about their smoking?
The big, hulking, bad-ass Martian monster is played by “B” western star Ray “Crash” Corrigan. It’s surprising that this monster is as scary as it is. It has clawed feet that look and move like clown shoes, really big hands with fingers that don’t work and, of course, the zipper down the back. But the best -- or worst? -- feature is the creature’s head and face. Seems that Crash never showed up for the casting of the costume’s head piece, so it wound up not fitting his head. The mask wasn’t long enough, so Corrigan’s heroically proportioned chin jutted out of the mouth. Fortunately that wasn’t actually a bad thing since in the film it just looks like creature has a very large and bizarre tongue. I guess you could say that fortune not only favors the foolish, but also the low budget Hollywood of yesteryear.
Invaders from Mars is available for viewing in its entirety on You Tube. So is It, the Terror from Beyond Space, but It isn’t free. Going with You Tube’s new (and not particularly popular) pay-per-view policy, It, the Terror from Beyond Space will cost you $2.99 to watch.
(Oh, BTW, I had a ton of really cool illustrations from the two films to add to the text, but Blogger's tech is so BADDDDD that it won't allow uploads. Sorry about that. I may move the whole blog to either Wordpress or Tumblr, you know, something that actually does work.)
It’s likely, in fact, that if you pick up a dictionary and look up the word “cheesy”, you’ll simply find a picture from Santa Claus Conquers the Martians, The Angry Red Planet, The Invasion of the Saucer Men, or either one of my two favorite zipper-monster movies, Invaders from Mars and It, the Terror from Beyond Space.
Zipper monsters ruled back in the hey-day of the drive in. Exhibitors back then needed a lot of product since the double bill -- that’s two movies per showing -- changed every Wednesday. The studios churning this stuff out didn’t have the budgets they have today, so something had to suffer. In the case of the zipper monster, it was costuming. Zipper monsters usually looked like some big lumbering hulk in a full body suit, hood and mask. None of it was subtle or realistic though. And it wasn’t bad enough that the mask was obviously a mask or that the saggy body suit rarely fit the actor. Some of those costumes had zippers that ran down the back like a wet suit. And unfortunately in a flick with a shoestring budget and a deadline of a couple of weeks there wasn’t the luxury, money or time to bother with re-shoots, especially for something as trivial as a zipper embarrassingly exposed in frame. So the directors of these cinematic triumphs, mostly out of necessity, let it slide.
That’s not to say that zipper monster movies were bad story-wise. Cheesy and bad are two different things. Invaders from Mars, for example, is an interesting spin on both the fable of the Boy Who Cried Wolf and Jack Finney’s novel, The Invasion of the Body Snatchers. It’s a paranoid piece of drive in fluff made in 1953 by director William Cameron Menzies from a scenario by Richard Blake based on a treatment by John Tucker Battle that he based on a dream his wife had. In it a boy named David, played by then-kid actor Jimmy Hunt, sees a flying saucer crash into a sand pit outside his home. He can’t be sure it wasn’t a nightmare, so the next morning his dad, who just happens to be a scientist, goes over to the pit to check things out since, as he says, “there have been rumors”. When he comes back, he’s different, and little David notices a thing sticking out of the back of his neck. Dad explains that he snagged it on some barbed wire…just before smacking the crap out of the kid for being so nosy.
It seems that David’s dad is an engineer for a nearby plant where they are manufacturing missiles with atomic warheads that are going to be placed in orbit above the earth. Since, by some weird pseudo-scientific reasoning that‘s only viable in this film, a rocket can reach Mars in “a couple of days” the Martians are concerned about the nuclear threat and have decided to do something about it. So they bury their flying saucer under the sand pit, lure scientists and civic leaders into it, suck them down to the ship and surgically implant probes that allow the Martians to go puppet master on them. Then they send them out as saboteurs to kill and destroy. Once these poor mindless drones have accomplished these dastardly diabolical deeds, the Martians remotely pull the plug on them by detonating the probes. No witnesses. Bonus.
As was the case in the drive in classic made from Finney‘s novel with Kevin McCarthy, it’s not easy to convince folks that their friends and neighbors are actually aliens or in this case Martian spies. So what else can they do but take him to a shrink. But once little David convinces the pretty, sympathetic psychologist, played by Helena Carter, that he’s not nuts or making stuff up, a world of hurt descends on the Martians as Col. Fielding, played to the hard-boiled hilt by Morris Ankrum, and the whole U.S. Army starts digging in the sand pits to free the Martian’s victims and blow up the flying saucer before it can escape. This involves a lot of running through underground tunnels the Martian mutant drones have made by melting the rock with a heat ray (interesting how Martians seem to have a thing for heat rays, isn’t it?) You can tell the rock has been heated to the melting point because the walls are covered with great big bubbles as if someone scotch taped balloons everywhere. Course, those aren’t actually balloons. On a whole new level of cheese, director Menizes decided that balloons didn’t look right, so he had his crew inflate hundreds of condoms and stick them on the walls instead.
From that point on, I guess you could say the Martians were totally screwed, weren’t they?
There were two types of Martians aboard this particular saucer. One is the leader, a little guy (or woman, kind of hard to tell which) with a bulbous head and tentacles or branches for arms inside a glass globe. The globe is carried around by the second type of Martian. This one is over six-feet tall with oversize hands, big bulbous eyes and rubber zipper suits for skin. There are tons of them in the ship and running in pairs through the tunnels carrying bazooka-like ray guns. And one gets the quick impression that the leader mentally controls them, just as it controls its human saboteurs once they’ve been fitted with probes.
This flick was remade in the 1970s with Karen Black, a decent budget, actual special effects and Martian mutants that looked a lot like giant fleas. But personally, for all its flaws, hokum, scientific inaccuracies and zipper monsters, I like the 1953 version better. There’s a certain homey charm about it that has me feeling the upholstery of the back seat of my dad’s 1957 Ford and smelling the shopping bag of popcorn mom always brought to the drive in every time I see it. It’s hard to beat my favorite scene in which David is being hauled through the tunnels by Martian drones yelling “Col. Fieldings! Col. Fieldings!” When Col. Fieldings suddenly hears him, he faces the camera in a dramatic close-up crying “It’s the boy!”
Man, they just don’t make them like that anymore.
Topics like mind control, fear of invasion by ruthless totalitarians and just plain paranoia born from the cold war that grew out of World War II is at the heart of many of these old drive in classics, most notably Howard Hawk’s The Thing from Another World with James Arness as the Thing (which ended with the warning “watch the skies! Keep watching the skies!”), It Came from Outer Space with Richard Carlson, George Pal’s version of H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds and, of course, Invasion of the Body Snatchers. All of these films expressed the fears on everyone’s minds that the commies were coming. They were secretly taking over the country and brainwashing everyone so that wouldn’t see the inevitable nuclear strike. Invaders from Mars certainly embodied these themes. It had a sense of inescapable doom like in The Thing and The War of the Worlds, the same ruthless mind control as in It Came from Outer Space and the total fear of losing identity as so eloquently expressed in Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
But if all these phobias are at the heart of Invaders from Mars, the only one of them plaguing my other favorite zipper-monster classic is pure claustrophobia. It, the Terror from Beyond Space (originally titled It, the Vampire from Beyond Space) is like The Thing from Another World in the sense that both are flicks about isolated groups being stalked by an unbeatable horror in a place from which there is no escape. In the case of The Thing, it’s a remote research station in Antarctica. But the location of It is even more inescapable than that. This nightmare unfolds aboard a rocketship on its way back from Mars.
Set in the distant future -- 1973 (same year David Bowie came out with the album, Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars) -- It, the Terror from Beyond Space tells the tale of Capt. Currothers, played by Marshall Thompson, who is sent to Mars in a mission that has mysteriously failed. When a rescue mission arrives, Currothers claims that his entire crew was killed by something unseen that stole them from the dust storms. The crew of the rescue vehicle doesn’t buy this for a minute - especially after finding a skull with a bullet hole in it - and Currothers is taken aboard under arrest for murder. Once they’re underway and too far out to turn back, crew members begin to disappear. Reluctantly, the crew has to accept that the fact that Currothers was right. There are Martians, and one of them has hitched a ride and is moving around in the air shafts, snatching crewmen and draining them of blood. Enormously strong, the Martian can tear down steel doors and rip through the central hatches. The crew, of course, fights back. But this is one tough son of a gun. He’s impervious to bullets, fire, electricity and even lethal doses of radiation and one by one the crewmembers fall. Finally, with nowhere else to run, the survivors cluster in the top of the ship and wait for the final confrontation.
If all this sounds sort of familiar, it should. It, the Terror from Beyond Space is credited as being the inspiration for Dan O’Bannon’s incredibly scary script for Ridley Scott’s 1979 space shocker, Alien. And that’s for a good reason. For a low budget, zipper monster-flick, this 1958 space opera ain’t bad really, and it has some pretty impressive credentials. It was directed by Edward L. Cahn who, a year earlier, directed Frank Gorshin (the Riddler from TV’s Batman) and Lyn Osborn (Cadet Happy from early television’s Space Patrol) in another drive in sci fi classic called Invasion of the Saucer Men. And it was written by Jerome Bixby, a Twilight Zone writer who would several years later pen four episodes of original Star Trek, Requiem for Methuselah, Day of the Dove, By Any other Name and Mirror, Mirror.
Of course, that doesn’t mean that It, the Terror from Beyond Space is sans cheese. Actually, face-palms abound in this flick. For example, the first guy the Martian snatches is down in the supply level checking out a noise or an open hatch door or something. While he’s there, he raids the supply locker for a pack of cigarettes. That’s right, cigarettes. Smoking was okay in the 1950s. As hard as it is to believe in the health-conscious world of today, nobody knew it was bad for you back then. Cigarettes were sold everywhere for about a quarter a pack and they were even widely advertised on television. You could smoke everywhere. You could smoke in movie theaters, malls, department stores, bars, pubs, restaurants, terminals, buses, trains, ships, airplanes and, as we’re led to believe in this movie, even rocketships.
Of course, the rocketship in It, the Terror from Beyond Space is impervious to everything and absolutely indestructible. Anyone who has ever seen a Bond flick knows what happens if you fire a gun in a jet plane. I mean, Goldfinger didn’t end up on some guy’s lawn by accident, after all. But on this ship you could apparently fire a bazooka if you felt like it. All the crewmen aboard the rocket are packing .45s, and one of them brings out an M1 carbine. So not only is there a lot of shooting aboard the ship halfway between Earth and Mars, but when Currothers and the boys decide to set a trap for the Martian, they booby-trap the air shaft with about a dozen hand grenades. This is like a multiple face-palm. First, wouldn’t one - let alone a dozen - hand grenades blow the ship up? Second, none of the rescue crew believed Currothers when he said a Martian killed his crew cause none of them thought the planet was inhabited. So what did they bring cases of guns and hand grenades for? Was it to deal with the guy complaining about their smoking?
The big, hulking, bad-ass Martian monster is played by “B” western star Ray “Crash” Corrigan. It’s surprising that this monster is as scary as it is. It has clawed feet that look and move like clown shoes, really big hands with fingers that don’t work and, of course, the zipper down the back. But the best -- or worst? -- feature is the creature’s head and face. Seems that Crash never showed up for the casting of the costume’s head piece, so it wound up not fitting his head. The mask wasn’t long enough, so Corrigan’s heroically proportioned chin jutted out of the mouth. Fortunately that wasn’t actually a bad thing since in the film it just looks like creature has a very large and bizarre tongue. I guess you could say that fortune not only favors the foolish, but also the low budget Hollywood of yesteryear.
Invaders from Mars is available for viewing in its entirety on You Tube. So is It, the Terror from Beyond Space, but It isn’t free. Going with You Tube’s new (and not particularly popular) pay-per-view policy, It, the Terror from Beyond Space will cost you $2.99 to watch.
(Oh, BTW, I had a ton of really cool illustrations from the two films to add to the text, but Blogger's tech is so BADDDDD that it won't allow uploads. Sorry about that. I may move the whole blog to either Wordpress or Tumblr, you know, something that actually does work.)
Monday, December 30, 2013
Ho Ho Ho, The Ultimate Abduction
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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