Night of the Living Dead (1968)

THEY'RE COMING TO GET YOU, BARBARA...

If you're looking for a monster who makes the perfect killing machine, who feasts on the living indiscriminately without heart, conscience or soul--you can't go wrong with Nazis.

Oh, wait. That's video games.

In the movie world, you can't go wrong with ZOMBIES. The living dead. The reanimated bodies of the deceased, ravenous, bloodthirsty, unthinking, unnatural BEASTS risen from the grave to seek the flesh and/or brains of the living! Lock your doors, board up your windows, and for Pete's sake pretend you don't have flesh!

Zombies are right up there with summer camp serial killers, William Shatner impersonators, janitors who kill you in your dreams, and guys with pins sticking out of their faces - they make the perfect Halloween monsters. Besides, Frankenstein's monster has the capacity for human emotion, werewolves only come out one night a month, and Stephanie Meyer has pretty much single-handedly ruined vampires forever.

Now we all know from a scientific viewpoint (or by Cracked.com, anyway) that an army of zombies bringing human civilization to its knees would be a physical implausibility. Rotting flesh is a magnet for worms, weevils, maggots, and even wild animals, the lack of brain function would deny them the ability to identify mountains, cliffs or even stairs, and of course, being dead and all, they wouldn't have a functioning immune system, central nervous system or even bones that could mend themselves. Generally, the wisest thing to do during a zombie invasion would be to hide out in a tall building or a less densely populated area and wait for their food supply to run out.

Of course, that hasn't stopped some zombie movie makers from working around such complications. Danny Boyle's 28 Days Later, for example, created ravenous ghouls from a highly contagious disease spread from an infected monkey. Peter Jackson's Braindead (or Dead Alive, if you prefer) also used a monkey, but was also spread by New Zealander Howard Sprague's mother.

Meanwhile, nobody has even bothered to tell horror movie icon George A. Romero, as he's been making movies ending with "of the (Living) Dead" for years.

And as The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is considered by many to be slasher movie elite, so is George Romero's 1968 film Night of the Living Dead considered by many to be the ultimate zombie movie. Even though the word "zombie" is never used throughout the entire film, there's plenty of them in there.

What? It's just Bela Lugosi's chiropractor.

It began in a cemetery somewhere in western Pennsylvania...

Two siblings, Barbara and her groaning, moaning, less-than-enthusiastic brother John have traveled three hours to this cemetery at their mother's request to place some flowers on their father's grave. Or, rather, she places the flowers on his grave while her brother keeps pissing and moaning about having to drive three hours to arrive at 8:00 in the evening which looks more like the middle of the day to mourn a dead guy, and then starts freaking her out by chasing her around the tombstones teasing her about how something is coming to get her.

Well...then...something comes to get her. A strange, voiceless man comes out of nowhere, bashes Johnny's head on a headstone and chases Barbara all the way to an isolated farmhouse further in the middle of nowhere, where she in a near-catatonic state and an African-American gentleman named Ben barricade themselves inside as some of her pursuer's friends show up and begin to stand around the house waiting the two of them out.

"Wait! Can I get a ride to the Carnival of Souls set?"

The rest of the film pretty much takes place in or around the house and focuses on disaster movie principles of a group of survivors trying to escape this calamity, while radio and television give us expository reports of a people being killed and eaten by otherwise normal-looking dead people who have developed a taste for human flesh. As to the cause of this zombie infestation, TV newscasters say experts are reportedly at a loss, though one hypothesis claims extraterrestrial radiation found on an exploratory satellite that was blown up on its way back from Venus. Frankly, in my opinion, a virus would have been more plausible.

"After the break, we'll discuss the recent zombie epidemic and how it's all because of Obamacare!"

Meanwhile their little circle grows to include a boyfriend/girlfriend pairing and a bickering married couple whose daughter was bitten, all of whom come out from down in the basement about forty-five minutes into the film and then start arguing with each other, because what's a survival story without members of their main cast constantly at each other's throats, acting all "every-man-for-himself"?

Our heroes finally start arguing long enough to formulate a plan to escape the house by hurling Molotov cocktails out of the second story window to distract the ghouls while the boyfriend and girlfriend attempt to frive the blak guy's truck to a nearby fuel pump to fill up the tank, only to accidentally set the truck on fire and blow the young couple up in a fiery explosion. Which gives us the most iconic and infamous scene of zombies disassembling their flaming corpses and eating the delicious candy inside.

Even with zombies banging down your door, you can't miss Laugh-In.

Relations between the remaining survivors break down after that, particularly after the electricity goes off and the zombies start breaking in. The loudmouthed father turns on Ben and in the scuffle gets himself shot and falls down the basement stairs; by the time the mother retreats down there, her daughter has started feasting on his flesh and pauses for a moment to stab her to death with a garden trowel.

In this zombie universe, their brains haven't rotted enough to know that garden trowels are sharp and that rocks break car windows, apparently. I'm also willing to guess that they know how to cut off the electricity.

Barbara doesn't fare any better - she gets carried off by the swarm, one of whom looks like her brother while Ben is forced to fight the rest of them off alone and spends the night down in the basement.

The next morning, local law enforcement and the neighborhood rifle-wielding mob have the zombie epidemic pretty much under control, as they wander the field nearby capping off the last few walkers. Ben wakes up, comes out of the basement and peeks out the window only to be shot between the eyes and burned with the rest of the bodies, providing possibly the most eyebrow-raising conclusion to a movie that came out about six months after the assassination of Martin Luther King.

I like this new direction The Family Circus is taking. "NOT ME!"

Apart from some scenes of entrail consumption and gratuitous garden utensil violence, the original Night of the Living Dead would be considered moderate by today's horror movie standard. It doesn't entirely subscribe to the "less is more" philosophy demonstrated by The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, but not unlike that film, it does sacrifice some outright shock value for an atmosphere of suspense, desperation and survival. Some filmmakers rely on atmosphere when big-budget special effects are a luxury they can't afford, and Romero does a good job establishing atmosphere here. No jump scares, no on-camera dismemberment, no buckets of blood pouring out of some guy's arm-stump, just good old fashioned feelings of entrapment and claustrophobia.

Something also should be said for the film's progressiveness. As I emphasized earlier, this movie came out at a time of heavy racial tension in America, so it was pretty unheard of for someone to cast an African-American actor as the male lead, let alone as the most competent character in the entire cast. Compare that to most horror movies these days, where the black guy is a token character who gets killed off first.

Night of the Living Dead isn't recommended for anyone who enjoys horror movies with more blood spatter, but is definitely required viewing for classic horror buffs and zombie fans in particular.

Is that gluten-free?

Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959)

Greetings, my friends. We are all interested in the future, for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives. And remember, my friends--future events such as these will affect you in the future.

There are bad movies, and then there are bad movies.

Some movies are made with the sole intent to cause physical and mental pain to its audience. Some movies are made by directors and film crews with very dim outlooks on life and very low opinions of humanity. Some movies are torturous to sit through in ways that violate the Geneva Conventions. Some movies exist only to insult your intelligence, diminish your sanity, and suck your very will to live.

Then there is that special kind of bad movie, the "so bad it's good" type of turkey. It's the unnatural phenomenon where a film is just so inept, so terrible, so incompetent on every imaginable level that it somehow transcends all logic and criticism and actually becomes quite entertaining. They're been called guilty pleasures, unintentional comedies, and have sometimes been considered art films. People not only love them, but make them cult classics and recommend them to friends.

You know which ones I'm talking about. Snakes on a Plane. The Room. Reefer Madness. Santa Claus Conquers the Martians. Every movie Troma Films has ever made.

And this week, we're looking at the granddaddy of them all...

Who better to school us all in how not to make a movie than the grand cheese master himself, Edward D. Wood, Jr., writer, producer, director, known transvestite, lover of angora sweaters, and the self-proclaimed master of "suspension of disbelief"? A man who loved movies and loved making movies, even though he wasn't very good at it. An icon of overzealous half-assery who combined the acting talents (or lack thereof) of horror legends Vampira, Tor Johnson, even the great Bela Lugosi (sort of), put together shoddy reusable sets complete with identical shower curtains, banged out a script in no less than five minutes tops, dressed half the cast in shiny bathrobes, and then blindly chucked the footage in the editor's face with the words "go nuts", and STILL came up with a film that is less than the sum of its parts.

Crackpot psychic The Amazing Criswell opens the film by talking (or reading off cue cards) about the future, where you and I will spend the rest of our lives, and where future events such as these will affect us. He then goes on to talk about "what happened on that fateful day" and then confuses us further about punishing the guilty and rewarding the innocent before finally settling on "GRAVE ROBBERS FROM OUTER SPACE!"

Up in the skies, two men pretending to be airline pilots while sitting in a mostly empty room on boxes are freaked out by a shot of a hubcap hanging from a string.

Meanwhile, following a funeral service for the wife of an elderly gentleman, two gravediggers are burying the coffin when they are suddenly attacked by the very woman they were just burying.

Grief-stricken and despondent, the widower sadly leaves the house they had shared for so many years and walks a lonely, lonely path...into oncoming traffic.

And at HIS funeral, little do his mourners know that as they walk out of the world's smallest mausoleum wondering why his wife isn't entombed in there with him, HER CORPSE IS WATCHING THEM.

And it just gets better from here.

"The incidents, the places, the future...where the hell am I going with this?"

That evening, one of the pilots, a man named Jeff Trent, tells his wife Paula about the flying saucer he saw, saying it looked like a giant cigar (a giant hubcap-shaped cigar, I'm sure) and after he radioed it in, the topmost army personnel were upon him as soon as they landed and made him and the co-pilot swear to secrecy. He can't even admit he saw the thing (even though he just did). Suddenly a bright flash and a huge gust of wind knocks them both backward as a spacecraft has just landed in a cemetery conveniently next to the house, and just as conveniently where those two gravediggers were killed.

As the wind knocks the police around flimsy grave markers, one Inspector Clay (Johnson), who had gone off on his own with a flashlight, encounters Lugosi (or was it the director's wife's chiropractor? I can't be sure) and Vampira and is promptly murdered. ("And somebody's responsible!")

Soon after, Hollywood and Washington, DC are visited by similar sightings of hubcaps wobbling about on strings ("Visits? That would indicate visitors!") and the army's only solution is to shoot off pop caps at them. (How hard is it to hit them? They're just dangling up there.) As the army men ponder just what it is they're shooting at and what it is they're covering up, the aliens return to their space station and set about implementing "Plan 9", which is the regeneration of the newly deceased through stimulation of the pineal and pituitary glands in hopes of gaining the people of Earth's attention.

Plan 8 involved the saucers flying low over major cities with the aliens leaning out the windows waving and yelling "Hey! Look over here!"

Well, as Trent leaves to play pretend airplane pilot again, Paula is left all alone to touch his pillows in her sleep (make of that what you will) when Lugosi/Chiropractor Vampire Guy comes into her bedroom for some reason and chases her out of the house and into the cemetery, where he, Vampira and now the newly resurrected Inspector Clay wander around aimlessly while the girl runs around screaming. Shots alternate between soundstage and outdoor film, actors run across the same part of the cemetery several times over and the time of day changes completely at random until Paula is finally carried off the movie by a passing motorist. The dead reconvene at a waiting space vessel which takes off just as the cops arrive.

Wait, the detective and the dead wife come back as zombies, but the old man comes back as a vampire? How does that work?

Yeah, if I had to wear that, I'd want to choke myself, too.

Meanwhile, at the Pentagon, Colonel Thomas Edwards, Chief of Saucer Operations (as if there were such a position in in the Army, at least to my knowledge) is briefed by a chain-smoking general about the radio signals the aliens have been sending them all this time, and then plays him one which they have translated via their new "language computer." The speaker identifies himself as Eros, a soldier from some unnamed planet within the galaxy who describes his race as advanced eons beyond humans, calls they "stupid" for thinking they were alone in the universe, states that they have come to save their planet from their "ancient, juvenile minds" who keep devising new ways to blow themselves up, and states that the Earth's big guns scare them and that humankind will be destroyed if they refuse to acknowledge their existence.

Not one for diplomacy, are we?

When did Ann Coulter get a dye job? And when did Glenn Beck shave his head?

Edwards is sent to California to speak with the Trents when the aliens come back, send their vampire to attack them and then promptly vaporize him with their Decomposing Ray.

You know, I'm beginning to think these cries for attention are signs of a deeper psychological problem.

A trip back into the cemetery to see where this ray came from sees Monster Clay kidnap Trent's wife and Eros invite them inside their spaceship so they can show them that they're holding Trent's wife captive. He then goes on to reiterate that they are on a mission of peace by admonishing them for their primitive wars, calling them "idiots" with "stupid minds" who will just keep killing each other, and states that mankind must be obliterated before they stumble upon a new type of explosive--a "Solaranite" bomb which would harness molecules of sunlight or whatever as an explosive that would set off a chain reaction and destroy the universe.

Oh, nice use of tact, Eros. The aliens from Independence Day have better people skills.

"You're all big jerks who are stupid and your big ugly faces are as dumb as a butt!"

Anyway, police reinforcements arrive to incapacitate Clay with a stick to the back of his head and save Trent's wife, a fight breaks out on the spacecraft between Trent and Eros that destroys Eros' ham radio equipment and sets off a fire, Trent and the army guys escape just as the flaming ship takes off and explodes in midair, and the remaining zombie creatures instantly decompose where they stand.

Then Criswell comes back daring us to prove that what we just saw didn't happen (we can) and warns us that people whom we don't even know have passed us by in the street may be from outer space, and mentions something about laughing at vitamins and television and outer space before ending with "God help us in the future," not telling us what any of this even has to do with the future.

"YOUR mind's stupider!"
"Nuh-uh, YOUR mind's stupider!"
"YOUR mind's stupider times ten!"
"YOUR mind's stupider times a hundred!"
"YOURS time a thousand!"
"YOURS times INFINITY!!"

Plan 9 from Outer Space is a quandary among bad movies. Is it a bad movie? Undoubtedly. Did it look like they only had a special effects budget of twenty dollars (adjusted for inflation)? Absolutely. Does the plot make as much sense as a 27-dollar bill? Of course. Could a hyperactive six-year-old have written better dialogue? Again, the answer is yes.

Is it the worst movie ever made, however? Surprisingly no.

There ARE bad movies out there. Movies that make you cringe, movies that make you hurt, movies that make you want to find the nearest bridge and jump off it. I've done a few on this blog already--Supergirl, Volcano, The Giant Spider Invasion, and maybe some others I can't name off the top of my head. To list Plan 9 from Outer Space among those titles just seems...wrong.

Don't get me wrong; it is NOT a good movie. It tries hard to tell a suspenseful science fiction story and fails spectacularly in every category. But I'm certain there isn't a director alive who goes into any movie project with the sole intent of making an absolute stinkburger. Sometimes watching these cinematic failures are like staring at a train wreck. You can't look away. And over the years people continue to not look away at epic fails like these. And they keep telling other movie buffs to not look away. And eventually they gain legions of fans, attract new generations of film lovers and develop a cult following, and nobody ever looks away.

I guess my point is...the worst movie ever made is NOT the worst movie ever made.

"A MOVIE THAT IS SO GOOD I WAS HAPPY TO DIE FOR IT!" --Bela Lugosi

Carnival of Souls (1962)

Oldfather Studios, former home of the Centron Corporation.

In 1947, University of Kansas alumni Russell Mosser and Arthur Wolf founded the Centron Corporation, a small Midwestern movie studio which specialized in making hygiene films that they used to show in classrooms to get kids to brush their teeth, keep clean and neat and avoid the dangers of communism. Based in my hometown of Lawrence, Kansas, Centron shot their films at various locations around town, particularly Lawrence High School, and employed local scriptwriters, technical crews and over 3,000 residents, many of whom were children, as actors. Throughout its history, Centron produced these kitschy, conformist educational shorts as well as some industrial safety films for John Deere, Caterpillar and General Electric.

It's been more than twenty years since Centron closed its doors for good. Their old building, constructed in 1955 and pictured above, is now the main facility of the KU film and media department, while their legacy is forever preserved in the Prelinger Archives and old episodes of Mystery Science Theater 3000.

As well as one of the best-known public domain horror films of all time.

Herk Harvey, another KU graduate, was hired by Centron and directed over 400 of their instructional films. While coming home from a location shoot in California, he came across an abandoned amusement park near Salt Lake City, and the desolation and spooky atmosphere was so enchanting that it inspired him to make a movie about it. And so he brought in Centron scriptwriter John Clifford to come up with a movie script, hired an unknown actress named Candace Hilligoss, and used various locations in and around Lawrence (as well as a few in Salt Lake City) with Lawrence-based actors and a Lawrence-based crew, shooting it all in five weeks' time and on a $30,000 budget.

And so we have Carnival of Souls, a horror classic that barely made a whisper in theaters on its first release, but thanks to a successful run on the late-night TV circuit gained a tremendous cult following and inspired the likes of David Lynch and fellow public domain movie icon George A. Romero.

Nowadays the students throw the GOALPOSTS in Potter Lake after winning football games.
Of course, we've also stopped winning football games.

So the film starts out with something you usually see in movies from this era: a hot rod drag race. Two guys randomly pull up next to three women in a car and challenge them, and the women quickly accept. The two vehicles race out of town, through some country roads and finally to a bridge, where for some reason the car with the three women in it suddenly swerves over the side and falls into the river beneath.

That's the Kaw Bridge in north Lawrence they've driven off, incidentally. Though since then it's been replaced by one made of concrete.

As local law enforcement try and fish the car out of the river for three hours with no luck, a survivor named Mary Henry (Hilligoss) emerges out of the water with no memory of how she escaped or what happened to the other two women.

Some time later, Mary decides to move on with her life and take a job as a church organist in Utah, after stopping off at Lawrence's downtown pipe organ factory (since relocated to the northeast part of town) to try one out. She settles in at a boarding house run by a nice old lady and meets her lecherous next door neighbor, and then introduces herself to the minister of her new church (the Trinity Episcopal Church in Lawrence, in fact, at least in the exterior shot).

If he starts saying "giggity-giggity", I'm leaving.

Along the way, strange things starts happening. On her way out of town Mary starts picking up strange organ music on every station on the radio, and then starts seeing a ghostly white-faced man (producer/director Harvey in makeup and a suit) in her windows which causes her to run her car off the road. This man starts appearing in front of her in random places at various times of the day--in mirrors, in windows, at the foot of the stairs of her boarding house, you name it.

Meanwhile, she takes a peculiar interest in an abandoned pavilion out in the middle of nowhere. The minister explains that the building used to be a bathhouse, then a dance hall, and was finally used as carnival grounds before it closed down.

"HEY! YOUR RIGHT FRONT TIRE'S A LITTLE LOW!"

Then one morning during a shopping trip (probably at Weaver's, the department store in downtown Lawrence), a ripple effect in the dressing room renders her invisible to the rest of the world for a few minutes, coupled by an unbearable silence and yet another sighting of the mysterious ghost-faced man. By sheer coincidence she becomes visible again at just the right moment to run panicking into the arms of one Dr. Samuels, a professor of sorts who offers to help her with her strange condition.

Even though he mentions to her that he's not a psychiatrist.

Frankly I'd have gone to see someone who actually IS a psychiatrist. This guy could be any type of doctor.

"Well, I can't just call you 'Not-a-Psychiatrist' Samuels, or 'Dr. Samuels who is not a psychiatrist'!"

At this point you need to know something about Mary - in less polite conversation she would be thought of as a "wet blanket" or a "party pooper". She's very strong-willed, but doesn't always feel comfortable around other people, doesn't want a boyfriend, and isn't keen to join in on activities with others. She admits that she only took the organist job because it was just a job and has no interest in joining the church that is hiring her. She's also not interested in having a relationship with her lascivious neighbor, though that may be his fault more than hers.

The next day, while practicing the organ at the church, Mary goes into a trance and starts playing something particularly eerie while hallucinating about the old pavilion and the white-faced man standing in a dance hall surrounded by other white-faced people dancing. The minister overhears it, calls it "profane" and "sacrilegious", and asks her to resign, all the while worrying about her mortal soul and asking her to join his church.

Okay, THIS part was DEFINITELY filmed in Kansas. Maybe not Lawrence, but still...

Then she goes out with her neighbor to drink and dance...or NOT drink and NOT dance as she's just not into those kind of things. He eventually leaves, fed up with her when he tries to put the moves on her and she sees the white-faced man in the mirror and freaks out, despite her constant pleas for companionship.

On the plus side, there's no lines.

Driven to her wits' end and convinced she does not belong in this world, Mary finally decides to leave town, but not before stopping at a service station across the street from the masonic temple in downtown Lawrence (the masons have since moved and there's a contemporary-style church there now). When the white-faced man reappears as a shadow in a doorway she flees to a bus depot desperate to leave town, where another screen ripple makes her invisible again, and the only bus she gets on is full of eerie white-faced people who all get up out of their seats and move in her direction. Finally she returns to Dr. Samuels' office for help only to learn she's been speaking to the original white-faced man in the chair.

She turns out to have dreamed this.

No, the movie doesn't end there. Heaven forbid.

It ends when she drives out to the empty pavilion, where everything she saw during her freak-out at the church is waiting for her, including the white-face man dancing with a white-faced version of herself. Then they all start chasing her outside laughing and finally catch up to her when she inevitably trips and falls in that special way that movie heroines do...

The next day, the minister, doctor and the police observe her footprints outside the pavilion which end abruptly with no explanation.

Back in Lawrence, the police have finally pulled the car from the start of the film out of the water, with Mary's body inside.

"GRUUHUGHGHUGHH...EEEEEEVERYYYYYY MAAAAAAAN A WIIIIIIIILDCAAAAAAT..."

I'll agree with Herk Harvey on one thing - if there's anything that creeps me out more than Lawrence Welk reruns, it's wandering around in an empty amusement park. Nobody in the booths or running the registers at the gift shops, the roller-coasters and bumper cars totally motionless, no music, no babies crying, no guys earning minimum wage and college credit by walking around in hot, sweaty cartoon animal costumes...I could see why he chose one as the backdrop for a horror movie, particularly one as isolated and remote as Mary is from human society. I could easily tell there was a message in there about social withdrawal and lack of human interaction, though hopefully the creepy-looking monsters in the makeup will give her someone to finally talk to.

Atmosphere is one thing that Carnival of Souls does well, from the empty pavilion scenes to Mary's momentary lapses of existence. No special effects, no CGI, just an abandoned fairground, some makeup and a creepy organ soundtrack. If you enjoy a move that makes good use of atmosphere, you will most assuredly enjoy Carnival of Souls. It's one of those movies that proves that less is in fact more. My only gripe with it was that it drops us into the opening drag race too abruptly, and we don't get a lot of background on Mary apart from she doesn't always get on well with others.

It's a real shame this film is in the public domain, because had it done well in theaters, it might have put my town on the map. That is, if being a progressive college town in an infamously red state with a great arts and music scene and home to one of the best college basketball programs in the country wasn't enough. To be honest, I think the only other film that Lawrence is famous for is The Day After, which implies that there's actually a worthwhile reason to drop a nuclear bomb on Kansas.

Remember kids: brush your teeth, keep clean and neat, and communism is bad!

Santa Claus Conquers the Martians (1964)

"...And Mrs. Santa Claus has positively identified the kidnappers as Martians. Never in the history of mankind have the nations of the world reacted with such unanimity and cooperation. Tonight, the lights will burn until dawn in the United Nations building as the leaders of the world map a course of action."

I was going to think up a nice introduction for this review, but then I remembered that the title of this movie is Santa Claus Conquers the Martians.

I'll pause for a moment to let that sink in a little.









Okay, let's get started.

We begin in a house on Mars, circa mid-20th Century judging by the decor, where we see two Martian children Bomar and Girmar (played by Chris Month and a young Pia Zadora) watch some Nickelodeon TV channel as they send a reporter to a certain workshop at the North Pole for an exclusive interview with Santa Claus himself (John Call).

At least we get a workshop with elves on terra firma this time. Last Christmas movie I watched, he lived in a castle-slash-child-sweatshop in the sky. We even get a Mrs. Claus.

Back on Mars, we see Kimar (Leonard Hicks), the king of the Martians, who is concerned for his two young children. They are both glued to the video set all day watching Earth TV shows. They're listless, they don't want to sleep, they don't even want to eat their food pills.

Kimar's wife Momar (Leila Martin) suggests that he and the other Martian bigwigs ask the advice of Chochum (Carl Don), the oldest Martian on the planet who lives deep in a Martian forest which looks like a Star Trek set. Chochum explains that on Earth it is close to Christmas, a time of the Earth year where children eagerly await the arrival of a man called Santa Claus. He goes on to say that Martian children are raised as adults through electronic teaching devices and are being robbed of their childhoods with no idea of what it means to have fun, and suggests that Mars needs a Santa Claus of their own before exploding.

Personally, though, I blame Martian fast food.

Based on this advice, Kimar decides that the best thing would be to bring Santa Claus to Mars. They fly a spaceship to Earth but see multiple Santa Clauses on every street corner at the first city they come across. They touch down at Nameless City Park, where they question two Earth children, Billy and Betty Foster (Victor Stiles and Donna Conforti), about Santa Claus...and then kidnap them.

A clumsy, idiotic Martian named Dropo (Bill McCutcheon) hides the kids in the radar box in the cockpit as the Martians arrive at the North Pole to capture jolly old St. Nick. While they're gone, Billy and Betty escape the ship to try and warn him, but get lost and cold and chased around by a man in the world's cheapest polar bear costume before the Martians' giant cardboard box robot recaptures them. Meanwhile, Kimar and the others find Santa's workshop and shoot everybody inside with a freeze gun while Mr. Claus goes quietly.

During all this, a second news anchor gives us up-to-the-minute coverage of what we've just seen, followed by several minutes of military stock footage.

How do you "kidnape" someone? Did they kidnap and then RAPE him, or what?

On the way back to Mars, Voldar (Vincent Beck), Kimar's military-minded subordinate who is paranoid of absolutely everything and was against this whole Santa Claus thing from the onset, gives a VERY MUCH TOO TRUSTING Santa and the kids a tour of the spaceship which includes a long walk out of a short airlock. The Martian Dick Cheney's plans are foiled, however, when Santa and company reappear, having snuck out of an air duct though some unexplained magic moments before the airlock doors opened.

After landing, Santa, Billy and Betty meet Momar and her Martian kids, who start laughing uncontrollably albeit for the first time ever when Santa simply enters the room. The plan is to set up a workshop similar to the one on Earth, only an automatic one controlled by a push-button console, so Santa can make toys for good little Martian children. The whole Christmas routine is so inspiring that Dropo, silly little numbskull that he is, stuffs a pillow down his pants and starts dressing up as Santa Claus. Then he gets captured by Voldar and two of the Martian Three Stooges as they sabotage the workshop, mistaking the little moron for Father Christmas himself and clearly unaware of the tubes and antennae that are sticking out of his head that are JUST LIKE THE ONES STICKING OUT OF THEIR HEADS!!! And neither Santa, the Earth kids, nor any of the Martians suspect that something is up until they fire up the toy shop and a doll and a teddy bear come out with each other's heads.

At least there's no pinball machine with lips.

Voldar thinks he has the upper hand until Kimar shows him something off-camera in the workshop which convinces him that Santa has escaped, and then locks him and his accompanying underling up in the janitor's closet. Meanwhile, Dropo escapes from Voldar's least attentive crony and his "nucular curtain" (his words, not mine), Voldar escapes from the closet and Santa repairs his toy machine. Billy overhears Voldar scheming to kill Santa, and he and the kids come up with a plan to ambush Voldar with the toys in the shop. Then we get a bizarre montage of the kids shooting things at Voldar, hitting him with things and throwing things at him until Kimar and Dropo call a cease fire and have the mustachioed villain taken away.

So Santa, Billy and Betty say goodbye to the Martians, the annoying Dropo becomes the official Santa Claus of Mars, and Kimar gives them a ship, I imagine, to get them back to Earth just in time for Christmas. We end on a reprise of the opening song, which contains such questionable lyrics as "Hang up that mistletoe/Soon you'll hear ho ho ho."

He looks happy for a guy who was nearly shot out of an airlock into the vacuum of space just now.

So that's that not-so-lovable holiday classic and beloved MST3K staple Santa Claus Conquers the Martians. It's a silly little flick at heart, despite its many, MANY flaws and shortcomings. Like, for instance, the many questions it raises about Martian civilization, such as why Martians have food pills that come in Earth flavors like beef stew and chocolate ice cream and how Martians can instantaneously receive and understand Earth television programs. Or why this extraterrestrial task force of great intelligence and highly-advanced technology pack Wham-O Air Blasters and take along a man dressed in a cardboard robot costume, let alone employ someone with a deep voice who is so very obviously evil and is not above killing two innocent children. Or why the movie's theme song is titled "Hooray for Santa Claus" and even spells out Santa's name in the chorus when its children's choir sing "Santy Claus".

It could be said that this is one of those movies where the filmmakers did not feel it necessary to take things too seriously. It certainly has a light-hearted nature to it, as we see Santa bring instant joy and happiness to everyone surrounding him. Matter of fact, it might even be TOO silly for its own good. Maybe that's why people regard it as one of the most infamous movies ever.

It's so silly, I'm not even sure you need me telling you about it. It's in the public domain, so you can find it anywhere on the Internet and see it for yourself.

In a proposed sequel, they bring Coca-Cola to Mars and put Dropo on all their cans.

Reefer Madness (1936)

"The next tragedy may be that of your daughter...or your son...or yours...or yours...or YOURS!"

Climb inside the DeLorean and fasten your seat belts, kids. We're going WAAAAAAAAY back for this one.

The year is 1936. It has been two years since the adoption of the Hays Code, a moral guideline to what could and could not be shown in movies. You couldn't swear, you couldn't drink, you couldn't make fun of religion, you couldn't kill anybody (at least not realistically), you couldn't even TALK about marital infidelities...unless you were a bad guy, in which case the Code dictated that you would be killed off every time. You couldn't even root for the bad guy. It would be another two decades before the Code's iron-clad reign came to an end and standards would start to loosen, and another three before the MPAA would start playing around with a ratings system.

You're a 1930s filmmaker. You think the Hays Code sucks and you want to put things in your movie which the powers that be would frown upon, but most studios would censor it for fear that the government or other authorities would censor it for them. How do you get past this hurdle?

The answer is simple: MAKE IT EDUCATIONAL.

Reefer Madness is one of many films of the 30s and 40s released in the exploitation circuit, which got around the Hays Code by claiming to be cautionary tales about the dangers of drugs and premarital sex, because as you've probably already figured out, you couldn't talk about drugs, much less show them, in movies of the time. Its origins to this day are disputed - some say that it was a church-funded project meant to educate parents about the dangers of cannabis; a rumor spread during the 70s that the FBI financed the movie; while suing a distribution company over the film rights, its producer Dwain Esper made claims that he produced it for the Army, which were disproved. But whatever the intention, it fails as an educational film because when you base it on what we know now of its effects on the human body, it doesn't quite get its facts straight.

"You should read Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet! It's swell!"...dork.

The film centers on Bill Harper (Kenneth Craig), an average 1930s American high school student who enjoys typical 1930s American high school student things like tennis, Shakespeare and using the word "swell" as an adjective. We also see two dope dealers Mae and Jack (Thelma White and Carleton Young) whose target clientele is teenagers like Bill, although Mae has a guilty conscience about it. Helping them are college dropout Ralph (Dave O'Brien) and Blanche (Lillian Miles). One day Ralph and Blanche invite Bill and his friend Jimmy (Warren McCollum) to a party where the demon drug is passed around freely. When Jack runs out of reefer, Jimmy offers to drive him to his supplier to pick up some more, and by then is so stoned out of his gourd that he runs down a pedestrian at a crosswalk on the trip back.

"I wish my brother George were here..."

The newly addicted Bill starts having an affair with Blanche, and his disappearances at school as well as Jimmy's behavior has Mary (Bill's girlfriend and Jimmy's sister, played by Dorothy Short) worried. She goes to Ralph and Blanche's place to try and find Bill, and while there Ralph slips her a joint which she mistakes for a normal cigarette and then attempts to ravish her. Bill enters the room after a quick one with Blanche, imagines in a drug-induced haze that Mary is stripping for Ralph and attacks him. Jack attempts to break them up by hitting Bill with a gun, but Bill fights back and in the struggle the gun is accidentally fired. Despite the fact that the gun was CLEARLY POINTED AT THE FLOOR when it went off, Mary is killed.

The next thing Bill knows, he's on trial for first-degree murder, where his high school principal Dr. Carroll (Joseph Forte, whose character also appears as the speaker at a PTA meeting which serves as a framing device for the film) testifies. After several minutes of deliberation and light switches visualized as hangman's nooses, the jury eventually finds him guilty. Ralph, Mae and Blanche are holed up in an apartment during the trial, during which Ralph starts going insane and grows desperate to confess that Jack was the one who killed Mary. Jack is ordered to kill Ralph before he hears the verdict, but Ralph gets the drop on him and beats him to death with a stick. A neighbor hears the noise and calls the police, and everyone is almost immediately arrested.

We then get a montage of Mae's police interrogation and scenes of cops raiding the entire drug ring which ends on Blanche tearfully admitting Bill's innocence. She is to be held as a material witness for Ralph's impending trial, but as she is led out by a matron, the guilt is so heavy for her to bear that she throws a fully-dressed mannequin out of a nearby window to her death. Bill is brought back before the judge, who overturns the verdict, declares him a free man and orders him to remain for Ralph's trial...which doesn't last very long, as Ralph's defense counsel drags him in the courtroom and requests that he be institutionalized for the rest of his natural life.

These shots alone would scare you off drugs for life.

Rather than dive straight into the film's camp value, I will choose instead to go over the many things which it claims to be telltale signs that you or someone you love is addicted to marijuana. Naturally, people who use it shouldn't drive automobiles, so I'll give them that one, but there are plenty of other so-called symptoms:

• Uncontrollable laughter. We see Ralph sitting in his chair with a joint in his hand, occasionally letting out a laugh for no real reason.
• An appreciation of jazz music. What type of records do you think they played at these drug parties? I mean, if the normal kids were into Shakespeare...
• Shameless acts of romance. We see drug addicts embracing passionately on couches, in bedrooms, even while playing the piano.
• Holes in the fabric of time and space. While Dr. Carroll is on the witness stand, he states that during an "interscholastic tennis match" (did people really talk like him back then?) he witnessed Bill miss the ball by at least three or four feet, which he attributes as a symptom of marijuana addiction.
• Violent acts of murder. No, not Mary's--Dr. Carroll in an FBI office reads a case file on a reefer smoker who killed his entire family with an axe while under the influence.
• And last but not least, the final stage: incurable insanity. Ralph, by the end of the film.

Poor guy. Just one more laugh towards permanent dementia.

The only thing which the movie implies that marijuana DOESN'T do is hinder one's ability to play the piano. As a matter of fact, it appears that doing dope can actually IMPROVE it. In the film's most famous scene, Blanche attempts to calm Ralph down by playing some soothing piano music. Ralph by this time is higher than the Space Shuttle and just as anxious, so he tells Blanche to play faster...and faster...and faster...and faster. By this time we see Blanche, sitting at the piano, puffing out marijuana smoke, her hands unable to keep up with the overdubbed melody she is playing, looking like she is about to overheat. I cannot see how this scene helps the film's message, because it's so ridiculously over the top it's downright comical.

This Blanche has performed an illegal operation and will be shut down.

How ironic it is that this film became a cult classic with stoners, college kids and midnight movie goers in the 1970s, and was even satirized in a musical adaptation in 1998. It isn't uncommon that a movie with such camp value as this is cherished for all the wrong reasons--although its attempt at an anti-drug message is admirable, the bad acting, the poor production values, and a delivery so overt it would put an after-school special to shame make it impossible to take it seriously, and that's without taking into account the many things about marijuana that it ends up getting wrong.

I mean, when your film starts out with an account of federal agents disposing of an entire shipment of dope by THROWING IT IN A FURNACE, you pretty much fail on the educational front.

Don't let your kids learn about drugs from a movie more than seventy years out of date.