Here is the deal. Don't watch it. That's it. That's all there is to it. If you respect your intelligence even a wee bit, if you cringe at the sight of mediocrity, if your blood is susceptible to boiling from ham-acting, this movie would easily give you a heart attack. On the other hand if, like me, you are a connoisseur of cheese, if in almost a masochistic way, you derive pleasure from the pain that a brain-liquefying piece of cinema inflicts over your personality, this movie is almost the culmination of the insistent human endeavor for reaching the abyss of creativity and meaningfulness.
The premise of the movie is very simple. Martian children, cooped up in their Martian homes watch Earth television programs and they happen to develop a liking for Santa Claus. Their Martian parents are now left with no other option but to kidnap Santa himself and bring him to Mars. While they do manage to take him hostage, Santa, contrary to his benign image, then indulges in rampant ass-kickery reducing the technologically advanced Martians to a bunch of carol-singing, incessantly-laughing, toy-loving sissy boys.
The technical ineptness of the movie is almost numbing. The Martians are imagined as dark skinned creatures but apparently the director did not have enough money to hire a make-up artist skilled enough to uniformly paint a face black when given a clean slate. The result is a bunch of sorry looking Martians who look more like the regular variety of Earthlings who have only partially recovered from a recent bout of Chicken Pox. Their sorryness is only exaggerated by their sorry costumes. Skin hugging green vest with skin hugging green pants and skin hugging green shoes and skin hugging green underwears worn over the skin hugging green pants. As if their costumes were not already hilarious enough, the director, in a rare moment of genius, makes them wear a helmet with a semi-circular antenna which apparently does nothing except become an impediment when changing clothes. They also have a Supermanesque cape and they have something written on their chests in English because obviously, English is the most widely spoken of all Martian languages. The cardboardiness of their spaceship screams at you face and the cheap boxiness of their robots shouts for your critical attention. At one point they have a polar bear and the only way you could be more convinced that it's really an actor (not even a good one) in a costume was if he just came out of his costume and shrieked 'Hey look at me. I am not a polar bear. I am an actor'.
Santa Claus's workshop in North pole has the self descriptive sign board, very imaginatively saying 'Santa Claus's workshop'. Inside this godawful place, we see a bunch of stupid elves churning out stupid toys with Santa trying to save this shipwreck of a movie by uttering nonsensical jokes which try to tickle your jugular vein almost in a pathetic begging kind of way. And you don't laugh because you stopped laughing at mere moving images at the age of 2. Here for the first time in history we meet Mrs. Claus. A run of the mill, blood sucking, authority wielding, staple middle-age housewife who made me remember that sorry figure of Hindi comics who had a brain faster than a computer but regardless got pillaged by the monster of a wife he had by the name of 'Bhaagwan' (Chacha Chaudhary).
Anyways, in summary, looking back, while moving ahead, in retrospect, taking the cushion of hindsight, having matured for the experience, to put it in a few words, jettisoning verbosity for the benefit of the innocent reader: 'This movie might just be the most heinous atrocity committed on the human intellect after Jim Davis'. Here is a link, if you are to watch it. Its the Mystery Science Theater 3000 version, therefore, bearable:
Santa Claus conquers the Martians (Part 1 of 10)
The premise of the movie is very simple. Martian children, cooped up in their Martian homes watch Earth television programs and they happen to develop a liking for Santa Claus. Their Martian parents are now left with no other option but to kidnap Santa himself and bring him to Mars. While they do manage to take him hostage, Santa, contrary to his benign image, then indulges in rampant ass-kickery reducing the technologically advanced Martians to a bunch of carol-singing, incessantly-laughing, toy-loving sissy boys.
The technical ineptness of the movie is almost numbing. The Martians are imagined as dark skinned creatures but apparently the director did not have enough money to hire a make-up artist skilled enough to uniformly paint a face black when given a clean slate. The result is a bunch of sorry looking Martians who look more like the regular variety of Earthlings who have only partially recovered from a recent bout of Chicken Pox. Their sorryness is only exaggerated by their sorry costumes. Skin hugging green vest with skin hugging green pants and skin hugging green shoes and skin hugging green underwears worn over the skin hugging green pants. As if their costumes were not already hilarious enough, the director, in a rare moment of genius, makes them wear a helmet with a semi-circular antenna which apparently does nothing except become an impediment when changing clothes. They also have a Supermanesque cape and they have something written on their chests in English because obviously, English is the most widely spoken of all Martian languages. The cardboardiness of their spaceship screams at you face and the cheap boxiness of their robots shouts for your critical attention. At one point they have a polar bear and the only way you could be more convinced that it's really an actor (not even a good one) in a costume was if he just came out of his costume and shrieked 'Hey look at me. I am not a polar bear. I am an actor'.
Santa Claus's workshop in North pole has the self descriptive sign board, very imaginatively saying 'Santa Claus's workshop'. Inside this godawful place, we see a bunch of stupid elves churning out stupid toys with Santa trying to save this shipwreck of a movie by uttering nonsensical jokes which try to tickle your jugular vein almost in a pathetic begging kind of way. And you don't laugh because you stopped laughing at mere moving images at the age of 2. Here for the first time in history we meet Mrs. Claus. A run of the mill, blood sucking, authority wielding, staple middle-age housewife who made me remember that sorry figure of Hindi comics who had a brain faster than a computer but regardless got pillaged by the monster of a wife he had by the name of 'Bhaagwan' (Chacha Chaudhary).
Anyways, in summary, looking back, while moving ahead, in retrospect, taking the cushion of hindsight, having matured for the experience, to put it in a few words, jettisoning verbosity for the benefit of the innocent reader: 'This movie might just be the most heinous atrocity committed on the human intellect after Jim Davis'. Here is a link, if you are to watch it. Its the Mystery Science Theater 3000 version, therefore, bearable:
Santa Claus conquers the Martians (Part 1 of 10)
No comments:
Post a Comment