This was supposed to be an easy Trash or Treasure to do before the festive season really kicked in. The plan was to find a seasonal movie with a reputation for being a stinker and heap 800 more words of jovial disdain on its head. Could you get any surer shot than a film that’s spent its whole life in the bottom 100 of the Internet Database, has appeared on Mystery Science Theatre 3000, and even made the 100 Most Amusingly Bad Movies Ever Made list by the founder of the Razzies? I thought not, and I was wrong. Very happily wrong. And I now know why it shat out money like a gilded Christmas goose when it first hit the cinemas in 1964.
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Santa Conquers The Martians (1964)
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This one was suggested to me by a chum called Rhys Roberts. This proves two things: firstly, that I haven’t heard of every strange film on the planet and thus am always willing to give them a go when someone recommends one. Secondly, that Rhys is a cruel and terrible person. The auteur behind it was world-renowned artist Fredric Hobbs, pioneer of ART ECO and Parade Sculpture, and this movie is a testament as to why probably you haven’t heard of any of his cinematic works.
I first heard of this film when I was 10, reading a preview in Sky Magazine. The basic premise had everything my young mind needed: the promise of robots, onscreen dismemberment and a snappy title. They were simpler times then, and Terminator was the apex of cool, so I thought watching it would have just been the greatest thing ever. Needless to say, I didn’t, because my parents weren’t mental and neither were those anyone I knew, so this sci-fi horror went into the “must watch, eventually” pile at the back of my mind. Snap forwards to a few weeks ago and, in one of its few moments of usefulness, Amazon Prime suggests I might want to watch it. “Yes”, says I, “Yes I do!”. But for all my anticipation and childlike excitement, the older and (possibly) wiser me was worried it would turn out to be trash. And I was right, but it was still a really good laugh.
There is a good chance you haven’t heard of this Keanu Reeves starring-and-produced film, even though he is one of the hottest properties in cinema right now. Produced in 2016, sold on before it’s 2019 release, and allegedly passed over by Nicholas Cage, it’s box office bombing should have been the talk of the town. Instead of it becoming a cause célèbre, it just got shuffled off the big screens at a rapid pace, another miss in a summer of hits. It then rolled into the Amazon Prime bargain bucket of Amazon Prime in the middle of the year and then on Netflix this month. So, is it as bad as the odd critic has tried to make out?
Ever since James Cameron asked the eternal question, “can I get away with ripping off an episode of The Outer Limits?”, time travel movies have followed a fairly set rote; man comes back from apocalypse, finds Partner/Scientist/Chosen One/Tits McGuffin, fights things through a combination of True Guts and Slow-Motion, and saves the day/saves the future/sets up a time-paradox you can drive a lorry through. So, after picking up and reading the back of the 2002 Takashi Yamazaki directed Returner, I was expecting more of the same but with a bit of gun-fu.
Trash or Treasure 