Ho, ho, horrible: Santa took on Martians in weird, wacky 1964 film - Entertainment, Movies - Navy Times

Ho, ho, horrible: Santa took on Martians in weird, wacky 1964 film

The consensus among film fans is that the worst movie ever is “Plan 9 From Outer Space,” the 1958 crowning achievement of schlock director Ed Wood’s low-rent career.

But start carving up genres and an equally clear standout tops the “worst holiday movie” list — the absurdly, unintentionally hilarious 1964 film, “Santa Claus Conquers the Martians.”

Shot mostly in an abandoned aircraft hangar on Long Island on a shoestring budget and featuring a truly oddball cast and crew, the flick would have languished in obscurity forever if it hadn’t been screened on the holiday episode of the much-beloved TV show “Mystery Science Theater 3000” in 1991.

In the years since, “SCCTM” has become a touchstone among fans of “good” bad movies.

The premise is wacky on an otherworldly level. It opens with a local TV news broadcast that cuts to a field reporter (Ned Wertimer) who is about to interview Santa Claus (John Call) at the North Pole (but not before tossing out one-liners so lame that they make Bob Hope seem Shakespearean).

The subsequent interview is a riot, with an absent-minded Santa fumbling the names of his reindeer: “Prancer, Dancer, Donner, Blitzen, Vixen … uh … Nixon …”

Meanwhile, millions of miles away on the Red Planet, two green-skinned Martian children (one played by 8-year-old Pia Zadora in her screen debut) are parked in front of their television set, transfixed by the news of “Santa Claus” and his mission of bringing toys to all good Earth children each Christmas.

Kirmar (Leonard Hicks), the Martian leader, is concerned that the children of his planet are despondent because their culture has no Santa figure. After Kirmar and his council consult their mystical elder Chochem (Yiddish for “genius,” I kid you not), they decide to blast off to Earth and kidnap this Santa person.

From there, each scene becomes exponentially weirder. The sets and props look like the rejected detritus of a “Star Trek” rummage sale; the Martian’s ray guns, for example, are painted Whammo Air Blasters, a popular plastic toy gun of that time.

When the Martian spaceship arrives in Earth orbit, a surreal sequence ensues in which Strategic Air Command launches waves of fighters and bombers in response to the extraterrestrial menace. If this stock footage seems familiar, it’s because some of it was recycled from Stanley Kubrick’s “Dr. Strangelove,” made earlier the same year.

The Martians end up kidnapping not only Santa, but also a pair of Earth kids: Billy (12-year-old Victor Stiles) and Betty (11-year-old Donna Conforti).

What happens once the group gets back to Mars is like a slow-motion train wreck that you just can’t turn away from, with two other Martians — goofy village idiot Dropo (Bill McCutcheon) and belligerent Voldar (Vincent Beck) playing large roles. One highlight features Voldar and Kimar in one of the the cheesiest pantomimes of a fist fight ever committed to celluloid.

The surreal aura owes much to the “special effects,” which are a special kind of special. The standout is Torg, the Martian’s robot enforcer — a schlub in a silver-painted cardboard box wearing what looks like a percolator coffee pot on his head.

A close second is the polar bear that terrorizes Billy and Betty at the North Pole. Not a real one, of course; it’s a man in a moth-eaten polar bear suit. Astonishingly, he was not too embarrassed to take credit for his work: Gene Lindsey, who would go on to bit parts in “Cotton Comes to Harlem” in 1970 and “All the President’s Men” in 1976 before apparently calling it a career.

Aside from the weirdness of the film itself, “SCCTM” is noteworthy for the abundance of odd trivia associated with the people who had a hand in the production.

Director Nicholas Webster started out as a film cutter at MGM, served as an Army cinematographer in World War II, worked on documentaries for the Agriculture Department and directed commercials in New York. In 1961, he briefly hit the big leagues, working on several episodes of the ABC-TV news magazine “Close Up!”

But he clearly peaked too early. After directing “SCCTM” three years later, he embarked on a slow slide to oblivion that ended with a thud in 1987 with a producer credit for “Playboy Bedtime Stories.” He died in 2006 at age 94.

The writers remain utter ciphers. The script is credited to Glenville Mareth, based on a story by Paul L. Jacobsen. “SCCTM” is the sole Hollywood credit for both men, and not one more scrap of information can be found on either — raising the distinct possibility that both are intentional pseudonyms, which was probably a wise career move.

The costume designer — misspelled in the credits as “custume designer” — is Ramsey Mostollor, who actually had something of a career; he did the costumes for the iconic TV series “Dark Shadows” for five years in the late 1960s and on the daytime soap “Ryan’s Hope” from 1975 to 1980.

Then there is the composer of the film’s amazingly bad theme song, “Hooray for Santa Claus.” Milton Delugg, now 92, actually had a long Hollywood career — and he’s still working. From the late 1980s right up through this year, he has been involved in music production for the annual television broadcast of Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.

“Hooray for Santa Claus,” however, should remain his eternal legacy — a true magnum doofus. Sample lyrics:

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S-A-N-T-A, C-L-A-U-S, hooray for Santy Claus!

You spell it S-A-N-T-A, C-L-A-U-S, hooray for Santy Claus!

Hooray for Santy Claus!

Yay yay for Santy Claus!

Hooray for Santy Claus!

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In the annals of repetitiously mind-numbing earwigs, it’s a tune rivaled by “It’s a Small World” for wanting to make you stick an ice pick into your brain.

The cast is a mix of sort-of-were’s, almost-were’s and never-were’s. Several had experience on Broadway but never went anywhere in movies, including Call, McCutcheon — who actually won a Tony Award in 1988 — and the kids Stiles and Conforti.

One of the few actors for whom the film was a start rather than a dead end was Beck, whose villainous Voldar sports a bushy ’stache that makes him resemble a slightly seedier version of Elliot Gould circa the early ’70s.

Beck had a productive, if not headlining, career of bit parts in a slew of iconic TV series of the ’60s and ’70s, everything from “The Man From U.N.C.L.E.” to Mr. Ed.” He died in 1984 at age 59.

The most recognizable name remains Zadora, who enjoyed about 14½ minutes of fame as an actress and singer in the early ’80s.

It seems strangely fitting that of all the “SCCTM” cast members, the one with the longest sustained career was Wertimer, the TV reporter firing rimshot one-liners in the opening scene.

He worked steadily in film and television throughout the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s, and as recently as 2007, at age 83, was an extra in “Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End.”

Thanks to the magic of the Internet, “Santa Claus Conquers the Martians” — shot through with weirdness from first frame to last — is now immortal.

That feels only right; we’d all be poorer if gags like this were lost forever: “What’s soft and round and you put it on a stick and you toast it in a fire, and it’s green? A Martianmellow.”

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“Santa Claus Conquers the Martians” is available in its entire 82-minute glory on YouTube and Hulu. The “MST3K” episode can be found on Netflix.