aka Santa Claus Defeats the Aliens

• Directed by Nicholas Webster
• Written by Glenville Mareth
• Starring
  • John Call
  • Leonard Hicks
  • Vincent Beck
  • Bill McCutcheon
  • Victor Stiles

A good many people who would never intentionally watch a bad movie (unless it starred Adam Sandler) know this movie by reputation, or and least by title. And that’s understandable, as Santa Claus Conquers the Martians is at once as goofy and as evocative as any title ever, with the possible exception of The Son of Hercules vs. Frankenstein’s Daughter, Part 4: In Space. The title also leaves most viewers with little desire to watch the movie itself; Christmas movies on the whole are pretty poor entertainment, so one that professes its inanity up front isn’t going to attract that many eyeballs its way.

But currently, a golden age for Santa Claus Conquers the Martians is being ushered in by the purveyors of one-dollar DVDs. It seems that every cheap DVD outfit is putting out an edition of this movie, blanketing the country in dollar-store-spawned copies. Where once it was rare and fabled in its goofiness, now it is ubiquitous, and that goofiness is easily confirmed firsthand.

The action begins at the North Pole, where a TV crew has come to interview the jolly old elf himself (John Call), against a backdrop of midget slave labor — err, his elves. But someone else is watching the interview… someone who the TV producers could never have imagined…

Psst… The drool! Wipe the drool!

Children! Martian children! With embarrassingly patchy green greasepaint on their skin, coat-hanger antennas sticking out of their helmets, and that same slack-jawed blank expression that Earth children get when watching TV!

The children in question happen to be those of Martian supreme poo-bah Kimar (Leonard Hicks), and he and his wife Momar (Leila Martin) are worried for their kids: they’re listless, inattentive, sleepless, and completely hooked on watching Earth programs. And it’s not just them, either; all the Martian children are exhibiting the same symptoms.

Kimar calls a meeting of the Council, wherein they decide to consult Chochem (Carl Don), the crazy old prophet who lives in the hinterlands. How crazy? So crazy that he’s absolutely the only Martian who doesn’t wear a goofy helmet with antennae and what looks like a gas trap on the side. He appears in a puff of smoke and pontificates on the state of Martian children: “We have no children on Mars! They have children’s bodies, but with adult minds! They do not have a childhood!” This, of course, is all thanks to the automatic educations machines that ramp their brains up to speed before they’re out of diapers. Seems to me that the real problem is that you’ve got a younger generation who are supposedly functional adults, but living in the leisure class of contemporary American children. Make some of those super-edumacated Martian get a job and earn an honest living, and suddenly you won’t have a planetful of juveniles with leisure obsessions. Naturally and as usual, I’m thinking way too much about this — this, a movie in which the entire plot could have been avoided if the Martian parents had simply turned off the damned tube.

“One more word from you about a ‘Bolshevik revolution,’ and you’ll be back on jack-in-the-box duty.”

No, what Chochem gives as the solution is… Santa Claus. This is who the children are all watching on the Earth broadcasts, watching in depressed jealousy because Earth children have a Santa Claus and they don’t. So Kimar decides that the only reasonable course of action it to take Earth’s Santa for their own.

Thus, Kimar mans a spaceship for a buzz to Earth. Most of the crew is interchangeable — bad greasepaint, goofy helmets — but the two that stand out are:

- Voldar (Vincent Beck), who thinks that all this happiness-and-toys jazz is a little too namby for stout-hearted Martians. Plus, he has a moustache. The heavy? You think?

- Dropo (Bill McCutcheon), the Odious Comic Relief. We were first introduced to Dropo as he meandered around Kimar’s house; my best guess is that he’s the Lady Momar’s idiot brother. He stowed away so he could see Earth.

Once they reach Earth (and set the world’s military body into a tizzie before turning on their radar shield, as evidenced by a dizzyingly-mismatched selection of jet fighter footage), Kimar is consternated by the sheer number of Santas to be found, mostly ringing bells on street corners. So he follows the only logical course of action: The Martians find two kids sitting alone in the forest listening to a transistor radio in the middle of December, Billy (Victor Stiles) and Betty (Donna Conforti), and ask them where to find the real Santa. Then, so the kids won’t squeal to the authorities (because who could possibly disbelieve two preteens who come out of the forest with a story about Martians asking directions so they can kidnap Santa Claus?), they trundle them along.

“Yeah, me too. Nothing but lite FM. You?”>

Dropo, though, gives the kids the run of the ship, so they learn enough about the Martians’ plans that they can try to sabotage them and give Santa fair warning. When the ship touches down at the North Pole, the kid slip out first to get to Santa, but the Martians give chase. And they unleash — Torg! The bucket-headed robot!

As the children amply demonstrate, Torg’s main tactical advantage is that its quarry will stop, stare at it, and wonder, “What the yippee-ki-yay is that supposed to be?” until it can lumber close enough to grab ahold of them. When I first heard the robot’s name, I immediately harked back to Tobor the Great, another bucket-headed robot of the previous decade. Remembering that “TOBOR” was cleverly “ROBOT” spelled backwards, I immediately analyzed Torg’s name for hidden significance, but spelled backwards it spells “GROT.” Make of that what you will.

(The kids also narrowly avoid being eaten by a man-in-suit polar bear. But if your suspension of disbelief was doing okay until you ran across the baggy bear suit, you have serious problems of your own to deal with.)

Torg then proves absolutely no help when they get to Santa’s workshop, as it just wanders in the front door and stands there. Apparently it’s enough of a toy that it can’t bring itself to attack Santa. But no matter; the rest of the Martians round up the copacetic toymaker and pack him aboard the ship. They keep the two kids too, despite the facts that a) now that the Martians have Santa, it really doesn’t matter who the kids tell, and b) Voldar’s itching to off the kids anyway. If Kimar was really serious about protecting them from Voldar, he’d have left them with the elves.

“So this is what you used to be able to get in a Cracker Jack box? Cool!!”

On the way back to Mars, we learn two things about Santa that we might not otherwise have known:

1) Santa’s humor is lame. Several times he tells the children, his cellmates, a joke or funny story, and they simply stare at him, as if he were an old bearded fuddy-duddy. I guess the majesty wears off up close. (And this is the guy that parents trust to fulfill their childrn’s wishes and dreams? He’s more like that childless uncle who insists on getting your children pajamas or toothbrush sets or something similarly weak for Christmas.)

2) Santa’s pretty damned stupid. When Voldar suddenly turns on the treacle and invites the Earthlings on a grand tour of the ship, the children are immediately suspicious, but Santa blithely trusts the moustachioed Martian, even after he locks the three of them in an airlock and starts the decompression cycle.

Actually, the airlock scene may be the single instance in the script in which Santa is at all active (Santa gets them out of there by whisking them all up the air duct as if it had been a chimney). The rest of the time, he’s almost a human McGuffin, sought after and fought after but not close to being an active participant in the story. (Although, given the way that Mrs. Claus (Doris Rich) henpecked him in the first few minutes of the movie, maybe we’re seeing a textbook study of “learned helplessness.”)

Because of Voldar’s airlock stunt, Kimar throws him in the brig after laying some fine Captain Kirk moves on him (the fighting moves, not the face-sucking ones). But Voldar escapes on touchdown, hides in a cave, and with the help of a couple of henchmen (at least as stupid as Dropo), plots the downfall of Kimar… and Santa Claus!

“Ho ho ho! It looks like you found what you want for Christmas!”

I really have to mention that one of Kimar’s children, Girmar, is played by Pia Zadora. Really. I have to mention that. It’s emblazoned across the front of just about every DVD and VHS release that this movie has ever had, this despite the fact that she had fewer than a dozen lines. How sad is it that distributors so hungry for star appeal will latch onto an obscure child role as their big casting coup? Almost as sad as this: With the plentiful copies of this movie around now, Pia Zadora could end up being most famous for this role.

This is the kind of movie for which, even with all of the word-of-mouth Golden Turkey-style build-up, one can really only drum up enough enthusiasm to enjoy five minutes of it. After that, there’s nothing new: You’ve seen Santa Claus, child actors of various hues, and some really stupid Martians. Stick around for more of the same. And don’t forget to watch it every year as part of an ill-conceived yuletide tradition. At least it beats fruitcake.

A Notable Quotable:

“All this trouble for a fat little man in a red suit.”

- Voldar

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 0
• breasts: 0
• explosions: 2
• ominous thunderstorms: 0
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 0