Comments on: SciFi Classics 50-movie Pack, Disc 4

By: Crooked Timber » » Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Professoriat

Crooked Timber » » Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Professoriat — Thu, 04 May 2006 01:01:08 +0000

[...] UPDATE: As is pointed out in comments, there is in fact a a whole series of 50-packs: mystery, horror, comedy, musical, drive-in, martial arts, historical, dark crimes, pastoral-comical, tragical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical pastoral, robot monsteral-pastoral, santal clausal-tragical, teenageral-historical and so forth. Also, some intrepid/damned soul has reviewed every single item in the SF 50-pack! posted on Wednesday, May 3rd, 2006 at 6:40 pm comments [...]

By: Daniel Cornwall

Daniel Cornwall — Tue, 11 Oct 2005 01:26:24 +0000

Ah, “Santa Claus Conquers the Martians”! That brings back a happy MST3K memory of Santa’s space station(?) workshop with a voiceover of “Increasingly paranoid, Santa’s obsession with security made life difficult for his friends” as a weird radar dish spins around.

One thing (likely the only thing) that I personally found touching about the movie was when Santa Claus made some remark about Christmas being Jesus’ birthday. You have Christmas specials with Santa Claus, you have the “Little Drummer Boy” and a few specials with the Christ Child, but you don’t usually see a Christimas entertainment with the two together. Not that that makes the movie any more watchable!

By: Brian

Brian — Mon, 10 Oct 2005 19:35:49 +0000

Now, I’m the kind of person who takes “They donâ€™t get much stranger than this” as an unequivocal recommendation. Even so, “Santa Claus Conquers the Martians” *is* much better with a large glass of Chambord eggnog at about 2:00 Christmas morning. (Does anyone else have David Letterman’s voice running through your head now?: “Pia … Zadora.”)

Sounds like the Rocky Jones serial may have been an influence for the Brewster Rockit: Space Guy comic strip. The strip even has a kid named Winky.

By: walt

walt — Fri, 07 Oct 2005 00:39:19 +0000

Maybe I wasn’t clear enough: SCCtM is, indeed, a really bad movie–I just wasn’t clear that it was intended to be as bad as it is. I guess Pia Zadora was playing a different role than I thought (none of the character names are at all memorable); if she was either one of the little girls, she was also entirely forgettable.

And yes, I’ve watched both Attack and Revenge of the KTs…and enjoyed them for what they were. Once.

I’ve done something different at the end of that disc: Instead of flipping back to TV movies (generally a compentent lot), I’ve gone on to Disc 5 of the Sci-Fi box, partly so that the six-disc roundups in C&I don’t come right at the same time. Disc 5 is, ta-da, four Hercules movies, with four different Hercules. Not sci-fi by any plausible reckoning, but 2/3 of the way in to the first one, actually made with some rudimentary Italian cinematic craft.

I’m glad someone likes the reviews; I can’t resist doing them. By the way, on our last cruise, the ship’s library had three or four of the 50-movie megapacks for loan, along with 300-400 other DVDs (and 3000-4000 books). I guess if you really didn’t want to be on the cruise or were sick, 50 movies would keep you going…

By: Eli

Eli — Thu, 06 Oct 2005 21:20:22 +0000

I dunno … I consider “Santa Claus Conquers the Martians” to be well-deserving of its Z-grade movie rep — it’s hilariously bad in the model of “Attack of the Killer Tomatoes” and that ilk. And according to IMDb, the movie was Pia’s first movie role, at the age of 10.

I love these reviews … thank you!