MIDNIGHT MOVIE MASSACRE
(seen at Nolacon II)
A film review by Mark R. Leeper
Copyright 1988 Mark R. Leeper
Capsule review: Neither competent enough to be fun nor
incompetent enough to be funny. Approximately one hundred
attempted pieces of humor. About two work. Same fail
spectacularly. Rating: -3.
Wade Williams is a well-known fan of 1950s science fiction movies and television. Of late, when you see 1950s science fiction television shows turning up in video stores or on television, they almost invariably show a recent copyright by Wade Williams. Why he has bought up these copyrights I am not sure but rumor had it that he had rereleased the 1950 ROCKETSHIP X-M with new color footage he added and was planning to do the same with HIDEOUS SUN DEMON. The 1988 World Science Fiction Convention featured the world premiere of MIDNIGHT MOVIE MASSACRE, a film produced by Williams.
Blech!
To understand why this film is so bad you need to know a little of how it came to be made. Wade Milliams tried to make a sendup of the old television show SPACE PATROL. When the film was half made, the product was clearly so incompetent that the film would never have been released. Under any circumstances. Never. So here Williams was with only half a film that had two expensive stars and if he finished it, it would be thrown out. The stars? Well, he got Ann Robinson from WAR OF THE WORLDS and Robert Clarke, who finished up a good career by being in a number of cheap, bad science fiction films (though perhaps none so cheap and bad as the first half of SPACE PATROL). It was Williams' bright idea to take his film and dress it up as an *imitation* dead teenager film. Dead teenager films make money. There are millions of teenagers willing to shell out big bucks to see fantasies of others in their age group being carved up like so much poultry. (Think about that if you're waiting for the next generation to come to power and improve things.) How do you make half of SPACE PATROL into a dead teenager film? Well, it is a movie that a bunch of teenagers are watching when an alien comes along and starts knocking them off. So Williams can go back and forth between storylines as he shows a movie within a movie, or more accurately, a stupid waste of time within a stupid waste of time.
The outer film is a satire on 1950s science fiction films, the only films Williams seems to really know well, as well as being a dead teenager film. So the whole outer story is set in 1956. This improves the film within since it suddenly becomes very prophetic as well as pathetic. It predicts 1980s hairstyles for women. When it shows the earth from space, it shows light wispy clouds that were never shown in science fiction films until years later. Then there is the fact that in the Midwest in 1956 (read that virtually none) had midnight shows.
Now, don't get me wrong. I do not mean to imply that the dead teenager portion of the film has much in the way of dead teenagers. Instead, it is taken up mostly by showing everything happening in the audience. I won't tell all, but while SPACE PATROL is stupid and dull, the rest of the film can be better described as stupid, dull, and *extremely* tasteless.
Treat yourself right. Skip this film. This is a -3 film on the -4 to +4 scale.
Mark R. Leeper
att!mtgzz!leeper
leeper%mtgzz@att.arpa
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