SANTA CLAUS CONQUERS THE MARTIANS (1964)

SANTA CLAUS CONQUERS THE MARTIANS (1964)

Tagline: Blast off for Mars... with Santa and a pair of Earth kids! Science-fun-fiction at its height!

(Sci-Fi, Comedy, Secular Christmas Nonsense) [G] 

Once you hit that nuclear curtain, there won’t be a whisker left. 

Note – This movie wasn’t given a rating, but it probably would have landed a G rating because it’s basically just goofy nonsense. 

In this one, basically all these kids on Mars have adult minds and are just kind of losing their “kid-ness”. The Martians go to the wisest man on Mars, and he tells them Mars needs a Santa Claus to bring the kids of Mars some joy. It doesn’t take long before Voldar and other Martians abduct 2 kids named Billy and Betty along with Santa. Voldar then decides to go against his superior, Kimar, and halfway back to Mars, concludes that he has had enough of brainless Earth kids, and attempts to get rid of them. Meanwhile, Santa and these two kids now have to figure out how to get back to Earth because they are not about to let the fat man go. 

I am not sure how much skin paint had to be used for this movie, but it had to be somewhere in the 10-million-gallon range. In the 1950s, you had a lot of movies that were black and white, especially if they were cheaply made and sci-fi. That trend continued for parts of the 1960’s but this movie ended up being filmed in color. I think it would have been fine either way, but the color brings a lot to the film, especially for a holiday comedy sci-fi “nightmare”. Despite having a 2.7 rating on IMDb, this isn’t actually the worst movie ever made. In fact, if you showed this to younger kids they might not even notice it sucks. It’s got dudes with antennas, a bear, an eight-foot robot, Santa Claus, milk and cookies, Earth TV, I mean, what else would a kid want? 

Acting wise everyone is actually trying. I haven’t heard of most of these names, but this thing is the film debut of Pia Zadora who was 10 years old at the time. If you don’t know who she is, drop everything and watch VOYAGE OF THE ROCK ALIENS. It’s probably the single most 80’s and 50’s movie of the 80’s with so much cheese it would put Wisconsin to shame. 

For the era, the sets are fine, the costumes are pretty janky (possibly on purpose), and everything kind of works for what this movie was going for. Unfortunately, the script is terrible, and even as a comedy, it’s just really rough. One thing that probably would have helped is if they had just cut the film's run time by 81 minutes. No, just kidding, but at least 15 to 19 minutes. It’s hard to get all these elements and still have parts of the film drag out and become boring, but that is what’s going on here. 

I have seen quite a few favorable reviews for this thing, and this is going to be one of those. Even though I have given it some critiques, it’s not a film worthy of the bottom 100 films of all time. Sorry, maybe at one point it was, but not anymore. It’s actually got its merits, and I could see a younger audience actually really having fun with this. It seems like that was the goal. Someone probably said, let’s make a fu,n goofy sci-fi Christmas movie, and they accomplished that. 

SANTA CLAUS CONQUERS THE MARTIANS gets a 3 out of 7. I do think nearly everyone should watch it at least once. 

GRAPHICS ARE THE PROPERTY OF JALOR PRODUCTIONS AND ARE USED FOR REVIEW PURPOSES ONLY. 

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