The fifty worst films ever

Here's a list that Wikipedia's published, after a 1978 book that professes to name the fifty worst films of all time.
Interestingly, not only did I enjoy some of them, but I actually OWN two: Eegah! (1962) and Santa Claus Conquers The Martians (1964). They turned up in a couple of DVD packs that I bought from Target earlier this year, released under the Showtime label and titled: Wild Adventure! 20 Great Adventure Movies (a questionable, but entertaining claim) and Family Festival: 20 Great Family Movies (ditto). Each retails for $9.95 and I highly, highly recommend that they be purchased. There are a few other titles in the chain- I seem to remember a horror pack, comedy, a children's pack and so on. I haven't seen the series around for a while, but it's the kind of thing that Sanity and HMV wouldn't be seen dead stocking. Try KMart or the Pov Bin of Crap at the newsagent's.

I could rabbit on about this stuff for hours, but for now I will content myself to provide a list of films featured in these 2-DVD packs, and to discuss briefly the most seasonally-relevant of these films. Must...resist...talking about...Horrors of Spider Island.....nnngh!...I will do that in a later post.

Wild Adventure! 20 Great Adventure Movies

• Bird of Paradise (1932)
• Bride of the Gorilla (1951)
• Chandu on the Magic Island (1935)
• East of Borneo (1931)
• Eegah! (1962)
• Horrors of Spider Island (1960)
• King of Kong Island (1968)
• Mesa of Lost Women (1953)
• Prehistoric Women (1950)
• Queen of the Amazons (1947)
• She Gods of Shark Reef (1958)
• Tarzan and the Green Goddess (1938)
• Tarzan's Revenge (1938)
• The Incredible Petrified World (1957)
• The Lost Jungle (1934)
• The Snow Creature (1954)
• The Snows of Kilimanjaro (1952)
• The Wasp Woman (1960)
• White Pongo (1945)
• Wild Women of Wongo (1958)

Riveting, eh? I WILL DEFINITELY be revisiting this list, for more in-depth discussion, but in the meantime this guy has a fantastic list of reviews that are much more technically relevant than mine, and contain juicy and entertaining pearls of background production wisdom.

Family Festival: 20 Great Family Movies

• Africa Screams (1949)
• Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1972)
• Beyond Tomorrow (1940)
• Gulliver's Travels (1939)
• Hercules Unchained (1959)
• Jack Frost (1979)
• Johnny the Giant Killer ( 1950)
• Jungle Book ( 1942)
• Kavik the Wolf Dog (1980)
• My Pal Trigger (1946)
• Rescue From Gilligan's Island (1978)
• Return to Treasure Island (1954)
• Santa Claus (1959)
• Santa Claus Conquers the Martians (1964)
• The Flying Deuces (1939)
• The Little Princess (1939)
• The Magic Sword (1952)
• The Painted Hills (1951)
• The Scarlet Pimpernel (1934)
• The Snow Queen (1957)

There you go: 50 pixellated piles of C-grade ultra-trash for under twenty bucks. I love it!

Now to talk about the reason for the season- Santa Claus Conquers the Martians, starring an eight-year-old Pia Zadora as Girmar (stands for Girl Martian, don't you know) along with Bomar, Momar (Mum Martian) and Kimar (King Martian- but shouldn't his name have been Damar, in keeping with the el lamo naming tradition?)

I thought that this would be a fabulous airborne action flick, as the title suggests. I imagined an Independence Day or War of the Worlds-style Martian invasion, bloodthirsty aliens hell-bent on razing Christmas into the ground: lasers blasting Christmas trees into smithereens, toys going up in smoke, small children reduced to charred corpses and so on. Weeping people running through the streets, woeful presidential radio addresses ("We're done for, citizens. Save yourselves"), puddings going uneaten, mistletoe trodden under alien foot. Then, there'd be an ominous jingling of harness bells, and (pull back to long shot, cue triumphant instrumental) there, exploding through the clouds of sulphuric smoke, would be Santa in full attack mode! Each reindeer with vicious teeth bared, Rudolph brandishing 240 volts of electrified nose, whips flying, an attitude-packed Santa would drive his sleigh right into the carnage, Bruce Willis-style, screaming obscenities, while the elves in the back blasted the living crap out of the Martians with bazookas, before slicing up their gooey carcasses with samurai knives.

Not so. Apparently, in this universe, Santa "conquers" the Martians by showing them the real meaning of Christmas. How saccharinely pukeworthy. The little Martian children are becoming hopeless brain-dead square-eyes (too much Martian TV, you see) and nothing can save them except kidnapping Santa and bringing him to Mars to teach the kinderlings about love and giving. Sap, sap, sap.

Unimpressed, I was. No wonder this one is in the list of the worst films ever: clunky cardboard sets, terrible cliched acting, no plot to speak of, etc. There is one redeeming feature- the campy pink animated opening sequence, featuring the song Hooray for Santy Claus. Get some egg nog in your hand, pin your hair into a beehive and believe that for this moment, it is 1964, the space race is on, and you are watching a modern, contemporary, and technically-masterful film...