Often cited as a forerunner to the meta likes of Mystery Science Theater 3000, Midnight Movie Massacre exists as a playful ribbing of old B movies. Nonetheless, the film squanders that premise — one so simple, it should be can’t-miss.
One night in 1956, Kansas City’s Granada Theater packs moviegoers in to watch the sci-fi serial Space Patrol (which was actually a TV show) starring Robert Clarke and Ann Robinson. Meanwhile, off the big screen, a gelatinous, tentacled alien invades the bijou to kill the patrons.
As story goes, that’s all this Massacre offers, leaving a wide berth for jokes, more jokes and also jokes involving the various patrons and their various body parts and functions thereof. They include a poodle-skirted woman with balloon-sized breasts (Lori Davis, The Bikini Open 5), an obese family lugging enormous trays of concessions and, up in the balcony, a sneezing girl constantly pulling gunk from her nostrils like a magician to a chain of colored hankies.
Amid this vacuum of comedy, two characters stand out for their overly insipid nature. One is a fat nerd (Vince Cabrera) obsessing over a foxy sweater girl (Tamara Sue Hill) only he can see: “Holy Toledo, look at those milk bottles! She’s a one-woman dairy farm! I can’t go in there, I’ve got a boner! … I bet she’s got nipples like flapjacks! … My dick’s harder than Chinese arithmetic!”
The other, cowboy Tex (Brad Bittiker), longs to lay his date (Susan Murphy): “Oh, darlin’, my one-eyed muff torpedo wants to go to Tuna Land tonight. .. Howazbout a little stink on the dink, baby duck?”
If co-directors Mark Stock and Larry Jacobs hold nostalgia for the single-screen moviegoing experience — and casting has-beens Clarke (The Hideous Sun Demon) and Robinson (1953’s The War of the Worlds) suggests as much — it’s lost within the tacky, lowest-level humor. Although credited to four writers, the lines play like someone’s sixth grader gave his dad’s script a “polish” as a prank … and no one noticed or bothered. Not even the movie within the movie is immune to such prepubescent chicanery: “Probing devices were penetrating Uranus to crack its dark and hidden interior.”
Preceded by trailers for Cat-Women from the Moon and Devil Girl from Mars, the Space Patrol portion aims for a lighthearted lampoon, but isn’t funny enough (if funny at all) to function properly, like the titular segment of Amazon Women on the Moon does with aplomb. Between Midnight Movie Massacre’s halves, what’s projected is slightly less dreadful than the in-theater gags, which are the dregs of failed camp. —Rod Lott