J. P. Shelldrake (Tony Curtis) is in a bind. He’s made a lot of money this year which means he owes a lot of taxes. Long on assets and short on cash he needs a way out of his problem. His accountant suggests a tax write off. Since Shelldrake is in the movie business what he needs to do is produce a stinker of a movie. When it flops he has his write off. All Shelldrake needs to do now is find a movie that he knows is going to tank at the box office. Yes, shades of “The Producers” 1967.
Enter a young student filmmaker named Stevie Horowitz (Dean Jacobson). He has a movie he made that he is eager to show Shelldrake his bad homemade movie “Lobster Man from Mars”. Shelldrake agrees to view the film. The film rolls.
Mars is running out of air. Apparently there is a leak somewhere. The King of Mars (Bobby Pickett) sends the Lobster Man (S.D. Nemeth) to Earth to steal its air. He also sends a Martian slave Momba (Richard Write) with him. The slave is a gorilla with a space helmet.
They land on Earth but their space ship is spotted by John (Anthony Hickox) and his wife Mary (Deborah Foreman). The couple take pictures and hightail it to the nearest town. The Lobster Man hides out in the trunk of their car. A flat tire sends them to a mechanic. John and Mary go off to find a phone to warn the authorities about the UFO but they are dismissed. The mechanic is attacked by the Lobster Man. Later two alien space bats explode from his chest and fly away. The Lobster Man then proceeds to zap people with a ray gun that changes everyone into skeletons.
John and Mary run to John’s uncle, Professor Plocostomos (Patrick Macnee). Plocostomos comes up with a way to kill the dreaded Lobster Man. It has something to do with boiling water.
“Lobster Man From Mars” was released in 1989 and was directed by Stanley Sheff. The film is basically a comedy spoof of fifties style science fiction “B” movies. Its main claim to fame it that it is a movie within a movie, a trope used in many “B” science fiction movies of that era. But it’s not the only trope in the film. I believe they may have gotten in most of the alien invasion tropes out there.
There are a bunch of sub-plots in the movie within the movie as well. A noir style detective (Tommy Sledge), a séance in a haunted house owned by Mr. Throckmorton (Billy Barty). And for luck a snippet of really obvious army stock footage.
Tony Curtis says that he worked on the movie because they paid him $100,000, and he needed to make child support payments. I’m not sure how true that is. He also mentions that during the production, he never saw the scenes of the movie that his character was reacting to. That part I do believe.
I suspect that Colonel Ankrum’s name is a tribute to Morris Ankrum who was a character actor in many science fiction movies. As a matter of fact there is a nod to almost every science fiction movie of the fifties. Everything from “Robot Monster” 1953 to “Teenagers from Outer Space” 1959. I also noticed references from “The Thing from Another World” 1951 and even “Jaws” 1975. I’m sure there were many more that I missed. The alien space bats looked really familiar but I couldn’t remember from which movie.
I really wanted to love this film. The idea is good. I also liked the using of “Rock Lobster” by The B-52’s as the ending credit song and it was fun finding all the sci-fi tropes and references but it didn’t do anything more for me other than that. I didn’t find it funny. The jokes were a little too forced. The film within a film was also a little too polished to have been made by a young, bad film maker. Also, I thought that it would have played better as a 50’s movie if film within a film was in black and white. It was fine, but it could have been better.
Orson Welles came up with the title for this movie. He had originally agreed to play the role of the producer, but died before production began.
According to the credits “No lobsters were harmed during the production, only eaten.”