Tagline: A fantastical film freakout featuring The Flaming Lips.
Curiosity: Please see above.
Plot: Christmas time is approaching at an American base on Mars, but there is little reason to celebrate. First, the crewmember chosen to play Santa Claus for a Christmas pageant (Kenny Coyne) goes insane and commits suicide. Then, the device that generates oxygen for the base breaks. With the crewmembers’ sanity deteriorating and the birth of the first space baby from an artificial womb in jeopardy, Syrtis (Steven Drozd) can’t figure out how to pull everything together. Then he meets a pretty psychedelic alien (Wayne Coyne).
Thoughts: OK, wow. Strap in. You know how The Flaming Lips’ albums are bright, Technicolor showstoppers? Yeah, Christmas on Mars is the opposite. It has less in common with Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots than it does, say, Eraserhead. Actually, it’s a lot like Eraserhead, in that both films are slow, took way too much time to complete, were shot in grainy black and white, and are really, really quiet until something super fucked up happens:
Yeah, that’s a marching band with vaginas for heads. Not pictured is the part where they crush a baby’s head with their feet. Which reminds me, the crewmembers’ hallucinations are truly horrifying, because they dream of demon-vaginas ALL THE GOT-DAMN TIME. Sex-ed teachers could show this film in class and it would make abstinence seem like the only logical, not-pants-shittingly frightening option.
The film is awfully slow, which makes the scary parts that much scarier. The majority of scenes consist of a mumbley guy (usually Drozd) and a guy who curses all the time (pretty much everyone else except for Coyne and Fred Armisen, whose non-vaginality is welcome) talking about whatever the fuck, then some walking, and then something REALLY LOUD AND PSYCHEDELIC AND VAGINAL HAPPENS. Seriously, this movie has got vaginas for days. I think there’s a pro-Christmas moral in there somewhere too.
Reflection: Song titles from the soundtrack include “In Excelsior Vaginalistic” and “The Gleaming Armament of Marching Genitalia.” So, I guess I should have known what I was in for.
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