Attack of the Killer Tomatoes (1978)
It may not be as iconic as Star Wars, but this movie has the greatest opening crawl and theme music of all time Ok, maybe not the greatest of all time, but it is still pretty great. I am at a complete loss at how a movie can be so incredibly stupid and so insanely clever at the same time. Every time I watch it, I find more that I didn’t notice the time before. It really is a blink and you’ll miss it type scenario.
The theme song plays over the opening credits, the credits are worth reading because every so often there’s random jokes mixed in. I’m sad to say I’ve never tried to call the ad space number. A few minutes in we are introduced to George Wilson, the President’s Press Secretary, who arrives by a helicopter that actually crashed. Amazingly no one was seriously injured, and the actors just adlibbed the scene and it was left in. This was the first time I realized that the plane flying by was actually being piloted by tomatoes and not people trying to stop tomatoes, I thought it was hilarious they were using a plane to fight tomatoes, but it is even funnier that the tomatoes are using the plane to attack humans.
My favorite scene in the film is when the military leaders and scientists gather together in the tiniest of rooms to talk about what is going on. Everything is just so stupid and all the actors through the whole movie, shy of Mason Dixon at times, plays everything off 100% serious. At one point in the scene a Japanese scientist, whose voice is dubbed hilariously inaccurately on purpose, stands up to explain the threat and when he mentions the ultimate destruction of the enemy (referring to the tomatoes) he knocks a picture of the U.S.S. Arizona off the wall and into a fish tank that is not even in the room. The U.S.S. Arizona was a battleship that was sunk during the second world war at Pearl Harbor.
There is just so much going on and it all seems so random. There is a press conference where were told by the Presidential Press Secretary “I can say without fear of contradiction, that under no circumstances, and at no time has the current administration expended any public monies whatsoever for the purchase of the fluffy flower print toilet paper.” I wish that were all we had to worry about with todays administration… There is a running joke where the Senate Investigative Committee takes the entire movie to decide to do nothing about the tomato crisis going on while Mason Dixon and his team of morons some how solve the problem with the help of the smash hit single “Puberty Love”. When the army tries to fight back the wide shots of the city battle are filmed using toy cars and cherry tomatoes. We can’t forget the President and his Presidential Signing Paper. I think that would be a great way to keep Trump occupied so he doesn’t fuck anything else up.
It’s a great/terrible movie on the surface, unfortunately if you dig a little past the surface it is incredibly racist with splashes of homophobia mixed throughout. Sometimes the things we notice during re-watching aren’t always good.