Killer Tomatoes Eat France!

Professor Gangreen (the immortal John Astin) has escaped from prison after stealing a prophetic book from the prison library. Now, with the help of his henchman Igor (Steve Lundquist), Gangreen seeks to use the prophesies to fulfill his nefarious dream of world conquest.

This time, Gangreen develops some even stranger tomato mutants, including a two-ton whopper with a mouth big enough to swallow a Volkswagen!

Enter Michael J. Fox (Marc "Skippy" Price), a hapless tourist thrust into the middle of this scenario of ultimate doom.

Assisted by the lovely Marie (Angela Visser), Michael must ascend the dreaded "Tower of 900 Steps" to face off against the putrid professor in his castle lair. That is, if the daily castle tour groups don't get in the way!

KILLER TOMATOES EAT FRANCE! Is every bit as fun as the rest of the films in this silly series. Yes, FT (Fuzzy Tomato) does indeed return...

This is not "so bad that it is good," it is purely good! For those who don't understand why, you have the intellect of a four year old (in response to a certain comment...) Anyways, Killer Tomatoes Eat France is a parody of itself, a parody of you, and a parody of me. It is the single most genius text in cinematic history. I have it and the three prequels sitting on my DVD rack next to Herzog and Kurosawa. It embodies the recognition of absurdity and undermines all that you or me call standard. I write scripts and this movie single-handedly opened up a genre of comedy for me, the likes of which we have never seen. It can only be taken in portions... its sort of exploitive... by now I'm just trying to take up the ten line minimum. My comment ended a while ago. Hopefully it works when I submit it now.

I felt this movie, though strongly supported by the uber talented Skippy, who, contrary to the credits, has no real name, he's only Skippy, was just poorly thought out. For instance, how would a tomato put on an eye patch? It's oversights like that that make this movie suffer.

On the other hand, we have John Astin, father of Sean Astin, star of Rudy. Just the name makes me laugh. Rudy. It's about a 20 lb boy who wants to play lacrosse for a community college. Or something very close to that but equally unimportant. However, if memory serves, no tomatoes present themselves, so I couldn't care less.

Back to Skippy. Since I only watched about 10 minutes of this movie and then got distracted by a shiny object on the opposite of the room, there's obviously much that I can say. The plot revolves around a young Skippy who is employed in a desert town as a slave, when Liam Neeson comes to rescue him from Chinese aliens and androids. Oh, it's good times.

In closing, I give Rudy a 5 out of 7 for heart, moxy and stick-to-itivness.

"Killer Tomatoes Eat France", which is the fourth and final installment in John DeBello's vegetable quadrilogy, is only my first acquaintance with the series. I love horror and I love comedy, but I'm usually very skeptical about a combination of both; especially when the storyline revolves on giant murderous tomatoes. But I watched this thing together with some friends and whilst heavily intoxicated and, you know, under these circumstances the silly premise isn't even half that bad. Typically, the French stereotypes and jokes are the funniest aspect in this film and actually often downright hilarious. The French are all peasants that live in really low-built houses and only consider fat women to be attractive. They read "Ze Times" and weave bread. The women are all called Marie and they're ready to have sex for free with every stranger that passes by. The story centers once more on the malignant Professor Mortimer Gangrene (John Astin having a blast again) and his killer tomatoes trying to take over the world. After he escaped from prison with the help of his loyal tomatoes, Gangrene entrenches himself in France in a really big castle (appropriately called Igor's really big castle) and kidnap a famous and furry tomato singer for one of his diabolical plans. It's entirely up to a random American tourist and a sexy French maid to save the world. There's also a sub plot stating that the war against the tomatoes will bring forward the new King of France, which makes this film actually a fairly witty parody on "The Man in the Iron Mask". According to most people who have seen the other three previous installments, unlike myself, this "fourth part in the trilogy" isn't as funny in comparison and the franchise is turning more and more children friendly. I can't really judge the other three films, but I did think this was reasonably funny and entertaining.

I have expected a lot worse because of very low ranking on IMDb. Yes, this movie is definitely not a gem, but it is funny in a playful way. The jokes are mostly mild, I was not laughing aloud but I have definitely smiled for the most of the movie. At least this comedy is not filled with obscene jokes, farting and vomiting as is typical for low ranking comedies these days. So you can watch this movie with your kids as well.

The best part is probably "the war with the tomatoes" sequence. But other scenes are actually very good as well (the stories of the tourists suffering the endless tour in the castle). There is a ton of different books and movies being parodied in the movie, yet it is surprisingly not offensive towards the French too much. There is some baguette-waving and such jokes but fun is made at the expense of American school system as well. The "US school map" of Europe is really hilarious, I would like to buy one!

Not really great but definitely not waste of time either. Just a bit of moderate silly fun.