The Canned Film Festival

This played on TV in the summer of 1986 (I believe). It had a great idea: Laraine Newman plays an usherette at a theatre that showed nothing but bad old movies. They showed the movies but they were interrupted by commercials and "comic" antics of Newman and the audience. The big problem here is the comedy with Newman and the audience was painfully unfunny. The cast tried but the material wasn't there for them. Even worse the films were edited down to about an hour rendering most of them incomprehensible. Still, it was fun to watch late at night during the weekend if you couldn't sleep. Also this gave exposure to some truly bad movies that (back then) you had no way of seeing. So, for its time, it was amusing but badly done.

This was a brief but charming syndicated series in the summer of 1986 showcasing some truly baaaaaaaad motion pictures over the years; just imagine "Mystery Science Theater 3000", only without comments from Joel, Mike and the robots in the foreground. This provided a terrific opportunity to see some truly stupendous classics of rotten cinema, among them: "Bride of the Monster", "They Saved Hitler's Brain", "Attack of the Eye Creatures", "Robot Monster", and my pick for best-worst movie of the series, "Eegah"--you HAVE to see this movie to believe it. My favorite scene: a boy and girl take a dune-buggy out into the desert to look for the girl's missing--perhaps injured and dying--father; but first...a snazzy sequence of hot-rodding shots over the dunes to some knock-off Beach Boys music! Truly stupefying! Comprising the framework of the series was the delightful Laraine Newman portraying a Chief Usherette for an old movie palace exhibiting a "film festival" of bad films. Various "friends" would drop by each week to dish on the movie in question. All in all, I remember this fondly as a great chance to catch these rarely-seen "classics" back in '86.

SKI FEVER (1969), SANTA CLAUS CONQUERS THE MARTIANS (1964), ROBOT MONSTER (1953), THE CRAWLING HAND (1963), DOCTOR OF DOOM (1960), UNTAMED WOMEN (1952), BRIDE OF THE MONSTER (1955), LAS VEGAS HILLBILLIES (1966), PROTECT MOONBASE (1952), ROCKET ATTACK USA (1960), THE SLIME PEOPLE (1962)

What did these titles have in common? Every week in the summer of 1986, one of these was the offering of "so bad it's good" cinema on this thirteen episode syndicated show. If for nothing else "Canned Film Festival" was invaluable for introducing people to the realm of the golden turkey movies, which had had a renewed interest in recent times. However, even in the dawn of the video age, a lot of these titles were hard to come by. Therefore, anyone who dared got a good crash course on the best of the worst in the summer of 86. Now if only summer school was THIS beneficial...

However, rather than just present the films on their own, some producer saw fit to insert wraparound segments featuring former SNL comedienne Laraine Newman as an usher in this representative set of a movie theatre, who also discuss the film in question with the regular bunch of goons that show up there every week. Considering this theatre was only filled every week with these five or six geeks, it's no wonder the Canned Film Theatre only stayed open thirteen weeks!

Someone forgot that the true laughs of this show came from the films in question, and not, certainly not, from the pathetic "comedy" offered up by the twerps in the theatre. Sample dialogue (from the episode which programmed SANTA CLAUS CONQUERS THE MARTIANS, featuring a very young Pia Zadora):

Twerp: Pia Zadora?!?! Does she take her clothes off?

Laraine Newman:She's only eight years old.

Twerp: So?

Barrel of laughs these folks are. One wonders what Starbucks they work at now.

This "comic relief" might be forgivable if it didn't cut into the programming that people really came to see. Because "Canned Film Festival" was made for a 90-minute timeslot, that left roughly 72 minutes of show, including the new footage in the theatre. Therefore, the films were cut down to barely an hour. ROBOT MONSTER was missing all the bizarre dinosaur footage, and the immortal jukebox segment from THE CRAWLING HAND was missing in action.

Even so, as the video age opened the doors of bad cinema to a new generation, "Canned Film Festival" was a noteworthy little primer that is still well remembered by discriminating insomniacs.