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What do I know going in here? Apparently it's a spoof of cheesy 50s sci-fi, and the previews here are all for Satoshi Kon movies. I suppose that's a good sign, but it's kinda weird for an American live-action movie.
OK, we're starting off with the cheesy orchestral score and a big Venture Bros. style skull floating around the screen. That's a good start. And.. lots more skulls. Yeah. I get it. Skulls. There are other forms of cheesy imagery. Anyway, now that we're getting into the actual movie proper... seems we really are going with black and white. And... we have dialog that's trying a bit too hard to be cheesy. "It's hard to be a scientist's wife, the wife of a scientist." Anyway, yeah, we've got a scientist and his wife going to check out a meteor. They stop and ask a local farmer for directions and get a variation on the whole "yep, lotta history on that road" schtick. We've also got another scientist hiking up to the cave of Cadavra in the area, where the movie gets its title from.
OK, I am REALLY not digging the dialog here. They're kinda going for that whole Tim Schaffer style clichéd expo-speak that comes off as hilarious in how blatant it is, but the writer here isn't all that witty, and really hasn't seen enough of the movies he's spoofing to get it right, so we basically just have Paul the Scientist here talking about how he has to go "do science" every time he opens his mouth... which is every time he's on camera. Very very very repetitive. See, this is why you never let someone spoof something who doesn't love the original source material.
So yeah, Scientist A is poking around with his wife looking for a meteor that the audience gets to know is really a spaceship, while Scientist B pokes around in the cave, finding a skeleton. The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra apparently. Not that it seems particularly lost, what with being, you know, right there and all. This causes him to laugh maniacally. For way too long. Because again, this movie has confused excessive repetition with humor.
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Meanwhile, we've got two "aliens" coming out of the spaceship, who are almost perfectly nailed in that Plan 9 sorta way, but they too slip into the overdosed repetition. Ironically, I feel like I'm repeating myself too much by constantly harping on all the repetition, but, well, welcome to my world. Anyway, they seem to have lost their mutant and are worried about it going on a killing spree.
Meanwhile, Scientist B is despairing about how the skeleton isn't coming to life like it should be. "All skeletons are against me! They always have been!" Then the skeleton starts talking, explaining about how "only my Skeleton Brain is alive." Apparently to become fully animated, he needs the rare element "atmospherium" which the meteor scientist A has been looking for, and actually found, is made of. The aliens also need to find it in order to repair their ship.
OK. Anyone who might be tempted to go and watch this? Do yourself a favor. Just rent some old MST3k reruns if you want the cheese. If you want a legitimate homage to black and white sci-fi, grab Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow instead. It's a loving homage to 30s pulp serials, full of giant robot armies and submersible jets. Seriously, it's a much better one.
Anyway, the aliens wander around, and explain about 5 times how they're going to have to use their Transmutotron to turn themselves into humans (read: switch from silvery jumpsuits to street clothes) to try and get the atmospherium away from Scientist A. Scientist B overhears all this, and how they also plan to use it to subdue the mutant, and he nabs it when they abandon it for plausibility's sake.
Anyway, there's actually a bit of legitimate humor with the aliens being totally baffled and horrified by stairs and doorknobs. They also try to milk them coming up with "earth names" as part of their disguise, Tardasso and Bammon. It doesn't really work all that well though.
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Meanwhile, Scientist B decides to also infiltrate the guest home of Scientist A as part of a vacationing couple, but not having a girl with him, has to make one by firing the Transmutotron at a random "forest animal." Which is apparently a cat since she just keeps saying "Rowr" in a fairly monotone fashion and generally acting cat-like. Meanwhile the aliens are all "I am a perfectly normal earth woman" and "you'll have to excuse my wife. Sometimes she forgets that she isn't a space alien."
And... here we get to a little more non-repetition based comedy, where the aliens decided to mimic the behavior of the normal humans, which of course leads to imitating the cat girl and her not eating with her hands. This doesn't last long though, and then we're back into the bad dialog. Seriously. It is not funny to just have every single line of dialog repeated five times. Repeating every line of dialog five times isn't funny. Five times is too many to repeat every line of dialog. I can't believe how every single line is repeated five times, it's just not funny. See? It was funny thing first 2 or 3 times I explained how repeating everything 5 times wasn't funny, but by now you really just want me to shut the heck up already.
So yeah, it's firmly established that the mutant is going around mutilating people. Anyway, rather arbitrarily, the skeleton starts telepathically asking cat-girl to go get the atmospherium because Scientist B is taking too long. She misinterprets this as "Amish Terrarium" which gets everyone talking about how it's an absurd concept to keep the Amish in glass enclosures. So then the skeleton just decides to switch his focus to Scientist A's wife. The aliens also try to telepathically order her to take it to them, and we kinda waste like 5 whole minutes on the back-and-forth. This doesn't really go anywhere and just leads to more of the dreaded dialog.
Scientist B pulls the aliens aside and lays everything out on the table, assuming that there's enough atmospherium to go around, and CAN WE PLEASE DROP THE FRELLING REPETITION GIMMICK ALREADY! Dear GODS! Where are they even getting this from? I mean, OK, you will have a few bad old MST3k fodder movies drop big bricks of foreshadowing about a few things, over the course of the movie. Maybe toss the monster's weakness out there 5 times or so over the course of the movie, because the notion of subtlety hadn't really taken hold yet, but come ON!
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Anyway, cat girl kinda does this whole pied piper dance deal to get Scientist A to bring the meteor to the spaceship the next morning. This is one of those rare moments of humor in this movie actual working, because, well, what the hell? Meanwhile, Scientist A's wife runs into the mutant, which, wow, has an actual costume. Fairly goofy too! And meanwhile, back at the spaceship, a double-cross occurs, where the skeleton paralyzes the aliens and scientist A so he can have the meteor all to himself. The skeleton is actually pretty funny since he's the only character in the movie who doesn't speak in Dialog. He talks more like the Big Brain from that episode of Futurama. You know, the whole "What killed the dinosaurs?" "ME!" sorta deal.
Anyway, Scientist A is finally getting clued in on everything by the aliens. Incidentally, the aliens actual names are Crowbar and Lattice. Just tossing that out there to kill the time while the movie works through some more lame filler here. Oh, and the whole the mutant has Scientist A's wife thing just kinda drops completely for some reason and she wanders back to the group. Now she's recounting her little adventure, because yeah, this movie totally needs more Dialog. Somewhere in all this exposition, it's specified that Animala there is actually made from "four different forest animals." Yon animals are never shown, but that actually does make more sense with the dialog.
So uh... we're about 75 minutes into the movie now, and there has been, if we're generous, 10 minutes of actual content thus far. Anyway, yeah, way too much time later, the skeleton rises (sits up awkwardly) and the party has a non-encounter with the mutant. This movie really would be so much better if they actually tried to play everything straight.
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So yeah, anyway. The skeleton's evil plan involves forcing the aliens to dance for a while, and making long term plans to kill Crowbar and marry Lattice. Meanwhile Scientist A and wife go after the mutant... which again, is just kinda completely dropped. Oh, and the wedding dress for marrying a skeleton involves cheesy skull mask of the cloth sort it seems.
Eventually things build up to a climax of sorts, wherein the mutant and skeleton "fight" for a while. So guy in a rubber suit dances with a rubber skeleton for a bit, then throws it off a cliff. Skeleton tries to mind control the mutant, but he's too stupid to be a valid target apparently. Then, the main threat resolved, I suppose, Animala is turned back into a mountain lion, 2 ferrets, and a mouse. Some more Dialog occurs, the aliens go home, and we get a somewhat overly long extrapolation of "The End... or is it?" in text. Which, again, they over-milk. Such is this movie. Also, it seems Scientist B just kinda fell out of the movie completely.
Special features on this here DVD include a lot of stuff I'm so not going to bother to watch, because it's really all just the cast and crew congratulating themselves on this movie and how funny it was. I'm not even a fan of that sort of thing when the end result is funny. Then, just because the studio had the rights to it, that one old classic cartoon with a bunch of skeletons just kinda dancing around a graveyard and playing each other as instruments for a while, without any sort of attempt at plot. I kinda miss that whole era of "Look! We can animate things!"
Anyway though, yeah, if it wasn't clear, this is really not something I can recommend. The premise is all well and good but there's nothing less enjoyable than comedy by people who can't write comedy.
