"Attack of the Killer Tomatoes"

I borrowed this 1978 movie from the library (that's where I get most of my movies from - it's free) and watched it last night. I remember seeing part of this when I was in college. The University was showing it as a student activity. I remember that my friends and I thought it was so bad that we got up and left part way through the movie.

So why would I borrow the movie? I'm a glutton for punishment and I wanted to see if it was really as bad as I thought it was. It was.

However, I did sit through the whole thing this time and I enjoyed it a little more. It's a story about mutated tomatoes that can talk, move, and kill people, and the people's fight for survival.

It was created as a spoof and is clearly so from the beginning.

• Advertisements for products, mostly for furniture I think, during the opening credits.
• A notice that there is space for my advertisement and various references to things tomato, such as a tomato handler (I think), also during the opening credits.
• Intermittently through out the movie, a banner would scroll across the bottom of the screen advertising furniture for sale.
• At one point in the movie, the group chosen by the government to lead the attack against the tomatoes gathers in a conference room to talk. Well, this is a tiny conference room with wall-to-wall table and chairs. The various members of the group have to crawl over the table to get to their seats.
• An advertising man is hired to create ads to put a good spin on the giant, mutated tomatoes. He comes up with an ad that has a tag line of something like "Bigger tomatoes make for bigger hamburgers" (I'm not going to watch through the movie again just to get the exact quote).
• At various times, a musical number is thrown in for laughs.
• One of the top agents parachutes in and for the rest of the movie wears his unpacked parachute, dragging the canopy around, even trailing it behind him during a chase scene.
• Another top agent is a master of disguise. He dresses up as a tomato and infiltrates the tomatoes' camp. Everything is going all right until he's eating by their campfire and absent-mindedly asks if someone could pass him the ketchup.

There are other such comedic and spoof elements as the ones listed above. In the end, the humans, of course, win. We are left with a possible sequel as the last shot shows carrots who are talking to each other.

The Bottom Line
I enjoyed this movie more than the "Don't drink the water" movie I watched earlier in the evening. I got more laughs out of it. That being said, I will not be watching this movie again in quite a while. If you like spoofs, horrors, musicals, and campy movies (all mashed together), you might get some entertainment value out of this, assuming you don't have anything else to watch.