The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra
dir. Blamire
Opens Fri April 9
Hollywood Theater
If there’s anything the hit show Mystery Science Theater 3000 taught us, it’s how to enjoy a crappy sci-fi movie from the ’50s: you watch them with your buddies and make fun of them. Crappy sci-fi movies from the ’50s are funny because they have no idea how bad they are, and we like to feel superior to things that aren’t “in the know.”
Larry Blamire’s send-up to crappy sci-fi movies from the ’50s, The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra, doesn’t work because it knows how bad it is. It’s a completely intentional, impressively accurate stylistic ode to the aforementioned genre, replete with wooden acting, choppy editing, awful monster costumes, a nonsensical plot about aliens or skeletons or some such, a melodramatic orchestral score, and grainy black-and-white film quality.
But we don’t need two hours to be reminded ad nauseum of what we already know: sci-fi movies from the ’50s suck. Certain elements of Skeleton remind us of things about the old movies that are very funny–the skeleton moves on strings, the aliens’ spaceship looks like a tin can–but the tongue-in-cheek avalanche gets tiresome, and in the end, Skeleton is parodying something that, whether its intentional or not, parodies itself. To pose an analogy, all the George W. Bush imitations in the world can’t top the hilarity of tuning into a State of the Union Address and catching the real thing.
But what really trips Skeleton up are its many genuinely clever characters and situations (the almost supernaturally earnest scientist; the contrived wedding between the skeleton and an alien). Such clever moments feel painfully out of place in a bad ’50s movie homage because bad ’50s movies didn’t have any clever moments. They were just bad, and that’s why we make fun of them. Relentlessly. But Skeleton isn’t bad; it’s kind of good, and so we can’t make fun of it, which is really annoying because it operates under the illusion that we can.