By Keri O’Shea
Well, here’s a blast from the past: if I remember correctly, and that’s a big ‘if’, Return of the Killer Tomatoes was one of the ragtag assemblage of films which seemed to play regularly on my dad’s illegal cable film channel back in the mid-to-late eighties. Between this film, Adventures in Babysitting, Howard the Duck and (spot the odd one out) Enemy Mine, I felt like I’d remember every word of this film when I got sent the screener for the recent Arrow re-release, so often was the film on in the background when I was a kid. Well, to cut a long story short, I didn’t – I’d forgotten vast swathes of it, and as far as I remembered, the word ‘tomatoes’ was even pronounced ‘tom-AH-toes’ in the title song, so before I really start worrying about my memory, I’d best talk about the film as it actually is.
And here’s the first thing I’d forgotten: the film-within-a-film framework which kicks things off, where a TV show called One Dollar Movie introduces the film alongside a very silly lottery for its viewers. Cue a FULL 80S beach scene, with lots of aimless bikini dancing to a ghetto blaster – wait, that’s the wrong film, so that’s exchanged, and then we’re into the intended film, which starts in a FULL 80S laboratory scene. You know an 80s laboratory – I’ve mentioned them at length before. Bright green liquids, pink and blue lighting, and a lab assistant who looks as if she’s dressed more to co-host on The Price is Right than work in STEM. Still – this, it seems, is illegal laboratory work, and the head of operations, Professor Gangreen, is performing gene-splicing experiments to transform tomatoes into humanoids – thus side-stepping the ban on all things tomato which has been in place since the Great Tomato War of some years hence. What does he hope to achieve by this? It’s not completely clear…something about taking over the world, probably. What we do discover is that Tara (Karen Mistal), the hot lab assistant, is actually crafted out of a tomato herself, and the Prof’s cruel treatment of her much-more tomatoey sibling, Fuzzy Tomato (FT for short) drives her to run away.
Tara seeks solace in the arms of her pizza delivery guy, Chad (Anthony Starke) on the grounds that he’s the only other person she knows. Any port in a storm – though, via a sequence of old newspaper front pages, we glean that Chad actually works for the old hero of the Tomato War, a man smart enough to thwart that threat but not to open a pizza restaurant, a foodstuff which relies quite heavily on tomatoes, all told. But can Chad, and his co-worker/roommate Matt (George Clooney!) help to stop the mad scientist and his machinations before the post-Tomato War peace is broken for good?
Return of the Killer Tomatoes was made some years after the 1970s prequel, and probably comes at the beginning of a sort of jaded, if well-intentioned self-awareness in genre film which we’re all too used to now. From the self-deprecating title song, to the handling on the back story, to the deliberate (and openly alluded to) filler in the form of clips from the first film, ROTKT knows it’s silly and makes this silliness part of the plot from the very beginning. It seems to be trying to emulate Airplane! in several respects, especially in terms of how very quickly the film cliches are thrown into the mix and in the amount of physical skits used, and although it’s not in the same league as the earlier, and more successful comedy, its attempts to channel that kind of humour carry it to a certain extent. That’s not to say it doesn’t overstay its welcome, though – for a film which promises killer tomatoes, there’s a lot of rather aimless human (or humanoid, at least) drama and that can be wearisome, and perhaps the earlier scenes in the laboratory, not least the film’s own title, promise a kind of madcap sci-fi movie that doesn’t really arrive. Part of the problem could be that Return of the Killer Tomatoes is possibly skewering a B-movie sci-fi tradition which could have been lost on the twentysomething target audience of the day who wouldn’t have known it very well, and for viewers now, with greater access to older films via DVD, Blu-ray and the internet, it’s not as lively as the films it parodies. Still, it’s got its moments, it never acts as though it’s better than it is, and it has sense enough to wrap things up after a reasonable duration. If nothing else, you can bask in the appearance of a youthful A-Lister George Clooney in a film about genetically-modified tomatoes – though to be fair to the guy, his filmography has always made it clear that he’s not afraid to take a punt in the dark. I hope we soon see Kevin Costner acknowledging his early appearances in Troma, in a similar vein…
As usual, this 80s time-capsule is a well-presented release from Arrow which comes with a modest array of special features, including an up-to-date interview with star Anthony Starke, some stills, a trailer and a TV spot.
Return of the Killer Tomatoes is available now from Arrow Films.