by Mark Gabrish Conlan •Copyright © 2015 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night’s Mars movie screening featured two films
hovering between the so-bad-it’s-good and the so-bad-it’s-unwatchable end of
the movie spectrum. The first was a 1989 production called Oversexed
Rugsucker from Mars — the imdb.com page for
the movie gives the second word of the title as plural and hyphenated, Rug-Suckers, but the actual credit is in the singular and it’s
more accurate because there is in fact only one “rugsucker” in the dramatis
personae (or, perhaps more appropriately, dramatis
mechanicae). The film was written and
directed by Michael Paul Girard, a personal friend of the Mars movie screenings
promoter (who worked for him as a cinematographer on some of Girard’s later
projects), who mentioned that the film was made on Super-8 and the total budget
was $4,000. This explains why a lot of the images are grainy and the soundtrack
runs the gamut from acceptably clear to almost totally incomprehensible. Also,
Girard’s working title for the film was Vacusapien, which was actually considerably wittier and closer
to an accurate description of what the film was about, but the distributor he
sold it to insisted on Oversexed Rugsucker from Mars on the incomprehensible belief that that title would
actually draw people to see the
film instead of driving them away. Oversexed Rugsucker begins with a prologue in really crude Claymation
featuring two characters from Mars, both of them naked and with quite obvious
sex organs (and built pretty much on the human plan except they’re considerably
smaller and made of clay) who’ve come to Earth to see what’s happened to the
experiment they started 10 million years earlier to “seed” Earth with life forms
and see how they (we) evolved.
The first human they see is Vernon (Dick Monda),
a homeless man as disheveled as time, lack of bathing and whatever meager
amount Michael Paul Girard had for makeup could make him look, and the Martians
see him and immediately write off their experiment as a failure. Only the male
Martian pisses into Vernon’s gin bottle, the female Martian infiltrates a
broken vacuum cleaner and thus brings it to independent, animate life, and when
Vernon drinks the Martian pee it immediately turns him into a horndog who has
an intense, passionate sexual experience with the vacuum cleaner. We then shift
to another set of characters altogether: Tom (Billybob Rhoads), a British émigré with a thwarted desire to be a science-fiction
writer; his nagging wife Beverly (Lynne Guini — I’m not questioning these
transparently, almost porn-like aliases, just recording what the clever
credits, in which a vacuum cleaner sweeps up the scraps of paper on which are
written the names of cast and crew almost as soon as we read them, tell us
these people are called); and Rena (Jean Stewart), a 20-something bimbo who
works as a secretary after the 90-something gazillionaire she married died and
she ran through her entire inheritance from him in a vain attempt to become a
rock star (and Jean Stewart could really sing; her regular band is featured
with her in the film and even listed in the credits, though not on the imdb.com
page, and she’s a good female punk singer in the Chrissie Hynde/Wendy O.
Williams/Siouxsie mold). Tom locks himself in his bathroom and tells his wife
he’s shaving when he’s really
jacking off while looking at Rena parading around her apartment in the nude (he
uses suntan lotion as a lube, which is not recommended because it stings — voice of experience here!), and when
Beverly is raped and killed by the oversexed vacuum cleaner just after she used
it to clean up some spilled aphrodisiac tea (the brand name is “Weeping
Wanger,” which is a pretty good indication of Michael Paul Girard’s sense of humor),
naturally the police suspect that Tom did his wife in so he could be with Rena.
Rena has a boyfriend, Charlie (Bill Monsour), a New Ager who’s decided that sex
is merely a physical distraction from his search for the higher plane — and
Girard brilliantly and accurately satirizes New Age pretensions in his writing
for Charlie — leaving Rena desperately horny and fed up with getting
psychobabble from her boyfriend when she wants her ashes hauled.
The Killer
Vacuum proves to be polymorphously perverse — it cornholes Tom with its
extension hose and later sexually assaults Rena as well — and while all this is
going on Vernon (ya remember Vernon?)
is searching for his lost amour de suction and he’s simultaneously the subject of an experiment by a psychiatrist,
Dr. Welling (Jeff Wilson), who’s going to get fired from his county job if he
can’t turn Vernon around from a homeless derelict to a respectable citizen in
10 months. Of course, Vernon’s constant babbling about being in love with a
vacuum cleaner isn’t helping either! There’s also a police investigator, Lt.
Krane (Ralston Young), who plays his entire part either channeling Humphrey
Bogart or Peter Falk’s Columbo
character — who proclaims his traditional family values and his commitment to
his wife, who turns out to be a sheep — and a defense attorney who’s also
Rena’s employer and agrees to take Tom’s case pro bono if Rena will give him blow jobs in the office. It
all comes to a climax — in more ways than one — when a visibly pregnant Rena
gets up from the witness stand at the trial and gives birth to a rather crude
white doll whose body is a box that reads “Dustbuster,” thereby confirming her
story that the father of her baby was a vacuum cleaner. Tom and Rena don’t get
together but the notoriety surrounding the case enables him to get his sci-fi
book published and her to get a recording contract and an album that goes
triple platinum. Oversexed Rugsucker from Mars is as awful a movie as you’d suspect from the above
description — according to imdb.com it was one of three movies the producers of
Mystery Science Theatre 3000
rejected as too tacky and tasteless even for them (I suspect one of the other two was my choice for
the worst movie ever made, Shriek of the Mutilated) — yet in the middle of this putrid sex comedy cum sci-fi would-be thriller there are some genuinely
funny lines and gags that deserved to be in a better film — and whoever
“Billybob Rhoads” was, he was a genuinely attractive heavy-set actor who would
do quite well at a Bears gathering and it was fun to look at him with his shirt
off, which Girard allowed us to do often, and admire all that body fur!
