Villian(s)  Aliens

Actor(s):  Tony Curtis, Dean Jacobson, Patrick Macnee, Deborah Foreman

Brief Description  Lobster Man from Mars is a 1989 sci-fi comedy parody directed by Stanley Sheff. The film serves as an affectionate, low-budget spoof of 1950s atomic-age B-movies, heavily utilizing a "movie-within-a-movie" framing device reminiscent of Mel Brooks' The Producers.

Plot:
Hollywood producer J.P. Shelldrake (played by Tony Curtis) is desperate for a massive box-office flop to use as a tax write-off and escape back taxes owed to the IRS. Stevie Horowitz, an earnest young filmmaker, arrives to pitch his incredibly bizarre, ultra-low-budget student film titled Lobster Man from Mars. Believing he has found the ultimate cinematic stinker, Shelldrake buys and releases it—only for the movie to become an accidental smash hit, inadvertently sending the producer straight to tax prison. • Mars is rapidly running out of air. The King of Mars commands a depraved, eight-foot-tall creature known as the Lobster Man (along with an assistant named Mombo) to travel to Earth and steal its atmosphere. Armed with a ray gun, the rubber-suited Lobster Man targets humans as an "unshelled" food source, running amok across the countryside.

A young couple, John and Mary, alongside a brilliant professor and a military colonel, scramble to alert authorities and find a way to stop the invasion. The heroes ultimately defeat the Martians using a bizarre combination of hot water, engine coolant, and the Old Faithful geyser. The movie premiered at the 1989 Sundance Film Festival and has earned a dedicated cult following. Reviewers note that it leans heavily into its intentional badness, featuring deliberately wobbly spaceships, terrible hand puppets, actors in ridiculous gorilla suits with space helmets, and a script packed with clunky 1950s tropes. The film boasts an eclectic ensemble cast including Deborah Foreman as the earnest scream-queen Mary, Patrick Macnee as the professor, and Billy Barty.