The news that Kent Nichols and Douglas Sarine, best known as the "Ask a Ninja" guys, are working on a remake of Attack of the Killer Tomatoes, is confounding on many levels. It's not that the guys in question are overreaching, God knows. They have proven their ability to be amusing for thirty-second bursts, which is more than can be said for the makers of their source material. Attack of the Killer Tomatoes, which came out as drive-in fodder (made on a budget of less than $100,000) back in 1978, has already spawned three sequels (the first of which, the 1988 Return of the Killer Tomatoes, is semi-infamous for featuring a young, deeply humiliated George Clooney), an animated TV show, and a video game based on the cartoon series. Why does this unfortunate creation refuse to die? A clue can be found in this remark about the original by Nichols (who is co-writing the script of the remake with Sarine, who is set to direct): "Attack of the Killer Tomatoes! is the masterwork of a generation. We can only aspire to recapture that magic." Since it is not possible for a sentient being to think that Tomatoes is in some way good, he must be making a nudge-nudge, wink-wink allusion to how bad it is, the idea being that it's so bad it's good. This is really at the core of the cult reputation that Tomatoes has built up over the years: many people are under the impression that it's one of those rare examples of a serious movie so freakishly bad that it's surreal and hilarious.
Nothing could be further from the truth. Tomatoes is a comedy; it's supposed to be funny. The fact that it is incompetently made to an embarrassing degree, and that it is in fact not funny, does not qualify it for consideration as a bad movie on the same magical level as Plan 9 from Outer Space, Robot Monster, Blood Freak, They Saved Hitler's Brain, or even Battlefield Earth. The fact that the movie has had any life at all since 1978 is based on its having often been unfairly bracketed with these anti-classics, which is to say that it's all based on a terrible misunderstanding. The movie is a cult classic in the minds of people who break up over the title because they assume that the filmmakers meant it to be taken seriously. But whereas the work of Ed Wood and Phil Tucker has the authentic fascination of a vision reflecting, as Tim Burton once put it, "someone's strange mind", Tomatoes is reflective of what wouldn't pass muster during the last ten minutes of Saturday Night Live. Place it alongside the real thing and the difference is obvious: I once attended a daylong "World's Worst Movies" festival where Tomatoes was included on the schedule and it cleared the room of an audience that had gleefully sat through The Beast of Yucca Flats and Billy the Kid vs. Dracula. If you can't maintain integrity in the field of really bad movies, where can you maintain it?
