Attack of the Killer Tomatoes
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Attack of the Killer Tomatoes is a 1978 film that attempted to parody horror themed B-movies.
It was made for less than US$100,000 and has been recognized as ahead of its time, predating Airplane! and other films with the same concepts but with less money. USAToday named it one of the ten best titles of all time.
The movie was directed by John De Bello; writing credits were shared by John De Bello, Costa Dillon, Stephen Peace (who also appeared) and Rick Rockwell. The concept of Killer Tomatoes was created by Dillon who is the only person who appears in all four films.
Attack of the Killer Tomatoes is often considered a cult film.
Plot
The plot concerns tomatoes suddenly turning homocidal and attacking humans. The fruit also gain the ability to grow to enormous size and eventually carryout large-scale assaults. Most of the films, special effects, if they can be called that, are actually tongue-in-cheek as they consist of simply (and obviously) rolling the fruit down an incline.
As with classic 1950s horror films, such as The Blob, the successful mechanism for defeating the tomatoes turns out to be rather simple. Its discovered that playing of a rather bad rendintion of a rather bad song—"Puberty Love"—is fatal to the tomatoes. One rather large tomato protected himself by wearing earmuffs, but the hero successfully defeats him by holding up the sheet music to the song.
This same method for defeating enemies was used in the 1996 film Mars Attacks!.
Sequels
The movie spawned three sequels:
- Return of the Killer Tomatoes! (1988)
- Killer Tomatoes Strike Back! (1990)
- Killer Tomatoes Eat France! (1991)
It was also a cartoon on Fox Kids which ran from 1990 to 1992. The cartoon was actually based on Return of the Killer Tomatoes.
Return of the Killer Tomatoes! has the distinction of being George Clooney's first movie.