Starring Larry Blamire and Fay Masterson. Rated general.

Remember the pie-plate flying saucers in Plan 9 From Outer Space? So does Larry Blamire, a veteran playwright and theatre director who wrote and directed this rib-tickling, often-hilarious take on the Z-grade movies of eras past yet somehow still with us.

The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra, shot in Skeletorama (a process that looks remarkably like black-and-white video shoved through a scratchy optical process reminiscent of old SCTV skits), is a send-up of wonderfully dumb, no-budget flicks like Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, in which the genuine anxieties of the atomic era expressed themselves as kitsch entertainment.

Blamire stars as Dr. Paul Armstrong, as starched as his Tilley Endurables and driven by the arrogant humility expected of a 1950s hero. He's gone for a woodsy retreat with his wife, Betty (cast standout Fay Masterson, a Brit living in L.A.), whose June Cleaver outfit never gets rumpled, even when she's abducted by aliens. But wait! I'm getting ahead of myself.

Being a true scientist, Dr. Armstrong is always practising science, and he has heard that this particular place in the forest is "lousy with atmosphereum", a meteor-borne element that has untold properties. Well actually, we are told some of its attributes: the space gunk is potent enough to fuel a wayward spaceship crash-landed by Lattis (Susan McConnell) and Kro-Bar (Andrew Parks), from the planet Marva, though initially, to pass among humans, they take the earth names Bammon and Tergasso. (As Lattis later admits, "Many things on Marva are fun to say.") Good thing the humans are too dim to notice the difference.

As it happens, atmosphereum is also the one element capable of restoring life to the (apparently) legendary lost skeleton of Cadavra, a cave-dwelling pile of bones that somehow enlists rival scientist Dr. Roger Fleming (Brian Howe) to help him purloin the stuff. To do that, the bad doctor turns a batch of woodland animals into a sultry beatnik (very funny Jennifer Blaire) whom Fleming, of course, calls Pammy. And don't forget, there's that space mutant on the loose.

To help capture that retro feeling, the film is replete with stock nature footage that jars with the surroundings, about $27 worth of props, and the kind of quasi-Shakespearean speech that makes the performers feel they must be, you know, acting. Other nice touches include a soundtrack lifted from the theremin-and-flute spook music of other movies, glaringly visible wires holding the skeleton in place, and symmetrical close-ups of people laughing far too long at their own jokes.

Lost Skeleton suffers occasionally in comparison with Top of the Food Chain, a 1999 Canadian effort that covered the same territory with more deluxe resources and a droller kind of surrealism. But Blamire keeps building enough farcical tension to make viewers--especially those under 10 or over 40--forget the film's one-joke premise.

As an added treat, it is astutely coupled with "Skeleton Frolics", a colourful Ub Iwerks cartoon from the 1930s.