Where does Beach Theatre owner Michael France keep getting these offbeat offerings?

Besides cool, free shows for kiddies (from Jack the Giant Killer on Nov. 8 to Laurel & Hardy's Babes in Toyland on Nov. 29), to timely tie-ins (Casino Royale for free on Nov. 13, followed by a midnight debut of Quantum of Solace), France finds time to deliver freaky stuff that hasn't had enough juice to even be considered cultish yet.

Stuff like Christmas on Mars, a space oddity co-directed by and starring Wayne Coyne of the fuzz-punk band the Flaming Lips. Christmas on Mars will show twice only, both times on Nov. 7, benefitting WMNF-FM (88.5 on your dial, and No. 1 in your heart if you've ever tuned in). Tickets are $7.

The plot concerns, well, uhh, let Coyne try to explain in these Rolling Stone excerpts:

"It's sometime in the future, Mars has been sort of conquered and there's a space station on it but the space program has gone into decline and these people are kind of stuck up there. ... This beautiful woman is giving birth to this sort of artificial impregnation from this bubble that she wears on her stomach, which is the way infants are gonna be born in the future.

"It's all scientifically timed so she gives birth to this baby the second it hits midnight on Christmas. So it's symbolically the beginning of a new civilization. But instead of being born from religious ideas it's born from a science idea."

Flaming Lips multitasker Steven Drozd plays the military guy in charge of creating the pageant; Coyne plays the Martian assisting him.

According to the few critics who've seen it, Christmas on Mars is a do-it-yourself-with-backyard-junk love labor that Village Voice movie critic Aaron Hillis wrote: "'Looks like Eraserhead via John Carpenter's Dark Star, a broodingly absurdist sci-fi fable set on the newly colonized red planet." Sounds interesting, or at least psychotic.