A spaced-out freakout from the Flaming Lips

Director-costar Wayne Coyne in ''Christmas on Mars.''

Oklahoma art-rockers the Flaming Lips are no strangers to DIY theater. In 1996 Wayne Coyne, the band's frontman, musical mastermind, and all-around circus leader, unfurled the so-called Parking Lot Experiment, in which he led an orchestra of 40 car stereos configured to form a sprawling urban sound system blasting cassette tapes. The following year the band released "Zaireeka," a collection of four compact discs meant to be played on as many sound systems simultaneously. A Flaming Lips live show is as much feel-good freakout as concert, featuring spaceships, extras in furry animal suits, enough confetti to fete a small nation, and Coyne perambulating the audience in an enormous plastic bubble.

Anticipation for "Christmas on Mars" has been building for seven years, which is how long Coyne and company have been building sets and filming scenes in the musician's backyard. For a home movie, "Christmas on Mars" is wonderfully odd and charming. Lips devotees will devour the trippy old-school textures, absurdist plot, and industriously lo-fi space station. Card-carrying cult members will marvel at the marching genitalia band; they will nod knowingly at the vision of Coyne as a compassionate alien superbeing who mysteriously confers harmony and joy. That's pretty much his job description in the band.

Judged by any standard measure of art or craft, however, "Christmas on Mars" is - sadly, shockingly - boring. The story, as it were, seems to go something like this: It's Christmas Eve and morale is low among a motley crew of colonists on the red planet. A doohickey regulating oxygen and another that controls gravity at the derelict outpost begin to malfunction. The planet's first baby is about to be born (to Michelle Martin-Coyne, rock-wife hot in skimpy T and briefs) and Major Syrtis, played with grave blankness by multi-instrumentalist Steven Drozd, is worried. He begins hallucinating about vaginas and tries to organize a Christmas pageant, but the guy who was supposed to wear the Santa suit commits suicide. Coyne materializes, dons the suit, and a healthy baby is born.

"Saturday Night Live" cast member Fred Armisen appears as a mild-mannered astronaut who warbles "Silent Night," the only song in the film, and Adam Goldberg makes a cameo as the station's hostile psychiatrist. The onboard mood meter is set to brooding and depressed, and the action, which amounts to a handful of narcotic and/or foul-mouthed exchanges, punctuates dreary walks through the space station and psychedelic close-ups of homemade gadgets.

Warmth and humor, Flaming Lips calling cards, are nowhere to be found. All that's left is weirdness. If "Christmas on Mars" was meant to be a Yuletide fable from the fantastical fringes, the inspirational message has slipped between the cracks of the sci-fi scrapheap.

Joan Anderman can be reached at anderman@globe.com.