Post by Ace on Aug 29, 2003 10:14:04 GMT -5
BEN STEELMAN | BEN ON FILM
Sometimes, Mars movies just can’t get respect
Mars attacks – but sometimes Mars laughs. In our last episode, we saw how Hollywood science fiction tended to project period anxieties – communism, infiltration, nuclear destruction, etc. – onto the Red Planet.
Sometimes, though, Mars was the butt of jokes.
In Abbott and Costello Go to Mars (1953) the duo were blasted off in a spaceship that took a wrong turn and landed in New Orleans during the middle of Mardi Gras – enough to throw our heroes off.
Soon, bank robbers accost the wrong-way astronauts and hijack the rocket for a quick getaway. This time, it lands on the planet Venus, where women rule and men are absent – which turns Abbott and Costello into walking love gods.
Generally, Abbott and Costello Go to Mars is rated as one of the team’s lesser efforts. Queen of Venus (1958), starring Zsa Zsa Gabor as a Venusian scientist (!), proved to be a lot funnier, since it managed to be both lame and dead serious at the same time. The earlier movie is still worth a peek, though, for the debut of Anita Ekberg, the Swedish bombshell who’d splash about in the pool so memorably in Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita.
Santa Claus Conquers the Martians (1964) was supposed to be a simple kid’s movie, but it wound up on just about everyone’s Worst List. Michael Medved, a pioneer of bad-movie studies, awarded it one of his prestigious “Golden Turkeys.”
It seems that Martian youngsters are all depressed because Earth Kids have Santa and they don’t. The Martian dads respond by flying their saucer to Earth and kidnapping the jolly old elf from the North Pole.
Connoisseurs value the low-grade acting, the Martians’ bad makeup and the cheesy sets and effects. A few aficionados also revere Santa Claus Conquers the Martians for an early performance by 8-year-old Pia Zadora (as a Martian kid). After a string of awful performances in Butterfly and The Lonely Lady, the grown-up Pia would be ranked as one of America’s least-talented celebrities before the advent of Anna Nicole Smith.
A slightly better kids’ movie was Spaced Invaders (1990). A crew of misfit Martians (including one with a Jack Nicholson accent) crash in rural Big Bean, Ill., on Halloween and are mistaken for trick-or-treaters. Before leaving they manage to save Earth and Mars from evil invaders – and they help Big Bean live up to its name.
Total Recall (1990) was such a big, bloody action spectacle that, at the time, nobody noticed it was a comedy. Some giveaways: The newspaper box in the spaceship terminal, carrying Mars Today (a USA Today spinoff, no doubt) and Arnold Schwarzenegger being camouflaged as a large fat lady.
Like Blade Runner, Total Recall was based on the writings of the late Philip K. Dick, perhaps the most philosophical of the modern sci-fi authors. Here, the dilemma is figuring out who we actually are. Ah-nold is an Earth construction worker who discovers his whole life is a lie; he’s a bad guy whose memory was erased so he can lead Mars’ evil corporate masters to the Resistance leaders, which he does.
Dutch-born director Paul Verhoeven has produced such virulent satires of American life, it’s a wonder the France-haters haven’t mobbed him. In RoboCop (1987), he gave us a future of blasted ghetto cities, corrupt police and corporate execs who made Enron look angelic. In Starship Troopers (1997), he painted an American-ized – and thus militiaristic and neo-fascist – future, hinting that there were few differences, moral or otherwise, between the troops of Operation Desert Storm and Hitler’s Wermacht. (And, of course, he also did Basic Instinct and Showgirls …)
His Total Recall continues the pattern: Mars is run by the requisite giant, heartless multinationals (or in this case, multiplanetaries). The ordinary working stiffs are all horribly mutated, since Management has been skimping on the Life Support Budget.
A side plot involves terra-forming, the notion that, with the judicious introduction of some hearty plants and chemicals, Mars could be converted into a replica of Earth. Even the most gung-ho scientists think this process would take several hundred or thousand years.
Total Recall accomplishes this in its last 10 minutes.
Mars Attacks! (1996) might be the only movie ever based on a series of bubble-gum trading cards. (I used to love them when I was a kid.) Director Tim Burton, however, uses it to spoof almost the entire 1950s invasion genre. Several performances are subversively funny, from Pierce Brosnan as the self-infatuated, clueless scientist, complete with pipe, to Annette Bening as the Flower Child, eager to greet her peaceful Space Brothers. (She’s disappointed.)
Key sequences joyfully send up Ray Harryhausen’s special effects for Earth vs. the Flying Saucers (1956), when UFOs demolished several Washington, D.C., landmarks. The Martians are eventually stopped, not by a simple virus but by the yodeling of Slim Whitman.
Still, Mars Attacks! leaves a bitter aftertaste. There’s little of the obvious affection Mr. Burton showed for his subjects in Ed Wood or Edward Scissorhands; instead, there’s the echo of art-school alumni sneering at folks who live in trailer parks – as if poor people were, say, ugly aliens.
Next, let’s check a couple of space oddities.
Planet of Blood (1966) was one of a number of “Corman Cut-ups,” Soviet Bloc science-fiction features to which famed low-budget horror producer Roger Corman bought the rights. Mr. Corman would hire a few film novices (one of them was Francis Ford Coppola) to rescript the movies, minus the Marxist propaganda, then shoot a few insert scenes with American actors. Presto! One instant drive-in movie.
In Planet of Blood, a Mars probe finds the wreckage of a crashed alien spaceship, and recovers one live survivor. She’s humanoid, a bit greenish and seductively pretty, and wouldn’t you just know it?
Before long, she’s sucking the blood out of the cosmonauts.
The American footage included scenes with Basil Rathbone, John Saxon and Dennis Hopper, who was apparently ad-libbing his lines. (He referred to other male astronauts as “Baby.”) Famed “super-fun” Forrest J. Ackerman had a brief cameo.
Planet of Blood might have seemed a little silly, but some of its ideas – say, the Boogey Thing killing the crew off one by one, or the Alien Queen trying to find a place to lay her eggs – seem to have inspired Ridley Scott’s Alien.
Then, there was Capricorn One (1978), the most famous mission that never made it to Mars. Filmed during the backwash of Watergate, the thriller cashed in on the folk belief that the moon landings were just a big hoax.
Just days before the big launch, technicians discover a major flaw in the life-support system and scrub the mission. Apparently, a failure at this point will mean the end of NASA, though, so the Capricorn One crew – James Brolin, Sam Waterston and O.J. Simpson – is convinced to hide and to fake Mars landing scenes on a movie set.
The astronauts are startled to learn, though, that Capricorn
One “crashes” on re-entry. Someone can’t permit them to survive. Somehow they have to escape and feed the story to journalist Elliott Gould.
Capricorn One’s director, Peter Hyams, went on to do more conventional s-f – Outland, 2010 – but this was probably his best effort, a serviceable thriller that overcame some bad casting and some kinks in the script. It crashed at the box office, though – the Trekkies and space nuts regarded it as sacrilege, and the rest of audience, at that point, didn’t care.
The same apathy greeted Mission to Mars (2000) and Red Planet (2000), both of which combined good special effects with hackneyed plots and cliched characters. John Carpenter’s Ghosts of Mars (2001) turned out to be a recycled zombie movie, and not a very good one at that.
Still, there’s apparently just enough magic to keep the cameras intrigued.
Director Timothy Hines is shooting a new version of War of the Worlds for Paramount, and rumor has it that Paramount also is developing an adaptation of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Mars novels, complete with four-armed warriors and bronzed princesses.
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So has anyone managed to actually see the oh so closer than it's been and will be in eons Mars yet?
Ace (in overcast NYC... )