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There
is a certain charm to a film where the lead villain always looks
straight at the camera and goes: "arghhhhghhh!!!!" which is about
twenty times in this awful John Carpenter movie. Something broke
in that man sometime between THE INVISIBLE MAN and ESCAPE FROM LA
so all he can make, or rather, remake, is every bad action sci-fi
VHS you ever rented when you were a teenager, except released for
modern audiences.
That
said, I rented GHOSTS OF MARS precisely to bring back that lazy
summer night let's watch this awful looking movie feeling and for
the most part GHOSTS OF MARS delivered.
Like
all good plots it can be rendered into a comparison description.
ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13 meets HEAVY METAL VIDEO. A team of cops patrolling
the nascent Martian human colonies arrive at a small mining town
to pick up an ultra-dangerous frontier criminal. However, a disaster
has visited itself on the mining town rendering it deserted except
for a few mutilated, decapitated bodies. It seems that the miners
have uncovered a trap set by the original martians that releases
evil spirits (wooooh) that take over the minds of extras and makes
them into a horde of savage warriors who run around with makeshift
weapons chopping and sorting.
Looks
nice in black
GHOSTS OF MARS has a cast of semi-recognizable faces who are in
costume mostly for the rent-cheque unless you count the very earnest
and spectacularly miscasted Natasha Henstridge who, while certainly
beautiful, is given the most inappropriate hard bitten dialogue
that ever ecaped from the floors of forgotten cop TV shows. Other
victims include Ice Cube, who is the obligatory homey in space,
SNATCH's Jason Statham to provide another accent into the mix, and
blaxploitation icon Pam Grier who seems to be saddled with droog-like
futuresprach as well as linebacker sized shoulder padding. In what
is essentially a "who dies next" type film, early departure from
the film was probably a relief for this cast.
What
I like best about GHOSTS OF MARS is the consistent cheapness of
the entire film, from the adobe sets, to the OUTER LIMITS-quality
special effects and the way all the stunt doubles fly into the air
like the baddies from the A-Team every time they're blown up. It
really does harken back to the time when I used to cruise neighbourhood
rental stores looking for the worst painted box cover with promising
titles like METALSTORM and STEEL DAWN, guaranteed that I would get
to see what heavy metal video directors did in their spare time.
Indeed,
GHOSTS OF MARS is very heavy metal. This is what you get in a film
where every extra seems to have been recruited from the pit of Gwar
concerts or at least Duran Duran's "Wild Boys" video. Every action
sequence begins and ends with a furious speed metal guitar riff.
There is also plenty of kerosene blowing up in the background and
lots of curious set direction featuring barbed wire, razors and
other sharp objects dangling from the ceiling like hippie art. The
only thing really missing from this trailer trash assembly is The
Rock as a villain who would have been a step up from the leader
of this savage horde, a strangely Alice-Cooperish body builder,
a send up of a Maori warrior and the Mohawk guy from THE ROAD WARRIOR.
There's
not much to recommend in this film apart from the cheapish charm
but it does contain the obligatory gore and gunfire. Our heroes
mow down hundreds of yelling, charging savages. They have lots of
dialogue like: "If one of us gets taken over..." "Yeah, leave them
behind." Lots of scenes where they point guns at each other before
they agree to band together. There are thrown saw blades, impalings,
decapitations, choppings and hackings. And we get to see Henstridge
in her underwear. Great stuff to see when you're sucking back a
Slurpee and chomping on Doritos.
On
DVD
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