Ghosts of Mars Review
by Jen Manna
You'd think they would have learned by now "Don't make a movie about Mars!".
The Ghosts of Mars, or Revenge of Ozfest, was bad. I knew this. Fully expected it to suck. I mean it's John freaking Carpenter. If I had been sick at home on Sunday afternoon and this was on UPN and I didn't have cable, I would have watched it and found it entertaining.
But.woooooow. Did this movie suck.
Let's examine the levels of suck-itude:
Characters:
All the Bad Movie bases are covered. T&A blonde (Natasha Henstridge), reluctant bad guy helping good (Ice Cube), and monster villain (Richard Cetrone).
There's also the guilt ridden scientist, the scared newbie, the away party member in red, the charming cad, and three, count'em, three token minority supporting characters. And a couple other people who carried guns and died.
Problem is, the characters are all bland. The concepts are so trite that they have less definition then the office jokes that used to get faxed around back in the years before spam mail. (Does anyone else remember those days?) If we're going for B movie, at least make the characters over the top and excessive so they're amusing.
Plot:
Blondie is 2nd in command of a unit of Martian cops, most of whom are 'rookies'. Jackie Brown is in command and looking fine in a tight leather trench. Their assignment is to transport a dangerous prisoner from a mining camp to the main city. Prison transports never seem to work well in the movies. The group arrives at the town and it's of course, eerily empty. Well, except for all the body parts. They investigate the weirdness and of course promptly lose the commander, leaving Blondie in charge.
That's when they discover Marilyn Manson is on Steroids and leading a group of blood-thirsty Ozfest roadies and groupies on a rampage to destroy the mining town after a quick stop at the Ink Lab for some nifty piercings. All because of an evil ancient Marian fart with an attitude. I knew Pepsi Co was evil. (Watch the movie, then you'll understand.)
Course the catch is, the fart picks a host and if you kill the host, the fart looks for a new person to inhabit. Yet the 'good guys' all seem to knock off oodles of the evil fart controlled people and always seem to get away without being taken over.
The plot was too predictable; it had all the originality of a grocery list.
Explosions?
Check.
Excessive violence and gore?
Check.
Random naked hooters?
Um.well.how about a body-hugging turtleneck?
It'll have to do.
Okay then, check.
Setting:
Mars.enough said. You'd think they'd know better by now.
Dialogue:
The writers tried to be clever. They really, really tried. But most of the lines came across with all the originality of a bad piece of Magnetic Poetry using chunks of dialogue from other B Movies.
Even the guns weren't cool. There was no honking massive one that looked like someone put a shoulder strap on a cannon. I mean, if you can't even have big guns that make big explosions what's the point in a shoot out?
Problem is it wasn't quite bad enough to be good. I'm sure I would have enjoyed it more if I had been free to just MST3K it with impunity. As it was I had to be mostly quiet because people were taking it seriously.
No idea why. It's John Carpenter people!
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