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John Carpenter has given us at least
23 films and we know he is very capable of delivering a much
better than average entertaining genre film. * * * *
Ghost of Mars is his latest. It's
full of mayhem, silliness. the requisite number of action
scenes, some well done gore effects, but offers very little
to recommend it. Every frame of this film is derivative of
scenes that Carpenter has done better in the past. The plot
is mish-mash of stuff from films like The Thing, The Hidden,
Assault on Precinct 13 , Night of the Living Dead, Escape
from New York and even The Fog. * * * *
The entire film is told as a flashback.
A police officer is telling what appears to be a tribunal
of women what went wrong with her last supposed routine mission.
* * *
It's 2025 and Mars is an earth
colony run by woman. There is however something else alive
on Mars and it doesn't like anyone else being on the planet.
* * *
Police Officer Melanie Ballard
(Natasha Henstridge) and a few others are suppose to pick
up a prisoner from a remote mining community on Mars known
as Shining Canyon and return with him to headquarters where
the prisoner Desolation Williams (Ice Cube) is to be tried
as a mass murderer. * * * *
Desolation Williams however may
have killed several creatures, but perhaps they were no longer
the mine workers of Shining Canyon. Perhaps the miners uncovered
something that laid dormant under the surface of Mars and
once unleashed took over the human bodies and turned them
into maniacal creatures. Humanoid creatures that become massochists
who must deform themselves and brutally attack and kill anything
that is not like them. * * * *
Thus a battle ensues between the
hordes of zombie looking maniacs and the police officers,
a few normal folks and some un-infected prisoners. I never
felt any particular mood was established nor did any of the
characters seem real enough to have any empathy for. * * *
A lot of the action is exactly
the kind of stuff we've seen in over-amped action movies for
the last 30 years. Little explosions send people or humanoids
flying into the air. Several fisticuff type battles involving
a combination of street fighting and martial arts pad out
some of the running time. The fights are well choreographed
and even decently shot--but really who cares. * * *
We don't know much of anything
about the main characters of the film and any empathy you
might have for the protagonists is because they look normal,
and we've seen them in other movies before. The bad guys look
like various versions of Marilyn Manson wannabe's . The normal
humans want to stay alive and get to a train so they can get
out of the mining camp alive, the bad guys want to kill them.
* * * *
The film takes a little while to
get started. It gives exploitation movie fans a little hope
when Pam Grier shows up. . but she doesn't get to do very
much at all. Natasha Henstridge (the often naked former model
from Species-) is pretty, and she's agile, but she's not very
convincing as a tough talking bad-ass police officer (and
she keeps her clothes on too). She's not absolutely wooden
as an actress, but the original plan was to have Courtney
Love play the role (she got injured just prior to filming)
and that would have been at least been more interesting. Ice
Cube is given some fairly lame tough guy dialogue to spout,
but he's a likeable presence on screen I suppose. Joanne Cassidy
shows up and she doesn't do very much either. Every once in
a while there's a good smart-ass line of dialogue to chuckle
at. Not enough. * * *
Ghosts of Mars becomes repetitious
fairly quickly because we've seen all of this many times before.
Oh there's enough metal music, gore and action sequences staged
every fifteen minutes to keep you from falling asleep, but
I want a little more than that when I'm watching a film by
a film-maker who's capable of giving us a lot more. * * *
If you haven't seen this kind of
thing many many times before I suppose you might find it somewhat
entertaining. The film was made mostly at a gypsum mine in
New Mexico, spray painted red and all of it was filmed at
night. Visually the low budget film is modestly impressive.
If you want to see John Carpenter doing what amounts to a
derivation on The Thing, and Assault on Precinct 13 mixed
with Walter Hill's The Warriors--then this one's for you.
* * * *
In case you're curious here's the
Carpenter films I think are particularly worthwhile: "Halloween",
Assault on Precinct 13, The Thing , They Live, Starman, Elvis:
The Movie, Dark Star, Escape from New York , In The Mouth
of Madness, Christine and Big Trouble in Little China.
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