THE ANGRY RED PLANET
"Earth's first expedition to Mars loses contact upon landing. When contact is restored, Mission Control discovers that the crew is in a fight for their lives."
Director Ib Melchior directed The Angry Red Planet on a budget of $200,000 over a period of ten days in 1959. It is a depiction of mankind's first mission to Mars. As you could imagine by the film's title and the descriptive text above, things don't go particularly well for our intrepid space-faring protagonists.
It is our desire to explore, our inability to merely accept what is and strive for what lies beyond the horizon, that drives us as a species. We are always struggling against something, trying to break free from our supposed limitations, never satisfied with merely what we have and instead dreaming of what's next, because complacency is stagnation, and stagnation is death. We are explorers and pioneers by nature, and that pioneering spirit naturally extends to the skies above, to those faraway celestial bodies that hold endless possibility for discovery and adventure. Make no mistake, out future lies in the stars.
Mankind's obsession with the stars was kindled by the infamous "space race" of the 1950's and '60's, and as the governments of the United States and the Soviet Union dueled for interstellar supremacy, the average folks were just excited and enthralled by every new story to break over the airwaves. Before this era, most people were quite certain that there was no way to create and maintain a suitable habitat for a living organism suspended in the void, and many doubted it was even possible to muster enough sheer force to break free from the atmosphere and achieve orbit.
But milestone after milestone, breakthrough after breakthrough, our best and brightest shocked the entire world with an unprecedented storm of creativity and innovation. Anything seemed possible. And the motion picture industry took advantage of "space fever" with a seemingly endless stream of science fiction projects, from big budget prestige pictures like Forbidden Planet to bargain basement productions like Night Of The Blood Beast. Everybody and their dog was making a movie with a UFO in it back in those days.
Many of these projects tended to deliver a moralistic punishment on their science-minded protagonists for daring to go "too far", in essence encroaching on the domain of the divine. Some things, these films warned, mankind was not meant to discover. It's often difficult for films of the genre to balance our inherent desire to discover and innovate with our often destructive and reckless nature. Too often, lesser science fiction films take an eerily puritanical view of their principal characters, judging them far too harshly for having the gall to ignore our generally self-imposed boundaries, based often upon outdated superstitious practices. The arrogant scientists are punished for their "sins", often by their own creation as a form of poetic justice.
Where does this leave The Angry Red Planet?
Mars Rocket 1, seemingly lost in space several weeks earlier, is discovered adrift in space. Mission Control manages to land the wayward spacecraft via remote control, and out of the original crew of four, only two have survived the journey home, and only one is unharmed.
Mission commander Col. Tom O'Bannion is seriously ill, his body being slowly devoured by a creeping green fungus. Dr. Iris Ryan is in shock, but otherwise physically intact. With the aid of an experimental drug, doctors are able to jog Iris's memory, slowly learning the truth of what really happened during Mars Rocket 1's fateful journey to... The Angry Red Planet!
So what happened on that fateful journey? Mostly a lot of standing around, staring out windows and polishing firearms while trying to engage in witty banter and politely failing. Col. O'Bannion has a penchant for keeping his ill-fitting jumpsuit zipped down nearly to his navel, exposing his powerful chest hair to the other crew members, and one in particular likes what she sees. Over the course of their journey to Mars, Tom relentlessly flirts with Iris, being the only female member of the crew, and much to my surprise, she seems very receptive to his oily charms, quickly agreeing to date her commanding officer as soon as they get back home, where whiskey flows like water and porterhouse steaks grow on trees.
This leaves the other two members of the expedition, Professor Theodore Gettell and Warrant Officer Sam Jacobs, to engage in several awkward scenes trying to ignore the bizarre mating display taking place right before their eyes, exchanging furtive glances and desperately wishing they could depressurize the capsule to kill everybody just to end the pain of being in the same room with Colonel Chest Hair and Dr. Fuck-Eyes.
After the rocket lands on Mars, the crew wanders around outside in their state-of-the-art spacesuits (jumpsuits with ill-fitting helmets), Iris nearly gets devoured by a big plant, they all paddle an inflatable raft over an ocean of Martian oil and discover a
With the amoeba enveloping the rocket, preventing take-off, Tom gets the bright idea to electrify the rocket's outer hull, damaging the amoeba and giving the crew their one chance to escape Mars with their lives. Professor Gettell dies after take-off, his heart giving out under the strain, and Tom spends the journey home laid up in his bunk, a
Back on Earth, Iris develops a technique to lure the amoeba off Tom's body using electricity, inspired by Tom's own plan to save their lives on Mars, he recovers and makes goo-goo eyes with Iris, who has finally let her luxuriant red hair down, and they plan their first date as a foreboding Martian recording plays on a nearby tape recorder, chastising the human race for being nothing more than children in a cosmic sense, warning us never to return to Mars, lest our entire planet be destroyed by their superior technology.
It's the same old story, really. Foolish human beings, their reach exceeding their grasp, are punished for fooling around with forces they could not possibly comprehend. In this case, the protagonists are actually castigated by the booming voice of God, or at least the Martian equivalent, for being too simple-minded and reckless to be taken seriously by such a higher intelligence, a higher intelligence that won't hesitate to resort to brute force to educate these supposedly "lesser beings".
These arrogant Martian bastards never even attempt to communicate with the rocket crew during their expedition, and the message later states that while the crew members were being attacked by the local fauna, they deliberately chose to make no attempt to help the hapless human beings, because they're basically too stupid to be saved. That's not the depiction of a higher intelligence, merely an intelligence with a higher opinion of itself.
This isn't a situation like in the classic Star Trek episode "Arena" where the Captain Kirk is able to prove mankind's better nature to a superior alien intelligence after being condemned to death as a race of brutish killers. These Martians have already made up their minds, and woe to humanity for the sins of our forefathers. But considering how awful Mars looks in the movie, maybe we're better off leaving those fart-sniffing, bug-eyed pricks to their own devices.
The Angry Red Planet is the kind of movie where the interior of a rocket ship looks like an office building set, there are random, useless-looking "machines" littering the backgrounds of control rooms and monitoring stations, and stock footage of impressive military equipment is used extensively to enhance middling production value. It looks cheap, in other words, and that's pretty par for the course regarding most genre productions of the era.
The odds of your sci-fi script getting picked up by a major studio with a decent budget have never been all that great, historically speaking, with most projects of this variety being picked up by infamously frugal distributors like American International Pictures, who would often slap two disparate films together on a double bill in lower-tier theaters and drive-ins across the United States.
One thing many B-grade filmmakers used to separate their films from the pack was a "gimmick", like William Castle, for example. Castle became a master of the gimmick: House On Haunted Hill had "Emergo" (a model skeleton would "float" over the audience via a rope and pulley) and The Tingler had "Percepto (devices installed under selected seats in the auditorium, causing them to vibrate during the film's climax), and he became rather infamous for his devious cinematic tricks.
The Angry Red Planet had its own gimmick, courtesy of producer Norman Maurer. That gimmick was called "CineMagic", and it never really caught on. Before production of the film began, producer Maurer approached director Melchior with a proposition, promising their film would be the first of many to use a revolutionary new photographic technique that would set them apart, making them pioneers much like their cinematic counterparts. This technique, he assured Melchior, would better integrate the cast members with their cheap sets, hiding the flaws and cut corners in the production design. It would create a 3-D effect without having to shoot in 3-D or force the audience to wear flimsy glasses. It would make the action on-screen look like a drawing come to life, creating a never-before-seen, dynamic live-action/animation hybrid that would blow people's minds across the country.
This revolutionary process was called "CineMagic", and it amounted to little more than a solarized black & white film stock tinted red. Ib Melchior hated the technique because it delivered on none of Maurer's promises, and "CineMagic" never caught on, used only one more time in a Three Stooges movie produced by Maurer called The Three Stooges In Orbit in 1964. So "CineMagic" did The Angry Red Planet no favors.
But the movie's good! It's goofy, often cheap-looking, and not scientifically accurate in any way, but it's fun to watch, and I recommend it. I think this is the first film I've watched thus far this month that I would actually recommend to you, Dear Imaginary Reader. I had a good time watching The Angry Red Planet. After a week of the crap I've been watching, I needed a movie like this.
YOUR TIME IS RUNNING OUT!
You suck and you can't write for shit. Nobody reads this awful blog and you know it you sad loser.
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