This lives forever in every Boomer's Saturday Matinee dreams as the perfect summing up all shlocky 1950's sci-fi movies and outer space comic books.......
Everything's here for you in one compact 83 minute package..........let's take a quick inventory....
Mars!.....and not just any crappy low-budget Mars filmed in a New Mexico sand dune.....this Mars literally bleeds red all over the screen, thanks the movie's so called 'Cinemagic' process.......which over-saturates the footage in a sort of reverse-negative deep scarlet. The effect, blatantly obvious and corny, still remains startling........like Mars colored in by reckless 3 year olds with only one color in their crayon box........
The Cliche Crew! The familiar, usual line-up of 50's star voyagers.......the studly stud Commander (Gerald Mohr), the nattering old professor (sci-fi vet Les Tremayne), the tubby Brooklyn-ese comedy relief (Jack Kruschen)....and most importantly, the hubba-hubba bombshell babe (Nora Hayden whose hair competes with the Martian landscapes as to which one's more flaming red.....)
Monsters! Monsters! Monsters! That's what we Boomers craved in our sci-fi and Ib Melchior fed our wildest dreams like nobody's business. Silly and cheap looking when viewed today......but oh my, did they scare the crap out of our dungarees.....let's here it for this wondrous
menagerie....which starred......
The Crab-Bat-Rat-Spider Thing! No one who saw this arthritic puppet as a kid ever forgets it......(even if watching it now, it moves like our 84 year old Uncle Morty trying to get up off the couch....)
The Triple-Eyed Martian Peeper!......who first appears in the spaceship porthole.....checking out Nora Hayden, thereby making him the movies' first official intergalactic pervert.
The Literally Eye Rolling Giant Amoeba! BQ's personal pick for the movie's monster MVP......as it rolls through the red-saturated terrain, the one big eye mounted on its top, spins madly in complete circles,......the only amoeba who can see you comin' and goin'.....and sideways.
There also a few other things we wouldn't dare leave out of a post on this film......the stunning matte painting of a Martian city, with skyscrapers punching holes in the clouds......and Jack Kruschen's bizarre, passionate love affair with his ray gun, naming it 'Cleo' frequently showering it with kisses......(not that Cleo does him much good when Big Amoeba plows through the foliage, its mono-orb rotating almost as fast as both of Nicolas Cage's eyes.....).
All the Martian mayhem directed against our four plucky earthlings apparently comes from the residents' desire for privacy.........and similar to Clint Eastwood in 'Gran Torino[, they leave a cranky 'Keep Off The Damn Grass' voicemail to make their point......
"Men of Earth, we are the Men of Mars" they announce.........which leads us to believe they can't be too pissed off at us if they liked our name for their planet better than whatever they came up with.......(makes us wonder if the people from Uranus did the same thing......heh, heh, heh)
Who's up for a sequel! BQ says bring back 'em all back one more time...The Bat-Crab-Rat-Spider Thing, Big Amoeba and The Triple Eyed Peeper......and throw in the giant Venus Flytrap thing whose tentacles get in some quality groping time of Nora Hayden........(which is more than Gerald Mohr enjoys, content to slobber over Nora's extra-curvy curves....)
3 stars (***) for a beloved childhood artifact, a gloriously cheesy reminder of a more innocent age. Only in a movie like this can our space explorers cavort in the oxygen-thin Martian air with no face plates on their helmets.......(sorry, not in the budge....)
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