THE ANGRY RED PLANET
1959
Directed by Ib Melchior
Written by Sid Pink and Ib Melchior
There's always at least something a little enchanting about movies about life on Mars—that is to say, macroscopic life on Mars, the kind that can eat you or threaten you with rayguns, existing contemporaneously with us humans on Earth, the adventure beginning with one planet paying the other a visit—and that's something that's only become increasingly true, though it's been a whimsy for so long you can forget we've known about Mars what we know now, in the broadest strokes, for most of our history of telling stories about that planet. For example, let us consider 1959's The Angry Red Planet, and The Angry Red Planet hasn't updated its information about its setting in something like half a century, and therefore quaint as hell, even in its day and certainly quaint as hell on purpose, not even stopping at "life on Mars," but instead eager to posit a Martian jungle so thick with undergrowth that it was a lucky thing the leader of its mission brought his machete to Mars, altogether having more in common with avowed pulp stories (even these mainly from, like, the 1920s and 30s) about mysterious, cloud-veiled Venus than with even the more fanciful contemporary movies about Mars, which at least generally acknowledged a rugged landscape. (To its credit, it does still require its astronauts wear space suits on Mars, though they're comparatively flimsy.)
This is all still appealing in its way, but The Angry Red Planet—and if a movie ever seemed determined to live up to its name, it would be this one, as we'll see—has the profound misfortune to exist in its particular subgenre in its particular time, that is, sci-fi flicks about speculative space exploration at the end of the 50s heading into the 60s, a subgenre that's basically never any good, while it operates under the further disability of being made by Ib Melchior and Sid Pink, potentially the single worst filmmakers of that subgenre. They actually got worse at it as they went along, and some years back we catalogued Journey To the Seventh Planet, a movie released in 1962 that also lives up to its name (for it is unequivocally a journey into ass), that doesn't even manage the minor compensations that Red Planet does, and maybe we could read something into that—Melchior wrote the screenplays for both films, collaborating on the scenarios with Pink, who produced, but Melchior directed Red Planet while Pink directed Seventh Planet—but they both have bad direction of bad scripts resting on bad stories given the meagerest substance by cheap, threadbare production, and Red Planet's superiority rests principally on having an interesting aspect to its production that was immediately deemed to have been a failure even if it was, it turns out, memorable enough that people do indeed remember Red Planet pretty well. But failure it was: even if I can't say for certain that it turned little profit (I've seen a budgetary figure of $190,000, so it presumably turned some profit), it was Pink's very last film before decamping to Europe for, as far as I can tell, the entire remainder of his career, at least until his very final production in 1970, The Man From O.R.G.Y., and while I cannot say whether that film likewise lives up to its name, I live in hope.
So: we begin not on Mars, but on Earth, as contact is reestablished between ground control and the creatively-christened space vessel Mars Rocket One, and while their messages are met with silence, and they have no idea if it even has enough fuel to make the return journey, they can remotely recall the ship back to base, and so they do. Upon planetfall, out spills two passengers—two fewer than took off—and much the worse for wear. One of these is biologist Dr. Iris Ryan (Naura Hayden), who's wrecked more psychologically than physically; the other is the mission commander, Col. Thomas O'Bannion (Gerald Mohr), unconscious and afflicted with some kind of space infection/parasite that's consuming his right arm and is primed to kill him unless they can figure out, from Iris herself—for the mission tapes have been wiped clean—whatever happened to him out there on Mars, if this information even can help save his life. But thereon hangs a tale, as Iris recounts their adventure, and it could be held a pretty bad sign for this movie that it is fourteen minutes and thirty seconds into its 83 minutes—a prologue mostly comprised of ground control montage, along with some dubious "drama" concerning whether this movie's principals might ever actually make their way into it—before the very last ripples of the dissolve effect finally subside to bring us fully inside a flashback that, itself, begins on day zero of this mission to Mars.
On their way to Mars, then, are Thomas and Iris plus geologist Dr. Theodore Gettell (Les Tremayne) and pilot Sam Jacobs (Jack Kruschen), anxiously enduring the month-and-a-half trip to our neighboring sphere—Iris and Thomas pass the time by sparking a romantic relationship—and, eventually, they do get to Mars, and at the thirty-seven minute mark—and while I was earlier being quite precise, I am now being approximate, for there's quite a bit of time spent on the ramp between the MR-1 and the actual Martian surface—the first human sets his very first foot on the titular planet. Martian wildlife attempts to kill them, though Dr. Gettell thinks there's a guiding intelligence to it all, and while Gettell's suspicions are based mostly on vibes and the (apparently) thin empirical evidence of the vaguely-humanoid Martian alien that Iris thinks she saw through the window but which they all seem to have dismissed, he's sort of right. Let's say "vaguely right."
That's The Angry Red Planet, which is a miserably bad adventure film straight through, with very few breaks, and if it gets better it's not exactly because that adventure is good, and while I don't want to say it's exclusively because at least our dipshit cast's yammering is about monsters on Mars now, it is still true that just finally getting to that point would be better than the preceding. These guys are lousy company and they're all the movie's got for most of its runtime; the elderly geologist is sufficiently neutral to somewhat not even count as part of the cast, rather than the set decoration, and Kruschen might be tolerable in a movie that was proportioned a lot better than this one is, one of those Brooklyn proletarian astronauts that numerous movies predicted but never really came into being, who gets some pseudo-amusing bits like expressing disappointment at the story in the sci-fi mag he's brought ending on a cliffhanger, unaware that he'll be living its thrilling conclusion, though uniquely amongst the cast he actually gets more annoying as the film goes on, especially once his comic relief business begins centering around his own romantic relationship with "Cleopatra," which is his space gun. "Cleopatra" is, specifically, an "ultrasonic freeze ray," and you could not be too cynical in evaluating what that phrase might entail, for it is exactly what it sounds like it would be in this low-budget science fiction film: a raygun that produces no visible ray and, with the exception of a single test on one piece of foliage, literally no visible effect on anything that ray hits, i.e. cheap fucking city. Naturally, however, it does produce an enervating high-pitched whine.
But the expendable meat—and the movie's already told us they don't make it—are relatively okay in comparison to our leads, or at least Mohr, who is plainly contemptuous of the project and expends absolutely zero effort on pretending otherwise, one of the film's two protagonistic anchors and never bothering to take any of it seriously, but not even in a way that leads to a rewardingly bad performance, just bored sullenness and a languid approach to the role that makes literally every line from this space captain feel like the repartee of a tired gangster drinking alone at a seedy bar. I can scarcely blame him, when the material is so objectively substandard. So this movie has a lot of filler, as I'm sure you've picked up on, and the mode of that filler is Mohr attempting to flirt with Hayden (Hayden is at least kind of trying throughout, not that it really matters), and the main channel this flirty dialogue takes is the brunet colonel slurring the last syllable of the ginger biologist's name into "Irish," going on twenty or thirty times—he calls her nothing else—and obviously that's going to get so unbearable you'll want to throw a shoe at the screen, though at some point down the line you'll be reminded the colonel's surname is "O'Bannion," and it crosses over into God damned insanity, just how inutterably lazy Melchior's script is.
He apparently finished Pink's story into a script (Pink's story just being a bunch of crap he spitballed with his children in the first place) only under the condition he could direct, and, normatively speaking, that feels like a situation where you'd care about the screenplay you were writing, but I suppose that would assume you cared about the movie you were directing, too, and that's not really too obvious here, with the balance of the movie being medium shots of the command center (the only interior part of the rocket we ever see, despite there being other parts of the rocket, which can only be implied to exist from offscreen sound effects), and it's pretty grindingly tedious but it's for the best since when he does use close-up singles all he's doing is proving is that he has no idea how to and they come off more akin to our principals, usually Mohr, lunging out at us like a jump scare. The most galling thing, I think, takes us back to that title: this movie's going to be, more than anything else, "about the color red," and we will talk about that very shortly, and accordingly when they set their ship down on Mars the window is a circle of strong crimson light. (Don't hold your breath for inserts looking out that window with our heroes—it's very much that kind of low-budget movie—and there is going to be, like, a ten minute interval between this indication of the alien world our cast's describing and us actually going outside onto the soundstage to see it. It's such a godawful small affair.) Then, in the next scene, and without explanation, that light is blue, and, yeah, at length we'll understand that "blue"—bright blue!—is "nighttime on Mars" (I mean, I would have gone with "black," for several reasons), but that's made explicit a good thirty minutes later and the movie is such that, in the moment, it is gruesomely plausible that they really did just forget and use the wrong light.
Seriously, do not hold your breath.
But, even if I've more-or-less rolled my eyes at Melchior's adventure writing, the movie's actual adventure sequences turn out to be sort of impervious to either a bad writer or even a bad director. Now, let's be clear—they would have benefited a lot from having either—but Pink had a bold plan for turning his underfunded movie that was never going to be able to realize "Mars" convincingly, or even on the twee terms of contemporary sci-fi, given that even the high-budget stuff wasn't exactly "convincing," and if this had gone a conventional route it was going to look basically like them but infinitely shittier. Instead, Pink, convinced by comics illustrator, storyboarder, and co-producer Norman Maurer, determined to swerve so fully into gonzo artifice that the gonzo artifice would be the point, even trying to make a full-tilt gimmick out of it in its marketing (and it wasn't his first time; Pink's very claim to fame was kicking off the 3-D craze with Bwana Devil in 1952). He dubbed it "CineMagic." That doesn't mean a lot—it's not some high-tech process as such—but it did result in a special movie, and at least not one you've seen ten times or more: the Mars scenes were made as a combination of negative and positive image solarization, and then tinted in the most hellish hues (the version I watched, versus the version I sourced screencaps from, I recollect pushes more towards "scarlet" or "vermilion" than these screencaps' orange; it was also in 1.85:1, but oh well). It effectively looks like Mars is eating our astronauts, which does pretty much track the plot. It is violently weird, and interacts terrifically with the interior of the rocket—I've complained about the direction, but somebody understood that cutting from an overborne, blaring solid red to the pale gray-blues of the spaceship or hospital, sometimes with the sort-of mediating factor of cutting to redhead Hayden in the ship or back on Earth, was going to be very disorienting—though of course the main goal was to hide the cheapness of the sets and effects, hopefully by unifying them aesthetically into something that all looked like a thick-lined cartoon (which, I believe, they often partially are).
It kind of even comes off, and Red Planet has some cool monsters to eventually throw at you, albeit fewer than Pink's original treatment would have had after he realized he couldn't even really afford the three he kept, the first monster being a relatively underwhelming, mostly-immobile carnivorous plant. The other two, though, are actually quite neat: a rat-bat-spider-crab that unfortunately gets staged like a Looney Tune gag (they think its spindly legs are trees because I guess they didn't lift their heads even slightly to see where the "trunks" went), but has a wonderfully otherworldly quality and even the dubious puppetry that makes it "float" feels appropriate, its tall, gracile body an adaptation to Martian gravity and its movement likewise; the "giant amoeba" that chases them out of a lake, while much dumber conceptually, is awfully memorable in its unnerving asymmetry and single rotating eye's 360 degrees of freedom.
The most important thing is just the strangeness, though, and the way it renders the imagery almost entirely abstract, so that even as something as frankly lame as standing on the banks of a flooded quarry to effect "a Martian landscape" becomes something genuinely alien and ethereal, and the glimpse of the Martian city across the lake, nothing but the suggestion of spires reflected on a horizon made otherwise entirely indiscernible by the CineMagic process, manages the kind of haunting beauty that simply wasn't really part of the genre's makeup yet in 1959, and could've still been the best shot in very good movie. It suggests time and distance and lost inaccessible worlds so well, and the movie we have, which is of course not good at all, can scarcely comprehend these emotions; ultimately, as we know, some of of our heroes escape Mars, though I find it very difficult to call how they do it a "climax," and the schemes of the Martian people turn out to be hilariously lackadaiscal. (Being an advanced alien civilization, they of course want nothing to do with us barbarians, as their farewell/fuck-off message makes clear. But they were sort of hoping that their suburban wildlife would kill us and relieve them of the inconvenience of making any decisions about it. And that's your usual 50s/60s sci-fi thematics at work, though I had unfortunately managed to rewrite the screenplay in anticipation of the reveal with another one, assuming that this angry red planet was an angry dead planet, so as to better dovetail with the haunting loneliness of the imagery.) It would've been too much (yet also too little) to give the movie a pass by that point, though I even could've managed not to hate it except that's not even the ending. The ending is another ten minutes of a fake medical procedural to deal with Thomas's amoeba hand, in a lab, on Earth, and in your movie for dreamy kids who came to sear some CineMagic monsters straight into their retinas, that's just kind of amazingly badly-judged, don't you think?
Score: 3/10
That which is indistinguishable from magic:
- Let's skip the "Mars has trees" and "Mars has an atmosphere" and "Mars has lakes" stuff, which is perhaps a little obvious.
- Instead, let's talk about the part where the Martian civilization throws a gravitational field at our heroes' rocket to keep them from leaving before they've gotten their condescending talking-to—"gravity" is identified as such in dialogue—and ponder why under 20 g's or whatever it was our heroes are still standing upright, or conscious, or alive.
- Just an enormous amount of delta-V this MR-1's packing.
- Thomas's arm was infected, by a unicellular organism the size of the house. Noodle that for a second. That's the last ten minutes of the movie, guys.
The morality of the past, in the future!:
- You may think it's swell that there's a lady scientist, though this Dr. Iris Ryan is the female heir to a famed male scientist, as they make absolutely sure to mention in our introduction to the cast.
- And then her colleagues shrug at her report of an alien, on this planet, with trees, that they're pretty sure has some kind of aliens on it.
- She passes out in hysterics a lot in this movie; in fact, its fundamental organizing principle is pretty much her psychic inadequacy, though I guess she gets better.
- I guess it's not really a "morality" issue, but Gettell? Dude dies of a heart attack on the rocket after the crisis, and that at least sucks, right?
Sensawunda:
- That shot of the city they'll never walk the streets of is the stuff a sense of wonder is made of, to be fair.
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