ANGRY RED PLANET...1960
Directed by... Ib Melchior Starring... Gerald Mohr, Nora Hayden, Les Tremayne. Jack Kruschen Radar tracking stations pick up a UFO in orbit around Earth... It turns out to be a Mars Mission that had been sent out months ago and presumed lost... The ship is brought down by remote control and the two survivors, Commander Tom O'Bannion and the lovely Dr. Iris Ryan, are taken to a military hospital... Tom, the leader of the expedition, has some kind of alien growth on his arm that has rendered him unconsious and is slowly killing him... The doctors need some information on what happened on Mars to try to find a cure... Not only that but there seems to be one crew member dead and another one missing... However, Iris has a mental block that prevents her from remembering the details of their trip... The doctors then administer a drug to release her memories... This is when the story really gets going... The ship lands on Mars and the four person crew is constantly watched by an unseen creature (see picture above)... Dr. Ryan is almost eaten alive by a carnivorous tentacled plant that that our fearless leader chops up with a machete knife... They then wander around looking at the plant life that is obviously drawings... They come across a strange looking tree and proceed to chop a limb off, except that it ain't no tree, it's a thirty foot tall spider with a bat's head who don't dig losing it's leg too much and attacks... They finally subdue the creature by blinding it with a ''freezing ray gun''... Next they happen upon a lake and
start to cross it in an inflatable raft... When they start to get
close to an island city this giant creature rises from the water
and chases them back to the ship... Not only does it look like
''THE BLOB'' with a revolving eyeball but it acts like ''THE
BLOB''... It envelopes the ship and starts eating away at the
outer hull with acid... This also gives us an opportunity to thin
out the cast as Sam Jacobs, the ''Jack of all trades guy'', gets
sucked out of the ship and desolved before our very eyes... Our
heros electrify the hull which frees them of the creature but
they still can't blast off until they get get the usual alien
message like ''You're all a bunch of goofs, don't come back''... Finally the ship blasts off but
Professor Theodore Gettell, has a heart attack and croaks... This
is the end which is really the biginning, or is it the beginning
which is really the end, damn, I don't know... Most of the critics don't think too
much of this film, but I don't mind it... Thats not to say I
think it's a classic... But it is pretty weird, mostly due to the
filming technic used which they called ''CINEMAGIC''... Basically
what this means is that while our heros are on the planet surface
everything is red, yes everything including our heros... This was
done to hide the cheap sets and paintings used as backgrounds and
props... |
