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Reviews:
Why
the Film is Good: Ghosts of Mars—A treatise
by
Christian De Matteo
Solid
The
above “Solid” is one I’ve been
agonizing over for days, not sure at all how the
hell to rate this movie.
The fact is, the
movie sucks.
The dialogue seems to have been written by
a twelve year old, the special effects done on
Microsoft Powerpoint.
The bad guys are rejects from the casting
calls of every zombie movie ever made, made over
by the 13 year old headed chapter of the Marilyn
Manson fan club.
The gore is unnecessary and mostly silly,
and the acting is…well, there really isn’t
much, and the set seems to have been made out of
old cardboard boxes.
So
why give it a Solid?
Because it cracked me the hell up!
I hate to say it, but I thoroughly enjoyed
the movie, laughing my ass off with every horrible
line. It
was as if legendary director John Carpenter (The
Thing, Big Trouble in Little China) decided to
make what an 1980’s Schwarzenegger zombie movie
would have looked and sounded like.
Remember the dialogue of The
Running Man?
After cutting an adversary in half with a
chainsaw, Schwarzenegger responds to a question
about the adversary’s whereabouts with the
brilliant, “He had to split.”
Yeah, that
bad and that damn good.
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First
of all, the movie stars Ice Cube as…well, Ice
Cube. The screenplay has basically applied Cube’s gansta rap lyrics to a sci-fi shoot ‘em up.
(When Cube’s compatriots show up, he
introduces them as Uno Dos and Tres, he’s
constantly railing against the police and The
Woman [explanation to follow], and explaining why
being a crook has been his only option.
You get what I’m saying?)
Headlining
the movie is the I-once-played-a-hot-alien
star of Species
and the acclaimed Species
2, Natasha Henstridge.
She plays an army woman with a gun who
sometimes kicks ass.
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Along
with the two of them and Pam Grier (playing Coffee
as a lesbian), there’s a supporting cast of
cannon fodder.
Now here we have witness to Carpenter’s
smartness as a horror movie director.
After a slew of horror flicks this summer
that have been too dumb to include killable cast
members or to use them when present, Carpenter
knows that to keep the action up we need
characters who can die as the story progresses,
not in one burst, but throughout the movie.
What he kinda/sorta/but-not-really tries to
do is give us a tad bit of emotional attachment to
a few of them.
Doesn’t work.
The only thing you care about when they die
is if it was a cool death or not.
And, for the most part, they all die
interestingly.
And
this is why the movie is a Solid. At the
risk of looking like a Carpenter apologist,
knowing the man’s immense catalogue of work
pretty well, and having seen his last film a
number of times (Vampires), I know what the man is capable of, and he is quite
capable. Vampires is a good, solid, exciting film, with good dialogue, neat
special effects, and characters you can get
attached to.
What we get with Ghosts of Mars is the exact opposite. But a calculated opposite.
And
I think it’s a joke, a Carpenter-esque gag like Big Trouble in Little China was.
Though nowhere near as clever as the
aforementioned film, Ghosts
of Mars is almost a spoof on all the old
Hammer horror films, on the Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, and, more so, on every bad zombie flick
that followed.
On top of that, it’s a spoof of all of
the vapid, not even trying-to-try sci-fi
actioneers that we are bombarded with every damn
year, films that assume we don’t have a brain
and think we can be amused, much like Homer
Simpson, by the mere presence of shiny objects.
On
top of that, social commentary abounds.
Every pierced movie-goer showing up to the
film is insulted within the first fifteen minutes,
as we are told that the first thing the ghosts do
when they take over a human body is mutilate it
with metal. John
Carpenter is saying that the only reason that
would make sense for a human being to riddle their
flesh with metal hangings would be if they were
possessed by an angry, vengeful spirit.
On top of this, Carpenter’s Mars is a
matriarchal society, something he makes sure to
tell us in the very first minute, an obvious
smirking retort to anyone who’s ever called his
previous films misogynistic, as he says they’ve
been in the Vampires commentary.
I
refuse to join the throngs of critics saying,
Carpenter’s getting old and losing it.
No, watch Vampires
and then try to tell me he’s losing it.
I am not a fan of everything he’s ever
done, in fact— prepare for the equivalent of
blasphemy for someone who claims to be a Carpenter
fan and
a Kurt Russell fan— I don’t care much for the Escape from films.
But
I respect Carpenter too much to write him off
after one movie that I feel he gave us as a joke,
and as a snort to his critics. Just look at the title—Ghosts
of Mars—and just tell me it doesn’t smack
of old, silly horror flick nostalgia.
If Tim Burton can bow to the throne
(perhaps literally a toilet in this case) of Ed
Wood, why can’t Carpenter?
And,
folks, if forced to choose between Burton’s Planet
of the Apes or Carpenter’s Ghosts
of Mars,
I wouldn’t need even a second to think.
I enjoyed the silliness of Ghosts
of Mars, I had pleasure being in the theater,
and I don’t at all regret the money I spent on Ghosts
of Mars.
If
everything that follows from the man is at this
same level, I will agree that perhaps he has
slipped, but I’ll need at least four more films
to prove it.
I say this doubting highly I’ll ever have
to eat that hat.
John
Carpenter is still as sharp as before and having
just as much fun.
And,
yes, I’ll be in the theater for the next one,
smiling once for every dollar spent.
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