Horror Extreme Movie Catalog

John Carpenter is a great director. He has a great sense of humor, great timing and has great skills. In fact, he is a great disciple of the classical form: austere, precise and always economic in terms of narrative... in the same tradition of one great master of the past: Howard Hawks. Don't take my word for it. Check the opening sequence of Vampires and compare it with the opening sequence of Hatari!. The similarities are striking and one can clearly see how Carpenter dominates his art.

But this film is very weak. The story about some dormant martian creatures (or their ghosts) who possess and transform a human colony in Mars into a homicidal tribe is so heavy handed it gets to be ridiculous.

The concept in itself is not bad and John Carpenter has had success with ideas even more offbeat than this one. But unlike films like The Thing (Collector's Edition) or Escape from New York (Special Edition) or less loved entries like They Live, everything here is a mistake.

The characters are dull (so dull that even Pam Grier and Joanna Cassidy look embarrassingly bad), the casting is a huge mistake (all other actors are unconvincing) and the acting is non-existent. To be honest, this film reminds me of Starship Troopers.

Everything else suffers the same fate. The screenplay is boring, with no interesting characters - something John Carpenter is very keen on: check on Vampires and even then we get James Woods in a great performance. Here, zero.

The rest is bellow average: special effects are cheesy (the balloon crash scene is laughably bad), art direction is uninspired and the "ghosts" actually look like a bunch of angry surfers.

I pray that Mr. Carpenter will give us much better things in the future... because he is great. But this film is not.

This one ranks with MEMOIRS OF AN INVISIBLE MAN as the last in string of stinkeroos from John Carpenter. After some initial success with HALLOWEEN and ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK, it was (box office wise) downhill. Not all of it fair. PRINCE OF DARKNESS, THEY LIVE, VAMPIRES, BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA and IN THE MOUTH OF DARKNESS (one of the better Lovecraft-type films ever made) are actually pretty good. But while others who arrived on the scene in the same time as Carpenter (Spielberg, Lucas, Ron Howard, Ridley Scott,Robert Zemeckis ) have gone on to bigger and better things. Such was not to be for Carpenter. GHOSTS OF MARS was an incredible flop when released -- hitting home video less than three months later! It isn't compelling, interesting or particularly well-acted. It's violent, but mindlessly so. I see it selling for 98 cents. That's too damned high!