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John Carpenter's Ghosts of Mars
(Reviewed August 5, 2001, by James Dawson)
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This movie has an incredibly boring setup, lots of general dumbness, and a flabbergastingly unsatisfying non-ending, but God knows it was more entertaining than the other movie I saw the same night ("American Outlaws"), so I can't be too hard on it.
Ninety-nine percent of the story is told in flashback by Natasha Henstridge, the bounteously big-busted blond babe who stiffened the world in "Species" a few years back. She is leaner, harder-edged and less sexy-for-sexy's-sake this time around, with absolutely ZERO nudity and only one very brief underwear scene. (That sentence probably has convinced every straight male over 17 who had any interest in seeing "Ghosts of Mars" to stay home, but I'll keep going just because the alternative would be doing something productive with my time.)
The plot is basically "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" meets "Aliens" meets "Night of the Living Dead," except that those movies were a whole lot better. Miners on Mars are being taken over by a previously dormant life form that converts them into bloodthirsty members of what looks like the KISS army, following a Marilyn Manson lookalike who has a penchant for decapitation. Natasha and company hole up in a police station in one of the zombie-overrun mining outposts, then spend all of their time ah, ah, ah, ah stayin' alive, stayin' alive.
If you are keen on seeing thousands of rounds of ammo expended; plenty o' big, fakey Hollywood explosions; lots of hand-to-hand WWF-style fighting; and several non-state-of-the-art shots of a mining train choo-chooing across a dark Martian landscape that appears to have been built on a family room card-table (okay, I'm exaggerating, but the FX really aren't very impressive), this is the flick for you!
Personally, I wish Natasha had felt the need to take some long, soapy, self-exploring showers every now and then amongst the incredibly loud scenes of carnage and destruction. But then, I'm very shallow.
Back Row Grade: C-
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