When I heard Charles had both Friday and Saturday off this week I had suggested that we go to the Mars film showings, and so we did even though we and the other attendees were probably the only science-fiction fans in all San Diego who were seeing a movie other than the latest in the Star Wars saga, The Force Awakens, a film that has been so relentlessly over-hyped I was already tired of it two weeks before it came out. (This morning’s Los Angeles Times has a story about how The Force Awakens has set box-office records everywhere it’s played — not too surprising given that the ad campaign virtually said, “You’re ordered to see this movie!”) The proprietor put together a typically varied program consisting of trailers for upcoming attractions, a cute little cartoon about a space-traveling raccoon who just wants to be left alone to eat an acorn, an episode of My Favorite Martian (the second in the series, “The Matchmakers,” in which Martin the Martian, played by Ray Walston, helps George, the dog owned by the boss of Tim O’Hara, Bill Bixby’s character, get together with his soulmate Chloe, whose owner, Marsha Carson [Laura Shelton], keeps her locked in all day because she’s pissed off at all males, human or canine, because her boyfriend Howard Loomis [Linden Chiles] apparently jilted her and ran off to Mexico; it turns out he wrote her a letter saying it was only a business trip and he intended to propose to her when he got back, but she misplaced the letter — or did Martin, with his virtually supernatural powers, create a letter and leave it for Marsha to “find”? Last night I was struck as I’d never been when both shows were knew how similar My Favorite Martian and Bewitched were) and a short called Red Pearl which was a charming but rather dull story about a young African woman who uses NASA’s infrastructure to get back in touch with the spirit of her dead mother (at least I think that’s what it was about). Interestingly, imdb.com lists another Red Pearl movie made in 2015, though that one is feature-length, and it claims the Red Pearl short was shot in the 2.35-1 CinemaScope aspect ratio but we were watching it on a download in an old-fashioned TV ratio.
The features on the program were both made-for-TV movies set
on the planet Mars and involving Earthlings who have traveled there and are
being menaced by the locals — though in the first one, Martian Land, there aren’t any living Martians and the menace is
a giant, but highly unusual, sandstorm that is sweeping the planet. The conceit
behind Martian Land is intriguing
and would have made an interesting movie: decades of humanity’s failure to stop
the relentless pollution of Earth’s environment and the resulting climate
change (obviously this is not a
film for Republicans!) have rendered our home planet uninhabitable. A few
hangers-on like scientist Dr. Foster (Lane Townsend) have decided to remain on
Earth and work on restoring scattered patches of the planet to sustainability
in hopes that they can make all of Earth fit for human habitation again, but
most of the human race (the chunk of it that survived the eco-catastrophe) has
decamped to Mars, setting up artificial cities under huge force-field domes to
keep out the hostile Martian atmosphere and climate conditions. They’ve also
named these communities after the former cities on Earth — at least that’s what
it says in the official synopsis put out by the producing company, a studio
called The Asylum (an appropriate name given how, as the film unreels, we begin
to wonder about the state of sanity of its makers), which refers to the
principal locations as “Mars Los Angeles” and “Mars New York,” though in the
film itself they’re only called by their initials, “MLA” and “MNY.” It seems
that what makes this sandstorm different from all the others is it has the
power to break through the force fields and thereby expose the artificial Mars
communities to the full blast of Mars’ toxic (to humans and all other Earth
life forms, anyway) atmosphere. It also just grabs anyone in its path and
whisks them away to certain death. Among the Mars colonists are Dr. Miranda
Foster (Jennifer Dorogi), who broke up with the male Dr. Foster a decade
earlier when she wanted their family — which also contained a daughter, Ellie
(Arianna Afsar, who actually looks enough like Jennifer Dorogi we can accept
them as mother and daughter — casting two people with strikingly dissimilar
appearances in a script that tells us they’re biologically related is a pet
peeve of mine, and casting director Scotty Mullen deserves kudos for avoiding
it here) — to move to Mars, while he chose to stay behind on Earth to try to
restore its environment to something that could sustain human life again.
So
she divorced Foster and took herself and her daughter to Mars, where she
remarried to a cute, hunky and decidedly sexier husband, Mars rover pilot Neil
(Alan Pietruszewski), who helped raise Ellie (so much so that he’s the man she calls “dad”) — only when that dastardly
sandstorm hits Miranda summons her ex from Earth, and he agrees to come but
only because the force field of MNY has already been breached and their
daughter Ellie is in imminent danger of being killed if the sandstorm passes
into the tunnels below the city. Ellie is there with her girlfriend Ida (Chloe
Farnworth) — at first the relationship between the two girls is unstressed but
we get hints of a Lesbian attraction, and eventually director Scott Wheeler and
writer Jeremy Inman give us an on-the-lips kiss between the two that nails it
even before Ellie introduces Ida to her biological dad as “my girlfriend.”
Eventually Dr. Foster hits on a plan to disperse the sandstorm by firing three
EVF beams at it simultaneously, controlled by a master switch that has to be
detonated from inside the eye of the storm, only Miranda’s agreement to this
plan is almost thwarted by her second-in-command, a tough Black woman named
Rieger (Dionne Neish, who delivers by far the most authoritative performance in
this film), and the guy they both rely on for the grunt work of actually
maintaining their station, Andrews (another Black person, though saddled with
the intriguing name Chaim Dunbar, and hardly the best — or worst — actor in the
film but by a long shot its sexiest male cast member), whom Rieger seems to
think will take her orders when
she mutinies and tries to arrest Miranda just because they’re both Black, but
who ultimately sides with Miranda and allows the power to the city to be kept
on long enough for the EVF devices (which come in metal satchels helpfully
labeled “EVF” and look like Coleman lanterns attached to little tripods that
look like leftover light standards provided by the camera crew) to be aimed at
the sandstorm — only both Dr. Foster and Nick sacrifice their lives to defeat
the sandstorm, which they nickname “Zeus,” and at the end it looks like Ida
dies as well (though that was more ambiguous) — writer Inman seemed determined
to let both the Foster women live at the end but deny them all their significant others.
From reading my synopsis
you might actually get the mistaken impression that Martian Land is a pretty good movie, but you’d be wrong; director
Wheeler, writer Inman and their cast took a potentially interesting plot
premise and screwed it up at every turn. The acting, if (to quote Dwight
Macdonald about Haya Harareet) I can use that term for courtesy, is almost
totally wretched (we’re supposed to regard Rieger as the human villainess of
the piece, but Dionne Neish so totally out-acts the rest of the cast we
actually sympathize with her), with top-billed Lane Townsend giving the film’s
worst performance. I’ve actually heard porn stars deliver dialogue with more
conviction! The writing is full of idiotic and downright risible lines, and the
direction is as lame as the acting and the script — though the action scenes of
the Mars rover flipping around in the wind as its two crewmembers go out on
what turns out to be a suicide mission is cool and shows that even at the low
level of budget and production values of The Asylum, anyone with access to
enough computer time to do halfway decent CGI can make an acceptable-looking science-fiction film. In other words, the computers
assigned to Martian Land did
their job properly; it’s the humans
who screwed it up, and while I don’t agree with the imdb.com reviewer who said,
“If you were to give a child a box of crayons and a handful of paint, I promise
they could create a better screenplay than this” — actually, the children’s
version would probably make at least marginally more sense, and even if it
didn’t their parents would do a quick bit of story editing (“Danny, my son,
just how did the wind get in the
tunnels?”) — Martian Land is an
infuriating example of how a bunch of untalented filmmakers can screw up a good
idea for a movie. It would be a good candidate for the Mystery
Science Theatre 3000 treatment if and when
the much-ballyhooed reunion of the original MST3K cast happens!
