by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night’s “Mars Movie Screening” featured a double bill
of what are so far the only two feature-length movies based on Edgar Rice
Burroughs’ 11-book series of stories set on the planet Mars (the first one,
published in serial form in pulp magazines as Under the Moons of Mars and then put out as a book as A Princess
of Mars), the much-ballyhooed 2012 Walt
Disney Studios production John Carter (originally shot under the title John Carter of Mars but with the M-word deleted from the final release
because Disney had just released two other movies with the word “Mars” in the
title, including a “comedy” called Mars Needs Moms whose very title was virtually guaranteed to put off potential ticket buyers, with the result that they
just alienated science-fiction fans who would have loved to see a film based on
the Burroughs Mars books at long last while not bringing in anyone else to
replace them) and a cheap-jack independent production called Princess
of Mars (though the screening’s publicity
included the indefinite article that had been in Burroughs’ title) made by a
company called “The Asylum” in 2009. The final credits of Princess of
Mars give the company’s Web address as “www.theasylum.cc/,” and while I have no idea
which country in the world owns the domain “.cc,” the site is still alive, the
company is still in business and they produced the recent better-than-average
Lifetime TV movie Break-Up Nightmare. Their usual modus operandi
of ripping off major-studio productions and trying to get cheaper exploitation
versions of the same premise out into theatres (or at least onto DVD’s) first
is revealed by other items on their Web site, including The Fast and
the Fierce and Ghosthunters. Princess of Mars was intended not only as a knock-off of Disney’s
then-upcoming John Carter but of Avatar as well — apparently some prints were released under
the alternate title Avatar of Mars
— and not having read any of the Burroughs Mars books I can’t vouch for the
fidelity (or lack of same) to the source, but according to Charles (who has read some of the Burroughs Mars series) this film’s
writer-director, Mark Atkins, made the same mistake as the creators of John
Carter did: instead of shooting a straight
adaptation of one of the
Burroughs Mars books he mashed up plot elements from several of them.
Princess
of Mars opens in modern-day Afghanistan,
where John Carter (Antonio Sabato, Jr. — considerably, shall we say, “beefier”
than he was in his prime but still a nice enough hunk of man-meat even though
the star of John Carter, Taylor
Kitsch, is sexier) is some sort of rogue Special Forces fighter tangling with
Afghan warlords and drug dealers. One of his battles leaves him near death, but
the sinister doctors treating him have a plan: they will download his entire
genetic information (which, according to Atkins’ script, fits on a 16-gigabyte
hard drive, which the more scientifically literate members of our audience thought
was absolutely hilarious) and use it to clone him, so though the original John
Carter will die there’ll be a new one who’s not only genotypically identical to
the first one but also has all his memories and knowledge. They also send him
through some kind of interstellar vortex to Mars — not the Mars in our solar system but “Mars-216,” a
planet in another solar system
which, like our Mars, is the fourth planet from its sun and whose terrain is
red in color (courtesy of the Vasquez Rocks, a Southern California location
that’s a go-to site for a lot of
movies supposedly set on Mars). Carter first meets up with the Tharks, a race
of bipedal creatures with hideous mask-like heads with tusks; they’re a warrior
class who fight duels to the death to determine who shall run the tribe and who
shall die trying. The leader of the Tharks is Tars Tarkas (Matt Lasky), and
when Carter asks for a drink of water Tars wrings out one of his shirts and
hands Carter a cup filled with his wringed-out sweat.
The Tharkian cuisine gets
even worse when Tars offers Carter a worm to eat — “I told you we shouldn’t have used Indiana Jones’ caterer!”
I couldn’t help but joke (Princess of Mars is the sort of movie that seems to invite Mystery Science
Theatre 3000-type commentary) — and it turns
out that the worm enables Carter and the Tharks to understand each other’s
languages, so that from that point on Atkins has the Tharks speak in
comprehensible English instead of the gargling noises that are apparently the
Tharks’ own tongue. Meanwhile, there’s an intrigue around the power station
that purifies and filters out the impurities in Mars’s atmosphere — if this
station isn’t kept in continuous operation Mars will lose its breathable air
and everyone and everything on it will die — the power station runs
automatically (and one of its junction boxes clearly has a “Craftsman” logo on
it) but there need to be two people (or whatever the Martians call the species
on their planet that looks like us) in charge to intervene and run the backup
unit in case the main one fails. They are Kantos and Saroh Kan (Matt Lagan and
Kimberly Ables Jindra), and they’re supposed to be a married couple, but Lagan
plays Kantos as such a screaming queen that’s hard to believe. Also the job
requires its occupants to live
inside the power station for up to 300 years, which most people (or Martians)
would probably find a deal-breaker. The central intrigue is that the Kans get
killed and the Tharks kidnap the Princess of Mars, Dejah Thoris (Traci Lords);
she and John Carter instantly fall in love (or at least lust) with each other,
but the Tharks are keeping her in a cage to which only Tars Tarkas has the key
— and he wears it around his neck so Carter can’t get it without defeating Tars
in a fight. Actually the cage is an incredibly flimsy construction made of
bamboo stalks tied together with twine, and it would seem easy for anyone with
Antonio Sabato, Jr.’s musculature just to rip the damned thing apart and free
her that way — but that never seems to occur to him (or to Mark Atkins).
Eventually Tars agrees to let the princess out of her cage and the principals
all end up at the power station, where the villain Sab Than (Chacko Vadaketh)
turns out to be, not a native-born Martian but another Earthling, Sarka, one of
the bad guys Carter had fought back home in Afghanistan (ya remember Afghanistan?). Rejected by Princess Thoris, who only has eyes
for Carter, Sarka decides to get his revenge by — you guessed it — pulling the
plug on the power station, thereby condemning every living thing on Mars
(including himself) to death by suffocation, and he and Carter have a grand
sword fight up and down the power station (suggesting that Atkins had seen the
Errol Flynn-Basil Rathbone epics from the 1930’s) until Carter wins, Princess
Thoris brings the power station back on line by waving her hands over it like
one of those computer screens on NCIS, and Mars is saved for humanity, Tharkdom and everything else that
abides there. There’s also an earlier scene in which the Princess, still locked
in that bamboo cage, is beset by a flock of weird and malevolent flying
creatures in a scene that suggests Atkins was ripping off Hitchcock’s The
Birds. Princess of Mars is one of those frustrating movies that’s too bad to
work as genuine entertainment and not bad enough to work as camp, either;
Sabato basically lets his pecs do his acting for him and Lords goes through the
entire movie with a fixed look of boredom on her face — I found myself wishing
someone would have stuck his cock in her face so we could at least see her
doing what made her famous originally. Lords apparently admitted in an
interview that she was embarrassed by making this movie and had done it only
for the money; she’s held on to her looks but seems either to have lost
whatever acting skills she ever had or never bothered to acquire any. (The only
other Lords film I can recall seeing is John Waters’ Cry-Baby, an experience she remembered fondly in her
autobiography — she said Waters treated her kindly and respectfully but the
film’s star, Johnny Depp, was so heavily cocooned by his entourage she
literally never spoke to him
except when they had a scene together — but I don’t remember her making an
impression on me, good or bad; it’s a fun movie but Lords seemed to be in it
more as one of Waters’ fabled casting stunts than for any intrinsic talent.)
Princess
of Mars is a pretty useless movie; it cost
$300,000 to make (though only $70,000 of that went towards principal
photography; most of the rest was spent in post-production on the special
effects, which look pretty good for the budget but hardly compare to the
elaborate state-of-the-art ones in Avatar or John Carter, and when
Sabato does his great leaping jumps, made possible by Mars’ lower gravity, it’s
obvious it’s being done with wire work) and the lack of money shows, though a
more imaginative director than Mark Atkins probably could have done more with
the money they did have. It’s
just 93 minutes of professionally acceptable but uninspiring film, and it
doesn’t help that a couple of times you hear the word “Barsoom” on the
soundtrack — “Barsoom” was the Martians’ own name for Mars (and they called
Earth “Jasoom”) but you wouldn’t know that from this film, and at least one
audience member gave the audible version of a wince when he heard Traci Lords
call Mars “Mars.” The screening was preceded by a number of student films with
Martian themes, including a 1981 production called A Picnic on Mars which was largely done with stop-motion animation —
the actual models used were on exhibit — and deals with two hot-looking young
Martians, a man and a woman, dressed in the bare minimum (and frankly they were
more fun to look at than the leads in Princess of Mars!), whose attempt to have the titular picnic on Mars
is beset by various monsters, many of them borrowed from Burroughs’
descriptions of the lower orders of Martian life. While I ruefully thought of
what the film’s two leads would look like now (especially comparing what I looked like in 1981 with what I look like now!), and
much of the dialogue was so badly recorded it was virtually incomprehensible
(fortunately either the recording quality got better as this eight-minute film
unrolled or I just got used to it), A Picnic on Mars was genuinely charming and quite good for a student
film of its vintage — which was old enough that “film” actually meant film and not “computer” or “smartphone.”
