Sunday, August 20, 2017

The Wizard of Mars, a.k.a. Horrors of the Red Planet (American General Pictures, David L. Hewitt and Associates, Karston-Hewitt Organization, National Telefilm Associates, 1964)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Two nights ago, the Mars movie screening in San Diego’s Golden Hill neighborhood (http://marsmovieguide.com/) consisted of two low-budget films, Devil Girl from Mars (a British production from 1954 about an implacable woman who arrives on a spaceship from Mars that looks like a giant bathtub stopper looking for men because the Martian males have become so emasculated through years of battle-of-the-sexes civil wars with the Martian females they can no longer impregnate them and make little Martians) and The Wizard of Mars, a truly weird American production from 1964 (though imdb.com gives the date as 1965, it’s 1964 that’s listed on the credits as the copyright date — actually it’s MCMLXIV, but you get the idea) that’s advertised as “starring John Carradine,” though given their ultra-limited production budget ($33,000 according to imdb.com, $40,000 according to the proprietor of the screening) they could only afford him for one day. By chance they signed Carradine just as his (third) wife, Doris Rich, was playing Mrs. Santa Claus in an even worse movie than this one, Santa Claus Conquers the Martians (whose only distinctions are that Pia Zadora had a child role in it and it features the same stock clip of U.S. Air Force bombers doing air-to-air refueling that was seen in Dr. Strangelove — so that clip ended up in one of the worst movies ever made and one of the best!). The Wizard of Mars was at least to some extent intended by its creators, writers David L. Hewitt (who also directed) and Armando Busick, as a conscious parallel to The Wizard of Oz, but about the only real similarities are they’re both about four people, including a woman named Dorothy (Eve Bernhardt), exploring a strange world, finding a “Golden Road” and encountering a super-powerful being who appears to them as a giant disembodied head. The setting is New Year’s Day 1975 and the crew of the first manned spacecraft to explore Mars — Dorothy (who’s depicted not as the surprisingly resourceful and plucky junior heroine L. Frank Baum envisioned in The Wizard of Oz but yet another dull spaceship crew member, sort of like Lt. Uhura in the original Star Trek, who’s there just for window dressing and so the filmmakers can feel oh so ahead of their time in actually putting a woman on a spaceship as part of the crew!), ship’s commander Steve (Roger Gentry), Doc (Vic McGee) and the incredibly annoying comic relief character Charlie (Jerry Rannow, who seems to be spending the whole movie trying to channel Jerry Lewis’s whiny delivery of dialogue even though he hasn’t a clue how to do physical comedy — may the real Jerry Lewis rest in peace and not have to fear from horrible imitators like this anymore!) — were originally supposed only to orbit the Red Planet. 

Instead they find themselves pulled in by some sort of force beyond their control and end up landing on it. They had already jettisoned the main stage of their rocket in the process of orbiting Mars, but we’re told in the Hewitt-Busick dialogue that if they can only find it again, they can use it to blast off the Martian surface and get home. Instead they get stuck in an endless series of caves (imdb.com lists the location as Lehman Caves in the Great Basin National Park in Nevada) which are actually the most appealing element of the film: though the vistas get dull after a while, by 1964 color film was cheap enough that even ultra-low-budget productions like this could use it, and the spectacular sights of the walls in Lehman Caves are considerably more entertaining than the dreary antics of the humans walking around them. (They also probably blew a big chunk of the budget renting the extensive array of lights and porting in all that equipment they would have needed to film inside caves.) Eventually, after narrowly avoiding falling into the lava from a seemingly active volcano (that was obviously stock footage), they finally make their way out of the cave only to stumble on a few golden paving stones suddenly revealed when a sandstorm blows off the sand that had previously covered them as part of the Martian desert. Following the golden brick road, Our Non-Heroes find themselves inside a sort of mausoleum featuring a number of glass tubes, each of them containing a sort of papier-maché body that looks like the sort of thing you used to see inside a fun house. (Remember fun houses? I’m probably part of the last generation that got to experience them in our childhoods.) In any event, the travelers encounter one of these creepy statues that talks to them, first in double-talk and then, as the whatsit figures out their language, in English that sounds like the voice of John Carradine — indeed, the figure looks like Carradine in elaborate trick-or-treater makeup, and I suspect the filmmakers created this preposterous contraption so they could have a mechanical Carradine to use for longer than the one day they had the real one under contract. 

Ultimately the real Carradine appears as a disembodied head in front of a black screen and launches into a preposterous explanation of his and the other indigenous Martians’ current plight that makes it seem like Hewitt and Busick were ripping off not only The Wizard of Oz but Forbidden Planet as well: it seems that the “Martians” are actually a super-powerful race that wandered around the galaxy with no fixed abode in any one solar system. They developed their technological knowledge so extensively that they were able to break any connection with space and appear anywhere they wanted to as pure mental energy — but that wasn’t enough for them: they also decided to break any connection with time, with the result that the entire race congealed into the disembodied head of John Carradine and became immortal, which they find so boring they plead with the astronauts to head into a ridiculous-looking gizmo that appears as a Mr. Sun-type solar face with a pendulum attached. Once they follow Carradine’s instructions and restart this device’s pendulum, time will start again and all the entities appearing as Carradine’s head will be able to die at long last — and once they do that, in a ripoff of the silly ending MGM’s screenwriters put on the Wizard of Oz movie even though it wasn’t in L. Frank Baum’s book, the astronauts come to aboard their spacecraft, still orbiting Mars, and only two minutes have elapsed since their experiences started — that’s right, folks, It Was All a Dream! If Devil Girl from Mars was an example of the frustrating sort of bad movie that isn’t good enough to be entertaining on its own merits and isn’t bad enough to be camp, The Wizard of Mars (which also exists, according to imdb.com, in a seven-minutes-longer version under the title Horrors of the Red Planet) is an example of that even more frustrating sort of bad movie: one that seems to have a good movie trapped inside it, struggling to get out.

The most interesting name on the credits of The Wizard of Mars is the film editor, Tom Graeff, who seven years earlier had made a surprisingly compelling film called Teenagers from Outer Space. Despite its terrible title (the idea of Warner Bros.’ marketing department after Graeff sold the film to them because they needed a double-bill partner for Gigantis, the Fire Monster, actually the first sequel to Godzilla) and some tacky production values, Teenagers was a surprisingly well-written and well-acted film, one of the better knockoffs of The Day the Earth Stood Still with some quite original aspects in its own right, including a quirky sense of spirituality — and bits and pieces of that same sensibility appear in The Wizard of Mars, suggesting that in addition to editing the film Graeff may have had a hand in writing it as well. (Eventually Graeff went so far overboard with his quirky spirituality that he became convinced he was the second coming of Jesus Christ, started an independent church where he was worshiped as such, and even filed a petition with the Los Angeles County courts to have his name legally changed to “Jesus Christ II” — which was unsuccessful.) The Wizard of Mars is hardly the worst movie John Carradine was ever in — The Unearthly and the unspeakably awful The Astro-Zombies (which looks like it was shot on Super 8 and sounds like it was recorded on cassettes) are definitely below this one on the quality scale — but it’s an indication of how horrible Carradine’s career trajectory was, from achieving notice in his marvelous supporting role in John Ford’s underrated The Prisoner of Shark Island, his repeated appearances as part of the “Ford Stock Company” in films like The Grapes of Wrath and Stagecoach, his marvelous starring role in Edgar G. Ulmer’s 1944 Bluebeard (a film of real quality, and recognized as such at the time it was released), before his career trailed off into ever tackier appearances in crap like this, from which he collected the money so he could keep his semi-professional Shakespeare company in L.A. going. (One wonders what its productions were like.) At least Boris Karloff managed to maintain his dignity and pride no matter how crappy the films he got cast in were; Carradine, like Bela Lugosi, seemed to be subsumed in them and one gets the impression he can’t wait to get off the set, sign for his money and go back to his friends and play Shakespeare!