The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
Mars is the fourth planet of the Solar System. It has a long history in literary science-fiction, ranging from the Martian invaders of H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds (1898) to the works of Ray Bradbury and the adventure stories of Edgar Rice Burroughs.
Mars has produced alien visitors since the early days of silent cinema. 1950s SF cinema brought a plentiful supply of Martian invaders. The same period also began a number of works about the exploration of Mars. Subsequent to that, we have begun to see a number of films about the colonisation and a little later the depiction of Mars as a world inhabited by humanity.
From the late 1990s, we have seen a concerted move towards the depiction of a scientifically credible Mars and realistic attempts to land on or colonise it. That said, there are still a number of films that conduct throwbacks to a romantic vision of Mars as a world inhabited by little green men.
Abbott and Costello take time out from comic hijinks with the Famous Monsters to go to Venus (despite the title) and engage in various datedly sexist gags with a planetful of women
In the same vein as Gravity and The Martian, this depicts spaceflight with scrupulous scientific regard. Essentially Apocalypse Now in space with Brad Pitt on a mission to Neptune to find his father who has gone rogue
Silent film depiction of a journey to Mars from the early days of the Soviet Union that makes for an interesting curiosity piece. The arrival on Mars contains some imaginative sets and costumes
The Asylum conduct a modernised remake of H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds – for the second time. With resident mad scientist Joe Roche on script, the results are undeniably interesting
Luigi Cozzi directed quickie designed to copy the success of Alien. As with many Italian films of this era, it has largely been conceived around plentiful provision of gore and little else
1950s B movie about an expedition to Mars that encounters exotic and hostile lifeforms there. Not much happens before the aliens pronounce judgement on humanity
This comes with the clear influence of The Martian, telling a similar but more low-key story of a lone astronaut having problems on the way to Mars. This is less about science ingenuity that his fracturing mental state
One of Francis Ford Coppola’s earliest films. Roger Corman has obtained rights to a Russian-made space expedition film and handed it over to Coppola who added a few extra scenes to repackage for US audiences
Donnie Darko director Richard Kelly adapts a Richard Matheson story about a couple who are offered a terrible choice by a stranger but delivers a bafflingly incomprehensible film
Third of the Brave Little Toaster films, this takes the talking appliances to Mars and comes with an appealingly zany sense of humour
The film that launched a host of conspiracy theories in which NASA decides to fake a Mars mission using tv transmissions. A clever and well written thriller that becomes an elegy to the loss of the ideals of the Space Mission.
Cheaply made and mind bogglingly bizarre Quebecois film about a Martian who takes two children on a journey around the world at Christmas
Has there ever been a good film combining the concepts of ‘Christmas’ and ‘Mars’? A film made by cult band The Flaming Lips about the first colonists on Mars as they celebrate Christmas
A low-budget film with some very accomplished effects that takes place in a devastated future as a Martian colonist returns to find what has happened to Earth
George Pal’s successor to Destination Moon imagines one step further – an expedition to Mars. Where Destination Moon had a bold unfettered optimism, this is killed off by an ending that falls prey to typical 1950s fear and anxiety
This was one of the last gasps of the 1950s alien body snatchers genre. Conducted on a low budget, this nevertheless comes with some modest effect as a scientist and his family face mysterious doppelgangers
This has distinct overtones of 2001: Space Odyssey and Event Horizon about an expedition to Mars to investigate a mysterious black sphere – only to find that it offers a gateway to Heaven
British entry in the 1950s alien invader genre with a female invader come to Earth to select male breeding specimens. The invader looks like a dominatrix from outer space who comes accompanied by a ridiculous robot
Disappointing film version of the videogame. The film seems to either miss or water down the principal appeals of the game, although you do get Dwayne Johnson (still billed as The Rock) as the bad guy
This was the second film based based on the Doom game and actually does a far better job of getting the essence of the game and paying fanservice to its elements than the earlier 2005 film did
Low-budget SF film about a space expedition from Mars to Earth where before you can say Solaris the crew start to experience hallucinations of their loved ones. Sort of The Crazies in space
One of several Mars movies that came out around 1999-2000, this concerns the first manned expedition and their efforts to survive after being stranded on the Martian surface
The second of the Flash Gordon serials, which relocates action to Mars following the popularity of Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds broadcast. The film has a wonderful imagination that far outshines the tattiness of usual serial production values
1950s SF film about an expedition to Mars. This fails to find anything interesting to happen once there where the astronauts do no more than engage in romances with the Martian women
Twelve-chapter serial that offers one of the first ever depictions of an alien invader on screen. The results are oddly mundane in comparison to the onslaught of great 1950s alien invasion films that came only a couple of years later
The fifth Godzilla film, the point where Godzilla becomes a good guy joining Mothra and Rodan to battle Ghidrah. The best Godzilla film from this period with the effects team operating at the peak of their game
John Carpenter returns to cinema screens amid the 2000-1 spate of Mars movies. Despite promise, this ends up being not much more than his early film Assault on Precinct 13 relocated on Mars
The first serious film about spaceflight, a silent epic from Denmark about astronauts arriving on Mars and encountering a hippie Utopia. Worth watching for the quaint amusement of what it imagined would be
TV mini-series that adapts six less well known short stories by H.G. Wells into an anthology with Wells as the central character. A couple of good stories, some that never hit the mark
Classic of the 1950s alien invader genre in which a young boy discovers that the adults around him are being taken over by Martian invaders. Director William Cameron Menzies makes striking use of sets to further a sense of alienation
Tobe Hooper’s remake of the 1950s alien invaders classic for Cannon Films has much better effects and more technical proficient than the original but misses any of its paranoid, alienated mood
Timo Vuorensola’s follow-up to Iron Sky. It is hard to believe that a film with a premise that combines Nazis on the Moon with alien lizard people from the hollow core of the Earth could go wrong
Although others can be cited, this is the film that inspired Alien. It seems to have been conceived in terms of putting The Thing from Another World aboard a spaceship. A B movie no denying but well constructed
While the film bombed, it emerges as a fairly good and faithful, lavishly produced adaptation of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ swashbuckling planetary adventure
This was one of the first US films to depict the future. It is essentially Metropolis having been remade as a Broadway musical with an emphasis on comedy
Second of the Bruce Timm animated films based on DC’s Justice League, this has been construed as a Mirror Universe take that pits the Justice League up against villainous versions of themselves
A relative disappointment among the mostly excellent animated DC superhero films, this pits each member of the Justice League with a matching super-villain only who seemingly kills them off
Animated Justice League film, which adapts a comic-book storyline that reconceived the various DC superheroes as they were back in the era of their original creation
A DC Universe Original Animated Movie that introduces the Legion of Superheroes, their nemeses The Fatal Five and an assortment of new Justice League members to widen diversity
Another of the animated DC Comics films in which various of their regular characters find themselves incarnated in simulated combat arenas
This starts out offering a fine astrophysically credible depiction of Mars only to reach for the playbook of Alien cliches to essentially become Zombies on Mars
This is intended as a deliberately bad parody of a 1950s SF film. It is a fairly silly effort that almost ends up being too well made for its own good to mimic the originals that weren’t even trying
Action film with police officer Olivier Gruner investigating a murder on Mars. For a film that claims such a definitive title – that it is about the planet Mars – this lets all opportunities slip through its hands
Tim Burton makes a film based on the old Topps bubblegum card series about Martian invaders, which becomes an affectionately goofy tribute to 1950s alien invasion cinema
An impressively designed Quebecois sf film where it is it is sad to see so much artistry lavished on something completely nonsensical and utterly woolly-headed in terms of its ideas
A French animated film, SF noir set on a future Mars with detectives fighting against someone who is jailbreaking robots. This deploys a strong and confident use of Cyberpunk tropes
Motion-capture animated version of a popular children’s book. The title suggests a 1950s B movie and the subtext doesn’t bear close examination but the results are engagingly put together
Larry Buchanan was a low-budget director whose cheapness easily equaled Edward D. Wood, Jr. This alien invasion effort features Tommy Kirk come to Earth to procure women for repopulation purposes
This year’s Gravity. A film that has worked out the science to the nth degree (and made it digestible for mass audiences). Ridley Scott rides the drama like a pro and makes one of his most enjoyable films in some time
Ray Bradbury’s book about the human colonisation of Mars is an SF classic for its wistful, nostalgic poetry. This tv mini-series adaptation is killed by a lumbering director who over-explains Bradbury’s imagery in the most literal ways
The Asylum’s response to the box-office success of The Martian. The script has only made minimal effort to research the science but this works somewhat better than their usual fare
A majorly unfunny film about the arrival of aliens in Hawaiian shirts that do bad stand-up comedy routines and tell everybody’s embarrassing secrets
An hilariously bad film in which Christians launch a space mission to flee a Bible-censoring dystopia on Earth
Satiric Argentinean animated film about a Martian stranded on Earth
Brian De Palma makes a surprisingly good hard science film about a rescue mission send to save the first manned Mars expedition and their encountering alien artifacts on the planet
From Arrowverse producer Greg Berlanti, a film about a nerd who stows away on a voyage to Mars
Jaco Van Dormael film that reaches for epic ideas in a story about multiple life pathways and a babble of ideas taken from physics but fails to assemble them in a way that makes much sense
The big screen remake of the 1960s sitcom about a wacky alien visitor. However, this all of the original’s amusements promptly gets buried under frenetic slapstick and cheap CGI gags
Strange film in which a woman astronaut returns from a Mars mission somehow ‘changed’
One of the popular Beach Party comedies of the 1960s. Tommy Kirk turns up as a bumbling Martian to romance Annette Funicello
The Asylum conduct their own version of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ John Carter of Mars adventures three years before the Disney film and, despite one of their impoverished budgets, do an almost halfway reasonable version
Another cheap Syfy Channel end of the world film. So cheap that the catastrophe mostly ends up being talked about rather than depicted, while the rest of the show runs by disaster movie cliches
The third and in the opinion of many the best of Hammer’s Quatermass films in which Nigel Kneale introduces a conceptually wild array of ideas about Martians, race memory, psychic powers and The Devil
Another of Roger Corman’s films reusing footage from Soviet SF films. Director Curtis Harrington gives the tale of a spaceship crew who bring on board an alien vampire woman an eerie otherworldliness
One of a spate of scientifically grounded Mars movies that came out in 2000, featuring a space mission crew stranded on the planet
One of the most bizarre of 1950s Communist Fear films in which humanity begins to receive radio message from God on Mars. The film’s politics are hysterical today.
Unfunny comedy in which Harland Williams plays a bumbling idiot who is recruited to take part in a NASA Mars landing mission. Slapstick inanity results.
Low-budget film designed to copy the success of Destination Moon that ended up being the first film of the 1950s Golden Age. A surprisingly modest effort about a rocketship going off course to land on Mars
Children’s movie where a Martian dictator abducts Santa, this has gained a cult bad movie status
In this rather shabby effort, Santo (in the sixteenth of his 52 films) takes on invaders from Mars whose entire plan seems to hang on the need to have to defeat Santo in the wrestling ring
A story about the harsh conditions suffered by a family of colonists on Mars
Following the huge success of films like Gravity and The Martian that portray space travel with scrupulous realism, this can be considered the Young Adult version. It pays surprising attention to getting its science right; on the other hand, that doesn’t excuse the gaping implausibilities elsewhere
Anime film spun off from a popular Japanese tv series. Despite crude animation, this has a colourful vigour and taps the same space opera vein as Star Wars, which came only three months earlier
For reasons not clear to me, Space Jam is considered a classic. Now we get a sequel that updates it to the present featuring a different NBA star LeBron James
Well produced but otherwise unfunny comedy about a group of bumbling Martian invaders who turn up on Halloween, following a rebroadcast of the Orson Welles War of the Worlds radio show
Cheap 1950s SF film about alien spores brought back from Mars and the hunt for a housewife who inadvertently spreads them
Sequel to Species that this time offers up the male of the species. The film feels put together as an exercise in makeup effects but their physiological absurdity causes the film to topple into silliness
The fifth of the films in the series begun with Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers. The best of the series was the previous entry Starship Troopers: Invasion where they turned it over to anime director Shinji Aramaki. This is a sequel to that, although the same mix fails to work again
In the vein of realistically grounded space movies such as Gravity and The Martian, a solidly effective film concerning the crew of a Mars mission who discover a stowaway aboard
Fine animated film that traces Superman’s early years – Superman: Year One if you like – as we see pieces of the mythos coming together
Takashi Miike delivers a completely madcap film about evolved cockroaches on Mars being fought by astronauts who take doses of mutagenic serum to give them insect-based super-powers
The Three Stooges join a number of other comics of this era in taking on the space race. Well they only briefly venture into orbit and mostly this can be described more as a slapstick haunted house comedy with alien invaders
The first of the films spun off from Gerry Anderson’s cult puppet tv series. Not a completely successful transition but it is, as always with an Anderson production, worth watching for what the Andersons do best – making amazing models and blowing them up
Adaptation of a Philip K. Dick story is killed by being turned into an Arnold Schwarzenegger action vehicle and by director Paul Verhoeven’s burying the reality bending subtleties of the story under bludgeoning ultra-violence
A clone of Donald Trump battles The Illuminati and the Egyptian god Anubis on Mars before travelling to Hell to sort out The Devil. The sheer dementia of the premise alone has one sitting down to watch
An SF film where a remote probe lands to Mars uncovers a mysterious artefact of possible alien origin on the Martian surface. And then things start getting weird.
Disappointingly tatty rendering of the famous comic-book strip as a low-budget Roger Corman production. Vampirella is missing her distinctive costume and Talisa Soto comes nowhere near the comic-book character’s statuesque voluptuousness
A sublimely funny comedy about a group in a habitat who have been selected to roleplay the astronauts on a Mars mission
First and best adaptation of the book, this takes liberties with the H.G. Wells original but smartly updates the book’s underlying anxieties to the Cold War era (in so doing becoming the grandaddy of the 1950s alien invader film) and providing what was top notch effects spectacle for the era
Released just before the Spielberg film, this was an adaptation of the H.G. Wells novel set in the Victorian period that attempts to tell the story as it was written. The film has ambition way beyond the resources at hand but you cannot help but applaud what it tries to do
Sequel to The Asylum mockbuster version. Sequelising H.G. Wells is a daunting prospect and not too surprisingly this throws much of Wells out and creates its own film, which is undercut by a typical Asylum low budget
BBC mini-series that sets out to restore the H.G. Wells novel to the era it was written. This it does, as well as restores many aspects that other films change. At the same time, it also introduces some radical changes that make it the most variant of the adaptations to date
Sequel to the H.G. Wells novel that imagines a fascinating alternate history that might have occurred following the Martian invasion. The clear appeal has been creating a series of scenes showing humanity tackling invading tripods in giant Steampunk manned robots
Not an adaptation of the H.G. Wells novel but a biting satire made in Poland during Soviet occupation about how the pretext of an alien invasion is used to create an authoritarian regime and the way media is used to control the masses. A film more potent today than when it was made
The idea of H.G. Wells’ classic alien invasion novel rewritten with a Young Adult focus makes you cringe but the idea works in its own way
Not one of the Doug McClure Edgar Rice Burroughs adaptations but by the same people and in the same vein. Thanks to a particularly inventive script this is the best of these lost world adventures
Zack Snyder’s adaptation of Alan Moore’s groundbreaking graphic novel is exceedingly faithful to the original. Often called unfilmable, Snyder articulates the material in ways that quite surprise
An animated adaptation of Alan Moore’s classic, genre defining comic-book, this is the most faithful treatment to date
The second part of DC Universe Animated Original Movies’ adaptation of Alan Moore’s classic graphic novel, the most faithful screen adaptation yet
Low-budget film about an expedition to Mars The novelty the film holds is that it attempts to rework The Wizard of Oz in SF terms