chapter 12

One thing about JOHN CARPENTER’S GHOSTS OF MARS: it’s definitely John Carpenter’s GHOSTS OF MARS.

It has plenty of elements that could be perfect for one of his movies. It’s kind of a siege movie like ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13, although the simplicity of that type of setup is mired in flashbacks and narration. It’s got a western motif – even though it’s in the future and on Mars there’s a train, and colonists possessed by angry Martian spirits take the place of the Natives defending their land. It’s got a ready-made anti-hero – Ice Cube as the bad-but-not-guilty-of-the-specific-crime-he’s-accused-of prisoner-in-transfer Desolation Williams. It has a pretty good soundtrack where Carpenter melds his style with a bunch of rock n roll dudes with electric guitars and drums, playing Martian tribal rock. It has Ice Cube, Jason Statham, Joanna Cassidy and Pam Grier in the cast! This shit should be great.
In the opening scene a train shows up in the human Martian settlement. It’s supposed to have a prisoner and a bunch of cops on it, instead it only has Lieutenant Ballard (Natasha Henstridge), who is high on space pills. They bring her in to explain what happened to a space magistrate or something, and the movie is her flashback (with flashbacks within it, and sometimes flashbacks within those flashbacks within flashbacks). As far as I can tell this is not making any kind of statement about storytelling or memory or nothin, it’s just… a bunch of flashbacks. Complete with slow, old-timey dissolves and wipes, like when somebody comes out of a dream on a soap opera.

I want to like Natasha Henstridge, and obviously she’s real easy on the eyes, but she’s pretty stiff in what really needed to be a tough, charismatic lead. So it’s not surprising to read that she was cast about a week before filming, recommended by her boyfriend who was already in the movie. She apparently was exhausted from doing too many movies in a row, and at one point collapsed on set. If you look at her IMDb page she’s credited with six movies in 2000 and another two besides this in 2001. Give that lady a vacation.

Originally the character was gonna be played by Courtney Love – I’m not sure how that would’ve gone. Officially she had to drop out because her ankle got run over by a car (you know how that is), but Drew McWeeny reported at the time that the studio forced her out after “the rehearsal and pre-production period [were] wrought with tension as it became clear the casting wasn’t going to work.” It’s anybody’s guess if that refers to unreliability due to drug problems or just being horribly miscast. She had done some good performances in a couple of Milos Forman movies, but it’s hard to picture her wearing leather and running around on Mars with Ice Cube. Or hopping around if it was true about her ankle. Shit, even if she would’ve been worse than Henstridge I kind of wish it happened.

Anyway, it’s too bad Henstridge didn’t get more time to prepare. She does some tough things, like punching a guy and putting him in an armbar when he says “I’ll cut your fuckin titties off.” But she doesn’t sell it like a real action hero. I don’t believe she’s the toughest one on this train. Pam Grier is on there.

John Carpenter in-joke: at one point Pam Grier asks “Who goes there?” Get it, ’cause that’s the title of the story that THE THING was based on. But also it’s just funny to hear somebody say “Who goes there?”

GHOSTS OF MARS is the story of some members of the Mars Police Force (the futuristic equivalent to our own Earth Police Force) who come to pick up a dangerous prisoner, but they find the town where the jail is located nearly deserted, and most of the people left behind have gone crazy, given themselves a bunch of piercings and are roaming around in a big army going CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST on a motherfucker, chopping off heads and putting them on stakes, roaring, etc. So they can tell that something is wrong.

“It was almost like she was… possessed,” Ballard explains in her testimony when describing a particular incident. “Like there was some kind of force inside her.”

No Ballard, it wasn’t almost like she was possessed. She was possessed, not just by “some kind of force inside her” but specifically by the ghost of a dead Martian, transferred via breathing the red dust of Mars. You know this for sure, because you personally breathed in the dust and became possessed, even saw Martian history flash through your brain. You should say “She was possessed by Martian ghosts, and here’s how I know this,” instead it’s this “It was almost like she was… possessed” shit.

She wants it to be an entertaining story I guess. That’s also why she includes parts where she gets high and where she almost gets laid. Most people would skip over that stuff in their sworn testimony.

Ice Cube’s prisoner character is called “Desolation” Williams, which in my opinion is in the lower percentile of good nicknames, although better than some rapper names including Flo Rida, Chamillionaire and Rappin 4-Tay. It would’ve been a routine prison transfer, except “there’s nothing routine about this prisoner.” He gets a decent introduction, with Cube sitting dramatically shadowed in his cell, refusing to talk. But like all the characters in the movie he doesn’t get anything non-cliche to do or say ever. I guess he gets to talk a little more like Ice Cube than Snake Plissken does. He says “Drop the weapon before I cut this dyke bitch head off!” (The Martians do it instead. Off screen.)

One weird aspect is Ballard’s pill addiction. It ends up saving her from getting her body taken over by Martians, so it’s one of the healthier addictions you could have. At one point Desolation says “Look at you. You look high right now,” and it’s funny because she doesn’t look high at all. I figure Carpenter must’ve wrote that in there because he assumed Courtney Love would look high the whole time. But it’s weird that he left it in.

Man, the dialogue that’s supposed to set up a John Woo type relationship between cop and criminal is so fuckin lazy:

BALLARD: See, that’s where you’re wrong. I’m a cop, not a crook.

DESOLATION WILLIAMS: There’s a thin line between a cop and a crook these days. You think it’s a big difference between you and me? You just got The Woman behind your bullshit.

Oh, by the way, he says “The Woman” ’cause the Martian colonists are a matriarchy. That’s one unique touch. They got assigned a rookie named Jericho, and even though it’s Jason Statham they’re disappointed, saying “I was hoping we’d get a good solid woman we could count on.” Kind of like how Dirty Harry would act when he finds out his new partner is a woman.

One scene that threw me in both 2001 and 2011 is the one where Jericho tells her he wants to show her something, brings her into a room and explains that there’s only one door and no windows, so they could “dance.” Even in a matriarchy dudes are always hitting on chicks, I guess. The two characters have been completely hostile toward each other so she justifiably gets pissed off, but then suddenly says “Okay” and starts to go for it.

It’s a completely what-the-fuck? moment, but after thinking about it some I decided it must’ve been intended as a play on this matriarchal society. Most male action heroes wouldn’t go for an out-of-the-blue blowjob offer from some ho, unless it was a scene where they get seduced as part of a trap and they fall for it. But if he did do it in a non-trap situation it probly wouldn’t seem as weird as it does here, it would show that he’s awesome because the ladies throw themselves at him. I guess James Bond or Shaft would go for it. Or Machete. Maybe if Henstridge’s character had that kind of charisma it would come across better. I thought this scene made her seem weak, but now I realize it’s supposed to make her a “pimp.”

But it took me a while to decode that because the gender roles and their reversal don’t seem to really have any meaning in here, it’s just kind of a novel idea that doesn’t get fleshed out. Women are in charge, but it doesn’t really mean anything. Desolation can still get Ballard’s attention by grunting “Hey lady!,” so I don’t think society has changed that drastically.

The colonization theme doesn’t amount to much either. Obviously there’s a parallel here to what my European ancestors did to the Natives. Now the Earthlings are building trains and shit on holy Martian lands, and they’re paying for it. But you don’t get any sense of “oh shit, we reap what we sow” or anything like that. I think the Martians were already wiped out before the humans got there. And if not they’re still hard to sympathize with because they’re cruel, self-mutilating, Pam-Grier-decapitating beasts. They seem like they deserve to be colonized. They deserve to be turned into ghosts of ghosts of Mars.

By the way, although the Martians are represented by humans with crazy piercings and face paint those are only their avatars. There’s one part where you see a flash of a corny big-eyed alien puppet guy so you know what they used to look like in pre-ghost form. I forgot about that.

Way too many aspects of this seem half-assed. Maybe if the performances were better it could sell the dialogue better. Maybe if the dialogue was better it could sell the world better – the uniforms they wear, the goggles that help them breathe the Mars atmosphere, the fucking Martian Police Force. Maybe if the world was better it would sell the phony looking soundstage Martian ghost town. But no, it didn’t happen.

This movie bums me out. In the summer of 2001, especially for a guy like me who liked VAMPIRES, John Carpenter was still a great, working director. Then he made this.

FLASH FORWARD TEN YEARS: It took Carpenter this long to make another movie, and it’s THE WARD, which came out on video last week. It’s about a girl who’s found burning down a house, doesn’t remember how she got there, and they put her in an asylum. She befriends some other girls there, they think some force is trying to kill them so they start hatching an escape plan. I guess nobody told them they could imagine they were in a brothel where they do sexy dances and imagine that they’re in WWI flying around in a robot blowing the shit out of steam-powered re-animated soldier corpses. Isn’t that the best way to deal with asylum life? Maybe next time.

I wanted to do a full-on review for THE WARD but to be honest the movie’s kind of left my head already so I don’t have much to say about it. So I’ll say that it’s a well made, completely solid movie, way more competent, slick and stylish than GHOSTS OF MARS. But like I said, forgettable. The thing is that after GHOSTS OF MARS and all this time it’s a relief that it doesn’t suck. It’s like if you had a cat that disappeared into the woods one night and you didn’t see it for months and figured it got killed by a raccoon or something. And then it shows up and holy shit, it’s still alive. If it’s just walking around normal you’ll be proud of it because you never thought you’d see it again. Okay, the cat seems a little off, not quite what it used to be, but generally healthy. That’s THE WARD. It can walk. Give it a treat.

I mean it’s actually decent, it’s pretty good. But if I saw it without any idea of what it was I would never guess it was made by John Carpenter. It doesn’t feel like something that comes from his brain. Maybe it’s partly because he decided he’s too old to do the scores anymore, so it doesn’t sound like one of his movies. A crucial element of the JC style is completely missing. They call it JOHN CARPENTER’S THE WARD because otherwise you wouldn’t know it was his.

So what’s better, a pure but shitty John Carpenter movie like GHOSTS OF MARS, or a solid but anonymous one like THE WARD? Flip a coin, I guess. Or pick THE WARD, I don’t care. Either way GHOSTS OF MARS is not a happy way to wind down the summer of ‘01.

* * *

legacy: John Carpenter retired from the big screen for 10 years after this. Supporting player Jason Statham went on to become one of the biggest action stars of the current era.

datedness: the whole look and tone of the movie already seemed hokey in 2001.

would they make a movie like this today: of course not

* * *

I seem to remember back in 2001 being dumbfounded by a rave review in some overseas auteurist magazine like Cahiers du Cinema or something, but I couldn’t find it. The best I could do was this open-minded piece calling it “an interesting failure.”

Here’s my original review, written when I didn’t know who Jason Statham was, but I still suggested Natasha Henstridge’s character should’ve gone at him with a strap-on.

THE VINDICATOR is the story of Carl Lehman (David McIlwraith, who played Andrew Card in the TV movie DC 9/11), genius scientist and soon-to-be-father who goes in to confront the famed rich guy Alex Whyte (Richard Cox, who played Alan Dershowitz in the TV movie AMERICAN TRAGEDY) who cut off his funding just when he knew he was on the verge of a huge fucking scientific breakthrough. What could go wrong? He’ll probly be very persuasive and the two will work out a compromise to continue the research, support each other and work together for the betterment of mankind. I’m sure everything’ll be fine.

Oh, sorry guys, now that I think about it I already watched this movie and I remember that they did not work it out. Instead Carl gets set up, left alone in the lab where he has to try to stop a meltdown and gets stuck in a chamber and fried to shit like that blue guy in WATCHMEN. Everybody thinks he’s dead but his colleagues secretly take what’s left of his shriveled flesh and put it inside a powerful robot body they built to send to Mars. Also it’s programmed to go ape shit and kill anything that comes near it. Which would be handy for the experiments it would be doing on Mars.

I’m no scientist but if it had been me I think I would’ve left out the programming that causes it to be extremely dangerous, just use it as a miraculous life-saving device and instead of being secret about it go show it off and make lots of money off it. But obviously these guys aren’t in it for fame and power, they’re just in it for pure science, so instead they secretly make a dangerous killing machine destined to go on the loose and massacre a whole bunch of innocent people and then come back and kill them. Or, you know, vindicate them. And when it gets loose they report it as “a nutcase in a space suit.”

At first The Vindicator just looks like a regular dude in a gold lamé biohazard suit like you or I, but then he gets burned up and it reveals his robot parts beneath, with his eyes showing as his only human part. He’s basically still Carl, a fairly nice guy, but because of the defense mechanism they gave him he has to be careful not to let anybody get close to him. If somebody accidentally bumped him in a hallway for example he would probly tear their arms off, he can’t help it. The punks who attack him in an alley learn that the hard way. Even the one who didn’t do anything gets his motorcycle helmet and skull popped.

I don’t really understand the motives of these ’80s movie punks who go around terrorizing innocent people, but it’s especially weird to see them committing a hate crime on a burnt-up cyborg. It doesn’t even seem like they’re surprised to find a burnt-up cyborg and want to beat it up. They’ve seen it all, and they’re not impressed. It seems like they must’ve been picked on by burnt-up cyborgs when they were growing up and now they’ll take that out on any burnt-up cyborg they happen to run into in an alley. Unfortunately for them Carl is no ordinary burnt-up cyborg. He’s The Vindicator.

Carl wanders around and encounters people like the punks and the little kid playing space in the junkyard. He does the DARKMAN thing of hooking up with his girl again, but since this is before DARKMAN Peyton Westlake hadn’t yet invented the liquid skin yet and Carl has to talk to her from a distance. Luckily she’s a keyboard player and he figures out that he can hide in the bushes and broadcast his robo-voice to her amplifiers.

The concept of a destroyed man coming back as a cyborg and still having emotional attachments to people who think he’s dead also reminds me of ROBOCOP, but since this was before ROBOCOP they didn’t know to make it funny and cool. They just did it regular.

The bad guy, Whyte, hires a mercenary to take Carl out – her name is Hunter and she’s played by Pam Grier. She’s introduced practicing with a sword master, so she’s got a samurai type background but quickly turns paramilitary, leading a platoon of soldiers through the sewers trying to shoot Carl with special acid guns. Like anybody in their right mind I love Pam Grier unconditionally, but I also gotta admit that with the type of dialogue we’re dealing with here and the number of times she has to call Carl “Spaceman” she’s not necessarily 110% convincing as a tough-as-nails super soldier. But she does have one real badass moment when she realizes she’s been lied to so she drives straight to Whyte’s building, hops out of the vehicle, storms in past security and into his office still holding the gun to ask him what the hell is going on.

That’s it, though. Just that.

There’s another villain, Carl’s best friend Burt (Maury Chaykin, who played Robert Beattie in the TV movie THE HUNT FOR THE BTK KILLER), who he asks to look after his wife if anything ever happens to him, but when he says that I’m pretty sure he doesn’t mean “have me killed, live with my wife and try to rape her when she figures out what you’re up to.” Burt is actually kind of creepy because he seems to be the guy stuck in the fat best friend role who really wants to be the leading man and is willing to kill in a pathetic attempt to fulfill that fantasy.

Any hopes that the brilliant directorialism of 1982 Jean-Claude Lord would still be visible here go sadly unfulfilled. 1986 Jean-Claude Lord directs a cheesy movie with laughable dialogue and acting and bland camerawork. Nothing is handled skillfully enough to make you take the silly concept seriously. In terms of the Canadian genre cinema it’s more like a SCANNERS sequel than a VISITING HOURS.

Wait a minute, why the fuck is it called THE VINDICATOR? Who is he supposed to be vindicating? Does it mean by getting revenge he proves Whyte’s point that he can build a vengeful robot? I don’t really get why he’s The Vindicator. And it’s important to point out that at no point in THE VINDICATOR do they call The Vindicator “The Vindicator.” It should probly just be called CARL.

Johnny Pate is a Chicago-born bassist and arranger. He says his first and biggest love is jazz, but to me he’s a legend because of his comparatively brief detour into R&B in the late ’60s and early ’70s. He worked with many Chicago labels of that era but most notably alongside the one and only Curtis Mayfield – Pate was an arranger for the Impressions and for Mayfield’s label, Curtom.

I’m not as detail-oriented about music as I am about movies, so I probaly wouldn’t know about Johnny Pate except that I happened to pick up his 1970 funk instrumentals album “Outrageous” when it was reissued last year by Dusty Groove. Then I found out he scored SHAFT IN AFRICA so I finally got around to watching those sequels and loved them. At least half of my love for blaxploitation movies comes from the music, and of course SUPERFLY and SHAFT are the two most legendary blaxploitation soundtracks. Here’s a guy who kind of connects them together – he arranged Superfly for Mayfield, he scored the third SHAFT movie, and even played with the original Isaac Hayes SHAFT themes when he scored the short-lived (and not on DVD) SHAFT tv series.

But SHAFT IN AFRICA is a masterwork. Okay, it’s not as deep as SUPERFLY and maybe the original SHAFT score has a wider breadth of styles on it, and also it’s hard to really compare anything to SHAFT because it’s so inescapable in pop culture it’s hard to be objective about it. But all I know is SHAFT IN AFRICA has two of the most preposterously funky themes of all time. They are the type of theme songs every badass character wishes they had, but never will. That is the sound I always wanted to hear and I figure nobody, including Pate, ever topped them. But just to be sure I decided to watch and review some of the other movies Johnny Pate scored.

BROTHER ON THE RUN (1973)

The VHS tape I found was called MAN ON THE RUN, but the original and better title is BROTHER ON THE RUN. They got MAN on the title screen but Pate’s theme song (which plays in several different variations throughout the movie) repeatedly calls him “brother on the run.” And brother is simply more accurate because the guy who’s on the run is more like a kid than a man on the run, and he has a sister in the movie so maybe the title is from her point of view. He’s her little brother on the run.

(It could be worse though. IMDB claims it was also released on video as BLACK FORCE 2, which would make it the sequel to an unrelated movie that came out two years later.)

The reason the brother is on the run is he and a white dude were shoplifting radios from a store when the store owner pulled a gun on them, there was a scuffle and the owner got shot and killed. These kids are actually part of a crime ring run by a white hippie preacher named Brother John, and they kind of got set up by a corrupt individual trying to cover his involvement in the whole deal.

Anyway, he runs to his sister’s house, then the cops show up there so he runs some more, and that is why he is on the run.

But the actual hero of the movie is not on the run, he’s Professor Boots Turner played by Terry Carter of FOXY BROWN and BATTLESTAR GALACTICA (original recipe). We see in the opening scene that he’s a popular and somewhat lenient professor of English literature, and later he makes a reference to Fagin from Oliver Twist, and also he wears a very professorial suit and tie for the whole movie, but otherwise he’s basically Shaft. He knows how to break locks, use a gun, lose a tail, beat up a dude in a junkyard and trick the cops. He spends the movie trying to find the brother on the run because he’s worried if the racist cops find him first they’ll kill him.

He’s not a private eye like Shaft, so obviously he can’t be hired onto the case. He just found out he’s neighbors with an old hooker friend who is the brother’s sister. So he happens to be catching up on old times when the kid shows up with his white friend dying of a bullet wound. I really have no idea why they made him a teacher, that’s kind of weird. It doesn’t really have anything to do with the story. But I like it. He must be one of the all time toughest movie educators, up there with Indiana Jones, Tom Berenger’s THE SUBSTITUTE and Seagal’s professor of Chinese archaeology character from OUT FOR A KILL.

The filmatism is pretty crude and the story is pretty ridiculous. Boots not only beds the sister but also some white lady in Brentwood who he just meets because the kid was hiding in her backyard. But I sort of enjoyed the story which somehow was more involving than many better-made blaxploitation pictures. There are some pretty tense foot chase scenes with the kid climbing fences, hiding around corners, trying to stay quiet when cops are nearby. We can all relate to that. And he knows he’s in trouble walking through a rich white neighborhhood with his afro. Lucky for him nobody seems to lock the doors on their cars, or even their trunks. He hides in the trunk of a Mercedes at one point, a good way to catch a ride.

Musically it’s no SHAFT IN AFRICA but it’s a good one. The vocal theme song is very catchy and then there’s a bunch of funky chase music with intense drums and percussion and lots of organ solos. Also some more laidback jazzy sexy kind of tunes for the sex scenes. Not a great movie but a worthwhile one, especially for the Johnny Pate completist like you or I.

BUCKTOWN (1975)

This one’s alot like a western. Legendary badass (Fred Williamson) comes into small town by train, discovers the people are being oppressed by corrupt law officials, calls in a team of gunmen, they take justice into their own hands and execute all the cops, but then they decide to pin on the badges and take over the town themselves, so the original badass has to take them out. It’s a little different from other westerns though though because there are no cowboy hats or horses, and toward the end he drives a tank over a car and it blows up. That doesn’t happen in most of the Howard Hawks or John Ford movies.

Bucktown is kind of like South Africa during apartheid – it looks like it’s a primarily black population, but the white redneck cops control everything and abuse everybody. When Williamson steps off the train (in town for his brother’s funeral) the first thing he sees is a white cop beating up a black dude. I’m sure that’s on their postcards and souvenir t-shirts too. It might even be on the official town seal that they put on the letterhead and the checks and everything.

When Williamson calls his old friend for help he tells him to bring muscle, so he brings three dudes with him. One of them happens to be played by pre-ROCKY Carl Weathers. His character is named Hambone. Williamson and his buddies are all very cool and cocky. I like the scene where they notice a guy tailing them so they walk over and ask him to join them. These are exactly the right dudes to make some white bigots feel inadequate.

I was a little surprised that their plan just involved going around and executing all the cops, seemed too easy and straightforward. But of course when his out of town friends take over is when the story really begins. At first their friendship allows for a truce, but one of the other guys (not Hambone) gets jealous and has to fuck everything up. The message is that power corrupts, racism not necessary.

This is an above average blaxploitation movie, but I do have to deduct points for Pam Grier’s role. She had already been Coffy and Foxy Brown so it’s not very cool to give her this character where she just whines and gets upset about shit. She’s the standard woman-who-is-hostile-to-the-hero-but-then-falls-in-love-with-him-and-keeps-hysterically-shouting-about-the-dangers-afoot. When she gets attacked she just screams. It’s kind of like in SUNSHINE, when Michelle Yeoh gets attacked and doesn’t know how to fight it’s hard to accept. But this is worse because it’s a movie where a tough Pam Grier character would not necessarily be out of place.

The theme song reminded me a little bit of the DOLEMITE soundtrack but slicker with a little bit of a Fred Wesley and the Horny Horns flavor. There’s also a real funky song with vocals at the end, that one has a little bit of a P-Funkesque sound too.

DR. BLACK AND MR. HYDE (1976)

I was really surprised to find out that this fairly crappy attempt to cash-in on BLACULA was actually made by the same director. I don’t know how many of you hold BLACULA in the same high regard that I do, but I think it does a great job of combining the elements of its two genres (classic Hammer style horror and blaxploitation) and somehow coming off less ridiculous than that sounds on paper. I mean you still get to laugh at (and with) it a little, but I think it actually works as a horror movie with Afrocentric themes, and of course William Marshall is great in it.

To be fair, Bernie Casey is pretty good too as Dr. Henry Pride (hmm, his name is not Dr. Black, that’s weird). The standard horror movie part is that he’s a highly respected doctor working on cutting edge experiments that obsess him because of his mother’s death of liver disease. The new twist is that he’s also a progressive humanitarian type of doctor who works out of a free clinic in Watts that shares a building with a thrift shop. The two female leads are his partner at the clinic played by Rosalind Cash (Charlton Heston’s soul sister girlfriend in OMEGA MAN) and his prostitute patient played by Marie O’Henry (THREE THE HARD WAY). If you enjoy a good looking woman with an afro this is a pretty good movie to check out.

Dr. Pride’s serum causes a lab rat to turn white and kill all the other rats in his cage, and for some reason the doctor decides this would be a good time to secretly inject it into himself. As far as I could tell this makes no sense on any level since not only is the serum clearly not ready for human testing, but he doesn’t even have the liver disease it’s supposed to cure. The tagline of the movie is “A Monster He Can’t Control Has Taken Over His Very Soul!” and that is a double meaning there because the gimmick is that the Mr. Hyde he turns into supposed to be white. The makeup by Stan Winston (who had already made up Casey in GARGOYLES) is a pretty good monster/zombie type face with pale skin and white on the edge of his afro. Kind of a cool monster but for some reason everybody mistakes it for a white man.

This does make the movie sort of enjoyable, because of course you get some good laughs out of people referring to a monstrous Bernie Casey as a white dude. And I guess since the vast majority of serial killers are white it has some kind of logic to it that he would have to turn white in order to go on a hooker-murdering spree. But I’m not sure what the meaning of it is supposed to be. I like Mamuwalde in BLACULA because he was a dignified African leader given this curse by European slavedriver Dracula. He’s a monster and a villain but you also like him because he is bringing this Afrocentric world view to the American ghettos of the ’70s, transcending the stereotypes of the genre and trying to scare some sense into the other characters who fit into the stereotype more. Dr. Pride though, honestly I don’t know what the hell he’s trying to do, and that’s the bigger problem. In the middle section of the movie the storytelling really gets sloppy. To me anyway it is not clear what the rules or motives are. Is he continuing to take the serum for some reason, or does he just keep switching? Is there a reason why he’s killing people, or why he is singling out prostitutes? He doesn’t seem to be doing his experiments on them or anything. And for a while it’s unclear if he knows that he’s turning into a monster or that he’s killing people. And it seems to be inconsistent. In at least one monster scene he’s clearly conscious and in control of his faculties, other times he seems to not be.

Also, I gotta say, the title is really stretching it. Just because BLACULA worked out doesn’t mean you can just replace one word or syllable in any famous horror title with “BLACK” and be proud of yourself. A NIGHTMARE ON BLACK STREET, POLTERBLACK, THE BLAXORCIST, BLACKFERATU, FRIDAY THE BLACKTEENTH? Oh well, I guess if the best alternative I can come up with is JACKSON AND HYDE I got no right to criticize.

Musically it’s fine but not one of the more impressive Johnny Pate scores. Mostly he does standard ’70s cues, not songs but little tension-building low notes and percussion and shit. But there are several parts where it turns into your classic ’70s wah wah chase music. My favorite parts are the ballad at the end and the nice soul jazz tune that’s actually really inappropriate for a montage leading up to people finding a dead hooker.

This is kind of a funny one, but not a great one. Which nobody could’ve ever predicted from a movie called DR. BLACK AND MR. HYDE. Life is just crazy that way I guess.

[ratings]

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The correct answer is c.

This new one follows many of the great John Carpenter stylistic motifs and thematic type themes. For example, if you ever read an interview or listened to his dvd commentary tracks, you know that practically every movie he ever did he claims is “really a western.” So he always has some stranger walking into town, or has some prisoner being transferred from a jail or a new sherriff in town or what not. In Assault On Precinct 13 he has the gangsters doing blood rituals like evil movie indians in a John Wayne picture. In They Live Roddy Piper strolls into town, walking down the middle of the street even though it’s LA. In Escape From LA he does the old jumping from horse to horse routine, except with motorcycles. Vampires takes place in a sunny Mexican ghost town even though it’s about fuckin vampires. Even Big Trouble In Little China and if I remember right the Elvis TV movie started as western scripts but were re-written to modern settings.

Ghosts of Mars takes this updated western routine to new heights by doing a science fiction movie on Mars that has 1. a train! 2. A prisoner being transferred from a jail by the sherriff, and on a train 3. A ghost town 4. primitive martian ghosts who act like the movie indians of John Wayne movies and/or the gangsters in Assault On Precinct 13, but with piercings.

And that’s what you have to admire about this picture is that nobody else but John Carpenter would ever do it. Who in fuck wants to do a train movie on mars anyway. And is it martians or is it ghosts, make up your mind they would say. But not John Carpenter. He knows that if there’s ghosts, there’s ghosts on mars too. Fucking colonists, get out of their way. It’s like if you made a cowboy movie with an indian burial ground, only on mars.

And I mean this starts out promising, with a classic john carpenter electrical type keyboard and guitars score, creating that unique john carpenter mood.

Unfortunately, this has gotta be Mr. Carpenter’s worst movie. And as I said earlier, I KNOW the answer is C. John Carpenter didn’t lose it, otherwise how do you explain Escape From LA and Mr. John Carpenter’s Vampires, two very special testoterone filled b-pictures. So this is a surprise and disappointment to old Vern.

One problem you got here is the structure. Mr. Carpenter is best when he’s telling a simple story, building a mood. He tends to lose it as the story gets crazier – like in Prince of Darkness and In the Mouth of Madness. (One exception is The Thing which keeps its powerful sense of isolation and what not even as the monster starts sprouting dogs and human faces.) But he at least builds that primitive rhythm for a while before he gets too complicated on you. This one doesn’t really give him the chance because every time you start to get involved it goes back to the narrator, Natasha Henstridge, sitting in a court room telling the story.

And I’m afraid Ms. Henstridge does not have the acting chops to be a new Kurt Russell or Roddy Piper. The poor gal looks good but she sounds like she’s reading off a card. You can’t sound tough if you sound like you don’t know what the words you’re saying mean. And the character loses all credibility when, after being sexually harassed by one of her men for the whole movie, she gives into him. I mean if she put on a strap-on and had her way with him or one of those type of things, that would be fine. Or even go for the cunnilingus, and then roll over and go to sleep when he’s done. I don’t care, just show that she’s in command here. But no. This guy uses that old sci-fi/horror pickup line about we’re all gonna die so “Let’s dance” and she says, “Okay” and kisses him.

They got Pam Grier in here too, but next thing you know she’s decapitated and what’s worse, you don’t even see her GET decapitated. Is that the type of respect you show Coffy? Hell no.

And then there’s Mr. Ice Cube who plays the Snake Plissken character. Only his name is even worse – Desolation Williams.

I mean I guess that says it all, doesn’t it? Mr. Carpenter, you fucking knew that name didn’t work when you first typed it. You decided to let it go though. You can’t just call somebody Isolation Armstrong or Hopelessness Pearlman and expect it to sound right, and you know it. I liked Ice Cube in the Friday pictures as well as The Three Kings, but the poor bastard has nothing to work with here. Roddy Piper and Snake Plissken get funny one-liners to say, and that’s why they are popular characters. I guess James Woods in Vampires improvised alot of his dialogue, so maybe you’ve lost it in that department. But you can’t just have poor Desolation doing this garbage about, “You would make a good criminal if you wanted to,” “Yeah, you’d make a good cop.”

WHAT IN FUCK’S NAME? Is this Nash Bridges? No, this is John Carpenter’s Ghosts of Mars, a movie in which the fans of Mr. John Carpenter hope to be entertained and delighted. We don’t need these generic words coming out of their mouth, even if they’re on mars fighting ghosts. It makes it feel like your typical on mars fighting ghosts movie.

And just one complaint about the computery effects now days. It has gotten to the point where even the director of landmark effects pictures like The Thing is using a fucking computer to show sand blowing in the wind.

Jack, you should’ve just used sand. It would look more real if it was sand.

I’m sorry to tell you, my friends, that this picture is pretty much garbage. There are some touches here and there to enjoy. For example Desolation Williams wears camoflage pants, only they’re red. Because it’s on mars! Green camoflage doesn’t work on mars, see. It has to be red. I liked that.

But this does not offer the bang for your buck that a Vampires or a Halloween does. Mr. Carpenter will need to make a comeback after this and please don’t make it be Starman 2 or Return of the Invisible Man Diaries.

[ratings]