Blood Red Planet

The breadth & height of the scale of this movie overwhelm me. About a week ago I posted a commentary on the 1926 silent epic MACISTE IN HELL referring to it as "staggering". Then I encountered the Pollonia Bros. BLOOD RED PLANET. Wow ...

It's all about the scale of the thinking behind it. The Pollonia Bros. and colleague John McBride were thinking so big that the musings of Arthur C. Clark & Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A SPACE ODESSEY is lucky it was released thirty-two years before this sweetheart. As a matter of fact, Kubrick had it easy with modelers, a budget, actual actors and major studio backing for his little "Star Trek" ripoff, and all that Arthur C. Clarke had to do was write the damn thing. What's so hard about muscling around a typewriter? The Pollonia brothers on the other hand had to think radical, outside of the box, and quickly. They recruited a half dozen of their friends & colleagues -- including a hot lookin' chick -- bought a bunch of colored lightbulbs, raided old office supply dumps for every keyboard, monitor and hands-free phone headset they could find, got everybody identical black turtlenecks, made off with every cupcake tin in the county, learned enough 3d modeling & texture skinning to animate a couple of space ship fly-bys, spent a couple hours drumming up a script, executed what is easily the most frightening space monster puppet since that horrible little monster Jabba the Hut carried around with him was fried by R2D2, spent literally days working with a VHS camera and an Amiga to shoot & edit their film, and came up winners. This is the best D.I.Y. direct to home video fan movie space epic I've ever seen, and in proportion to the amount of talent & resources at the disposal of the filmmakers dwarfs even LOGANS RUN or BATTLESTAR: GALACTICA (the original series) as being a chilling look at our future, right down to a newscaster wearing a mis-matched, ill-fitting 2nd hand suit. As a species, we are doomed.

Seriously for a minute, though, it is a vast improvement upon such later epics as THE DINOSAUR CHRONICALS or PREYALIEN: ALIEN PREDATORS, which is funny since it was made before either of those masterpieces. Somewhere along the lines the Pollonia's started taking it easy on themselves: This film is executed with a certain conviction that gets you to believe that you really can breathe in a vacuum wearing a dust mask and two biker squirt bottles. And the scene where the alien beast consumes a miniaturized crew member made me immediately think of where I'd seen that before: GODZILLA VS. THE SEA MONSTER, where the giant rampaging monster crab skewers two canoers and eats them on camera. That made me cry when I was a kid.

This made me cry as an adult because here I am wasting my time trying to be some sort of critic or writer or writer/critic and these guys get to have all the fun, actually making a real feature length sci-fi epic with lots of cool colored lights, a hot chick and a talking slide projector named KAL. One of the flight crew even gets to wear his black space baseball cap backwards & glower with his goatee like that clown from Metallica. Is this supposed to be a joke? No. It is an epic statement about humanity, from humanity and for humanity that deserves to be seen by anybody who has the capability to not take any of it too seriously. Look for it on a 2 disc box set called GALAXY OF TERROR in your favorite discount retailer's cutout DVD bins, which is probably where it belongs, but how many of us can say "Yeah, they have a couple box sets of our movies for sale at Best Buy."

4/10: Anyone lacking in a sense of humor might want to try SILENT RUNNING or maybe TRON. But someday an alien civilization on the other side of the galaxy will intercept a transmission of this movie and decide that we actually are not to be messed with. Good work, guys!!

I'd seen the Polonia brothers act in Splatter Farm and was shocked by that movie. I thought maybe that the movies they made would be just as offensive as that one, but not Blood Red Planet. It appears to be a serious attempt at making a space movie.

I can't describe what a failure it is. Household objects are passed off as space gear. Most obvious are upside-down squirt bottles used for oxygen tanks and smoke detector bombs. They show these things up-close. I could go on and on, but I'll just mention that the final creature is a foam hand-puppet and it chews on an action figure meant to be one of the ship's crew. It sounds fun to watch, but then you have to deal with the plot. A computer learns to be human and makes an emotional speech. Horrible.

I thought I've seen low budget before, but this movie is the icing that was scrapped off the cake before the cake was taken back for a refund.

Blood Red Planet spent its entire budget on the purchase of 5 blanks VHS tapes to dump it to, the rest of the movie was done A-Team style, as far as I can tell.

I can hear the A-Team theme song playing now. Mark Polonia is welding together a set made out of discarded car parts. John McBride is picking smoke detectors out of the trash and labelling them "space mines". Hey a weed-whipper mask. This will make a great space suit helmet!

The scene of the creature attack at the end doesn't have to be seen to be disbelieved. I haven't laughed so hard since Feeders 2 and the infamous emotionless kids sequences.

You have to love the Polonias. I mean they can do for 1 dollar what it took John Travolta MILLIONS to do with Battlefield Earth.

If you like bad movies, and love to roll on the floor in disbelief, see this movie.

Seriously though, these guys get credit for making their movies, flying in the face of funding and available actors, they're doing it anyways. Logic and reality be damned! Their spirit is truly to be commended.

Perhaps someday they'll surprise us all and be the next success story.

Perhaps Feeders will fly out of my butt too ;)

Me and a pal have actually spent time discussing which is the worse Polonia Brothers movie, this or BAD MAGIC. For me, this one wins the prize. It's really hard for me to give you a full breakdown as teh movie put me to sleep 3 times and I never once bothers to fully rewind to where I left off. At least the actors and filmmakers never take themselves too seriously, but that begs the question "why put forth the effort".

Silence, grubs. This movie is a testament to the indomitable spirit that resides in every man, woman and child on this planet. One day we too may be called upon to defend ourselves against a hideous alien scourge with nothing but smoke detectors and bad dental work, and I for one shall salute those who triumph over adversity in such a fashion.