Mars Attacks the World

Mars Attacks the World (1938)

** 1/2 (out of 4)

A large ray from Mars comes crashing through to Earth and messes up the atmosphere causing major storms, which could end up killing everyone. It turns out that Ming the Merciless (Charles Middleton) plans to destroy the Earth so a group of people led by Flash Gordon (Buster Crabbe) head there to do battle.

MARS ATTACKS THE WORLD is the feature length movie, which was taken from the serial FLASH GORDON'S TRIP TO MARS. As luck would have it, Universal managed to release this just a week after the infamous Orson Welles' War of the Worlds prank so this feature version ended up doing pretty good business as people were a lot more interested in the subject.

As for the film itself, I've seen several features that were taken from a serial and more times than not they're awful because they're just so poorly edited and often they don't make sense. That's not the case here as the film actually plays extremely well and especially when you consider how much footage from the serial is thrown out to come up with a 67 minute movie.

This here plays out extremely fast and fun as the majority of the running time is all action. The Ming character would become a cult figure and it's easy to see why since the costume is rather fun and Middleton does a great job with the role. Crabbe also manages to turn in a fun performance as Flash Gordon. The special effects are rather forgettable but that actually adds a bit of charm.

MARS ATTACKS THE WORLD certainly isn't going to be mistaken for THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD still but it's a fun little movie.

This was the first flash gordon movie i saw on video,i later learned that this was a edited version of the second flash gordon movie"trip to mars",in this feature film,flash gordon (Larry(buster) Crabbe), dr zarkov (frank shannon) and dale arden (jean rogers), along with a bumbling reporter named happy hapgood (donald kerr) fly in their rocket ship to mars to stop ming the merciless (charles middleton) who has built a huge death ray called a nitron lamp to suck earths atmosphere and leave the earth a dead world!, throughout this film flash and his friends meet the clay people who help them defeat ming,and the meet the martian witch queen azura(beatrice roberts)!, another great performance by buster crabbe and charles middleton,but the only thing is you miss out on what the serial version has to offer,in this version you only see the forest people once,and you miss a lot of the great thrills the serial version has to offer,my advice is,see the serial version first so you can see what i'm telling you about!

To make "Mars Attacks the World", they edited together selected pieces of the serial "Flash Gordon's Trip to Mars" (which had something like 15 episodes or so), keeping the main story line intact. The result is very fast-paced and sometimes chaotic, but it enables you to see the story all at once. It's an old-fashioned, comic-book sci-fi story, carried mostly by Buster Crabbe's energetic portrayal of Flash Gordon.

While most of the story is quite far-fetched, there were a lot of creative ideas, at least given the era, so that you never know what is going to come next. This edited version moves very quickly, so that you will always want to see the next scene.

These old Flash Gordon stories were very popular in their time. For those who are not big fans of comic-book style science fiction, this version gives us a good chance to see what it was like, without having to watch the full-length serial version.