Aterrador planeta rojo

First off, I'd like to say that the user comments alone left me with tears in my eyes from laughing. One comment that bad SF movies become good comedies is right on the mark. MST3000 made it's living off that.

If you look at THE ANGRY RED PLANET as the fever dream of a 10 year old comic book reader from 1959, you'll have the handle on this sucker. All the elements are there: the pseudoscience, occasionally logical, more often hilariously infantile. The adolescent boy attitude toward sex, with the "gigolo" captain (good call on that one, guys!) making eyes at the buxom "scientist" with hair so red it's a wonder it doesn't set off the fire alarms. The ridiculous conception of Mars as a planet so alien that everything glows red, yet one alien monster has a mouse face, and the blob alien has an eye that rotates like a kid's toy. The comic relief, an overweight astronaut (!) who sounds like he never finished the 8th grade in Brooklyn and has a psychotic fixation on his ray gun. And of course, the mere fact that alien = dangerously evil. If these people had met E.T., they would have roasted him in two seconds flat! "OW" indeed!

Don't get me wrong. I rated this movie low. Still, it's never boring (except when the scientist tries to explain everything - only to make it all sound more and more ridiculous), and you have to admit, in your little kid core, it makes you jump a few times.

Okay, then don't admit it. I guess you were never 10.

This movie is funny and painful at the same time. The "Cinemagic" almost gave me a seizure. Despite what they imply, "Cinemagic" is not some innovative technical procedure. It was "developed" as the result of an accident, and they used it because it disguised the fact that their "monsters" were so stupid-looking. I also don't think it's a coincidence that the writer is Sid "Pink".

This movie is good for a laugh, if you are really looking for a movie made in 9 days on 200,000 dollars. It is entertaining; at least I can say that about it. The bat/rat/spider is the highlight.

(edit 12/2021) I wrote this first review 20 years ago, and forgot about it until I saw the movie again, today! Well, I have to update my rating, because it's not really as bad as I thought back then. It still has entertainment value, which is better than plenty of movies I've seen.

I saw this movie in the theater when I was 5 years old and it stayed in my memory all these years. By today's standards it comes up short, but I've seen movies with hundreds of times the budget that were a lot worse. Sure the acting is bad, but anything John Wayne did before 1939 could not be called good acting either. This movie does have some positives working for it. The female among the 4 astronauts is a biologist/zoologist and is not just window-dressing. The martian monsters and landscape/city are imaginative. They had some kind of 1g drive that allowed their rather capacious spacecraft to not need zero gravity effects, although they could have showed the turnover at the halfway point. All in all this is not the stinker some other viewers have labeled it. My score 6/10.

One of only two survivors from a Martian expedition is so traumatized she (Naura Hayden) does not remember the circumstances of the trip.

The film stars Gerald Mohr and is directed by American International Pictures regular Ib Melchior. Melchior was only given 10 days and a budget of $200,000 to make the film. All things considered, he did alright.

The New York Times wrote, "The Angry Red Planet solemnly warns its audiences not to go to Mars. Stubborn patrons who ignore the advice will discover that the planet looks like a cardboard illustration from Flash Gordon and is inhabited by carnivorous plants, a giant amoeba and a species resembling a three-eyed green ant." Well said.

Great film? No. Fun film? Yes.

"The Angry Red Planet" will be a treat for anyone who admires sci-fi flicks from the '50s and early '60s. Basically, a group of astronauts travels to Mars looking for life. They find an over-sized being which appears to be a cross between a rat and a spider. And the Munchkin mayor from "The Wizard of Oz".

I guess that there's nothing particularly unique about this movie; that era yielded many movies about people finding things in outer space. But like I said, if you have a special affinity for old-fashioned B-movies, then this is the movie for you. Watching the DVD with Spanish subtitles makes it even more interesting.