Princess of Mars

I personally think it's great that you don't have to go back to the monster movies of the 1950s - the fact that they're still making movies like "Princess of Mars" today is fine with me. Surprisingly, the makers must have read the E.R.Burroughs novel, some elements of the story are recognizable with John Carter's arrival on Mars, being able to jump very high (due to lower gravity), meeting Tars Tarkas and Dejah Thoris, and fighting for the atmosphere station. Everything is put up to date, sometimes well (Carter being in Afghanistan instead of Nevada) sometimes not (the, uh, "technically explained" data transfer to another world, and that Mars not being our red neighbor planet, but a different planet accidentally also called Mars). Fortunately they did not use the Great White Apes, because how silly would that look nowadays with men in costumes? Despite the low budget, a funny flick if you have the sense of humor for trash sf.

I'd read some pretty brutal stuff about this flick and was happy to find an entirely competent and often clever b-movie. Admittedly, I was a huge Edgar Rice Burroughs fan as a kid, but I'm not sure that didn't prime me to dislike the movie.

It wasn't a big budget movie, but I think the money they had was well spent. The special effects were not the center of the film but they didn't detract from the story either. The acting was surprisingly unembarrassing and I personally found the dialog very good. The updating of the story was subtle and funny.

One of the other reviewers said this isn't the film we were waiting for, and I suppose that' right. It is, though, the film we got. All in all, it struck me as a sincere labor of love that did credit to the memory of Burroughs himself, the master of the pulps.

Well. This is by no means the worst movie I've ever seen. I've seen (if you can call it that) one or two Asylum movies before, and some of them are physically painful to watch. 2012: Supernova? Arrrgh!! AVH: Alien vs. Hunter? I nearly gnawed off a limb in an effort to dull the excruciating experience. The Asylum exist to produce unbearably cheap knock-offs of well-known sci-fi and horror movies, and they survive purely by tricking the ignorant into watching their deliberately and deviously diluted versions by mistake. Someone should give these guys a good spanking and ground them for life on a deserted island.

Anyway. You can understand that my expectations for "Princess of Mars" were very low indeed. But I wanted to check it out, just in case they had actually read the original book. And I was surprised: they had. But in a characteristic fit of plagiarism (and, probably, because filming in the desert is cheap) they'd also decided to fuse the concept with Star Wars Episode VI: Return of the Jedi. Even so, I was actually mildly entertained by Princess of Mars (and yes, I can still stand to look at Traci Lords). The acting was hammy and the production values were unimpressive (but at least they were there); it looked like what it was: a thoroughly derivative low-budget C-movie bordering on the farcical. But that can be entertaining, too! As the movie went on I was thinking that, hey, this was in the same league as Bloodrayne and stuff like that, and I might actually end up rating this a 4 out of 10! A good rating for a craptacular excuse for a real movie, appreciating that it might be trash but at least it's funny and entertaining trash.

Unfortunately, the ending was so stupid and pointless that I have to cut that rating in half, and end up with a 2 out of 10 mark. Properly, the movie doesn't really deserve more than 1, but for maintaining a certain watchability almost all the way to the end, and for being funny despite its ROTJ derivation, I retain one more star.

All in all, still a massive disappointment that can in no way be recommended.

1) Find a big-budget movie you can somehow associate your cheap knockoff with. That's easy, they are in development for years, while your ripoff can be made in a few weeks.

2) Try to claim it is linked to some book in the Public Domain. H.G Wells, Arthur Conan Doyle and Edgar Rice Burroughs won't turn into literary Zombies and march on your offices. (Although that would be more interesting that most asylum films, come to think of it.)

3) Get some washed up actors. People that you might have heard of, but aren't getting good roles these days.

4) Cheap Special Effects- Get some of those kookie You-Tube kids to make your monsters...badly edited them into the film.

5) Pad out 10 minutes of plot with an hour of fight scenes and wandering through the desert scenes.

Okay, Really, I'm going to say some nice things about this film. It's actually better than your average Asylum film, but that's like saying it's the least trampy Jerry Springer guest.

They've actually remained somewhat faithful to the Burroughs story, updating it a bit. (Carter is still from Virginia, but now he's an ex-Green Beret instead of an ex-Confederate officer.)

Honestly, the weakest part of the film was Traci Lords. She's never been a good actress, and you can tell she's in her forties every time they did a close up. Honestly, the girl who played the lizard chick was more attractive. Or at least firm in the places a woman should be firm.

Hey, I noticed something else. Ever notice in an asylum film, they have a lot of gunplay, but the muzzles of the weapons are almost always out of frame when they are being fired? I guess someone didn't budget for blank ammunition, but sound effects are always cheap. And Martians have 50 cals and Kalishnikovs, just like we do on earth.

It's just not too clear where the movie makers were trying to go with this adaptation of the Edgar Burroughs story. At first glance, it looks to be a tribute to the style of old drive-in sci-fi features, where an intrepid astronaut pioneers unchartered space. Along the way, our space hero will bravely fight giant creatures, duel bad guys, establish friendship with the Martian locals, romance a blonde alien, bring about peace between warring tribes, overthrow a despot, and so on.

They give us all that old school sci-fi stuff, but there's no cohesion to anything. The "plot" is just a parade of unlinked chapters. The story is modernized, which is a mistake. Yes, everybody knows the Rovers have found nothing up there, but who cares? Keep the naive retro feel of a mysterious and foreboding Mars. That was the fun of the source material. But now, the action doesn't even occur on Mars! The 19th century soldier turned Spaceman Spiff has been redone as a Gulf War Marine, and sports millennial tattoos. The Princess herself is Xena Warrior Princess one moment, and helpless fairy tale princess the next.

Still, those Martian green celery-head guys were lovable (even though you can see skin poking out from beneath the masks). The indigenous bug creatures, and the fights against them, are amusingly cheap, yet done with gusto. Overall, an amateurish film, but has a bit of odd charm to it.