Princess of Mars

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.

If this film had only used different character names, I would have rated it higher, because it would have been a dumb, laughable Science Fiction flick, possibly even enjoyable at some "it's raining and there's nothing else to do" level. You get the feeling that the writer had read the first John Carter book a long, long time in the past and remembered the characters' names without remembering what the story was about, or even what a thark was supposed to look like (I'm sure that Burroughs' warrior tharks didn't have tusks that wobbled). This plot was silly; Burroughs' was engrossing. The biggest disappointment was Traci Lords. While it was her body that was ravaged in many films, here, it was her face that looked ravaged - she just looked so OLD. (Fortunately, I never expected her to know how to act, so I wasn't disappointed there.) The big sword fight seemed to be performed by two actors who'd never held a sword in their lives; all the intercutting didn't cancel that out (why couldn't they have used stunt men?). A truly bad film.

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.

Clearly "Princess of Mars" is The Asylum's cash in on the "John Carter" movie that was out in March 2009, as "Princess of Mars" came out in December of the very same year. Is that a trademark of The Asylum, to take something that others made famous and then just sponge and leech of that success?

At any rate, and regarding the motivation behind this movie, then The Asylum actually managed to pull of a fairly decent movie here, compared to some of the other more questionable releases they have spewed out.

The story, if you are familiar with either the "John Carter" movie or the E.R. Burroughs novel, is about John Carter, a man from Earth, who end up on a distant red planet, where he have to save their world from impending doom.

Pretty straight off the copy and paste storyboard here, without anything new or overly interesting to be added to the story. But still, the movie was enjoyable for what it was. A word of warning though; if you have seen the "John Carter" movie that was out earlier in 2009, then chances are that you might want to stay clear of this version. Imagine a weird hybrid of the 1980's "Flash Gordon" movie mixed with Disney's "John Carter" movie, and you have the end result coming out as "Princess of Mars".

One thing that did puzzle me, though, with the technology and resources available to the human-like race on this red planet, why would their princess be clad so scantily like a common... Well, you get my meaning. It just didn't make sense. Or did it? Well, you have Traci Lords in the role as the princess, so of course, why wouldn't the director be having her running around half naked?

The creature effects were adequate to look at, except for those bipedal reptiles that they used for mounts. They were just horrible to look at. Awfully animated CGI and they walked like they all had bad indigestion.

I will say that The Asylum did put out a fairly enjoyable Sci-Fi movie here, but in the wake of Disney's "John Carter", then the movie pales in comparison.

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.