The Wizard of Mars

I remember this movie as being shown a lot on the "Mel Jazz Afternoon Movie" show on an independent Minneapolis TV station in the very early 1970s.

When I was 6 years old and seeing this, it was the stuff of nightmares, especially the frozen Martians in the castle who looked like "Wishnik" trolls in tubes. I also recalled the castle itself, and the way the sun shined with 4 points.

Unfortunately, I was able to see this movie again much more recently, and it did not hold up to childhood impressions.

One of the big continuity flaws not mentioned by others is when the astronauts cross the desert. They are walking in a well-trodden path of hundreds of footsteps in the sand from previous takes of the scenes... and this is supposed to be unexplored territory! There is really no attention paid to matters like this. The presence of a hot dog vender on this popular beach would not have made the scene much worse at all.

The characters are annoying and not very well acted. The only thing I will say for this film now is that some of the music is good, and some of the visual elements (the Wishniks in the tubes and the castle) are decent pieces of production design. The parts I remember from childhood held up, but the rest of it, which I did not recall, is pretty bad.

This movie is terrible!! A few astronauts crash on Mars, and wander around for about an hour (with very little dialog). After watching these guys wander around they follow a yellow brick road to a castle full of cheap frozen martians. There they meet The Wizard of Mars, played convincingly by John Carradine's dissembodied head. Then John Carradine starts talking for about 5 hours and helps these astronauts get home with some weird clock-thing. Other than that, I can think of absolutely nothing to say about this movie other than don't watch it.

But, on the other hand, if you've only got 80 minutes to live...watch this movie. It will feel like an eternity.

WIZARD OF MARS is very slow, as some of the preceding comments would indicate, but it is also extremely beautiful, and the slow pacing adds to the hypnotic effect. The film is literally like a half-remembered dream, but it's difficult to decide if this is due to deliberate artistic choice or the demands of the "road show" live performance/film feature combination that this film was originally meant for. One should note that certain themes seen in this film (time loops, nature of time) reoccur in other of Hewitt's films - THE TIME TRAVELLERS most notably. This is *not* an Ed Wood-style "bad film" to be laughed at - either you are prepared to make allowances for it and enter it's half-remembered, dream-like Martian landscape, or you just shouldn't bother to watch it at all. Do not expect convential narrative or action - not for fratboy parties or Mystery Science Theatre-oids.

I bought the video originally because the box said that Lon Chaney and John Carradine were in it. Well, Lon was nowhere to be found and this flick is not part of his filmography. However, John's head was in it, so that's no lie! The box art was also exciting-looking as it proclaimed the flick was titled "Horrors of the Red Planet." Well, its really "Wizard of Mars," but I would have called it "The Insomnia Cure of the Red Planet." "Wizard" resembles a large budget student film of wannabe filmmakers who must have been using this production for practice and who may (or likely did not) go on to better things. An amateurish looking drywall "spaceship," Death Valley-style desertscape, Carlsbad caverns, and what looks like a warehouse set the scene. Our band of high school play dropout explorers land on Mars and discover an ancient civilization replete with aliens housed in tubes (that have mud packs for makeup) and eventually the alien disembodied "Wizard" image of a John Carradine (desperate for work). The Wizard's "city," as depicted in miniature, looks like an aquarium castle, with a sun shining over it as if with a flashlight shot through a bedsheet in a darkened room. I could go on for several paragraphs with descriptions about the almost scene by scene mistakes of logic, science, bad acting/script/staging, etc...ad nauseum. Perhaps thats why I find this film so fascinating...it has so many mistakes, its an adventure to find them. Only the atmospheric photography in a few scenes and the sci-fi-weird music was really of note.

Four astronauts crash-land on the surface of Mars, where they encounter strange lifeforms; travel by land and by raft; and arrive at an ancient city. All while a narrator drones on, and "eerie" sound effects intone.

THE WIZARD OF MARS is a silly sci-fi epic, loosely based on THE WIZARD OF OZ. Indeed, the female astronaut's name is Dorothy, and there's even a "golden road" to follow. John Carradine puts in a cameo as the title character (aka: a histrionic, floating head). His ultra-melodramatic speech seems endless!

If ye be fearless amidst atrocious "acting"; unflinching in the face of brain-drilling "dialogue"; and plot is of no real importance to ye, then enter herein...