Closet Sci-Fi Geek

The Angry Red Planet (1959)

Watching something like The Angry Red Planet makes me wish I had my own cadre of sarcastic robots ala “Mystery Science Theater 3000″ sitting in the front row. Science fiction doesn’t weather time well quite often. Futuristic films may be the vanguard of their day, but become kitsch later, as the years wear away their glossy sheen. Tech becomes out-of-date, and special effects look quaint and silly by modern sensibilities.

In this case, we’ve got everything that makes for a film fun for all the wrong reasons: Bad special effects, ridiculous creatures, and stupid plot devices. Fortunately, the acting isn’t all that horrible, and there’s enough here to make this interesting enough to sit through the whole thing.

The year is sometime in the future. The first manned rocketship to Mars lands on the mysterious red planet, with four eager scientists ready to go exploring. We’ve got three guys and one flaming redhead of a female, notable for her beauty and a rich, commanding voice typical of actresses from that era.

Only, things aren’t as they seem on Mars. The intrepid crew has a few close calls: A giant man-eating plant and a large spider-like bat creature are just two of the creepy things populating Mars. The suspense builds as the crew gets chased by a giant amoeba that threatens to engulf the entire ship. Will they survive?

The story is told mostly in flashback; as a plot device, this works fine in the context of the film. What doesn’t quite work is the simplistic science and stupid actions by the crew. For example, the woman scientist enrages the giant spider-bat by cutting at its leg. (From afar, it looked like a tree.) One wonders, however, how anyone could not have noticed the rest of the giant monster attached to said leg. It filled up the entire horizon and seemed kind of hard to miss.

The Mars sequences are filmed in a special effect called “Cinemagic,” which basically looks like a red lens was placed over the camera and the film was slightly overexposed. This actually gives the film a unique look and eerie beauty that is interesting to watch even to this day. Live action shots are interspersed with drawn renditions of the Mars surface…these somewhat work, if only because the Cinemagic effect makes everything a little blurry.

The rocketship, of course, is as kitschy as you could possibly imagine. My vote for favorite useless item in the ship has to be the huge sign on the wall that says: “Oxygen Consumption” followed by two options: “Normal” and “Excessive.” There’s no indication of how one might fix “excessive” oxygen consumption, however.

As campy old films go, this is a fun one, if just to see how far we’ve come in the realm of science fiction film-making. Not quite 10 years later, 2001: A Space Odyssey was created. We’ve come a long way, baby.