Ghosts of Mars Review - 24 August 2001

Carpenter quickly cuts off what's good about Ghosts

After Pam Grier loses her head in a promising opening scene of butchy banter, Ghosts of Mars just gets worse

GHOSTS OF MARS

James "Desolation" Williams (Ice Cube, left) and Jericho 

(Jason Statham) battle evil Martian ghosts.

Starring Natasha Henstridge, Ice Cube, Jason Statham, Pam Grier, Clea Duvall and Joanna Cassidy.
18A. 98 min.

By KATHERINE MONK

  At one point in John Carpenter's latest schlock attack, Ghosts of Mars, the butt-kicking cop played by Natasha Henstridge makes it to safety after a 20-minute battle sequence with blood-thirsty assailants that nearly leaves her headless.

  She has a chance at making it back home in one piece, but instead of hopping on the next ship back to Earth, she tells the remnants of her crew that they have to go back to the battle zone. "We have to," she says in all earnestness. "This is about dominion."

  In other words, this burnt-orange waste dump of a planet teeming with severed heads and monsters pulled from the park­ing lot of a Marilyn Manson con­cert is a place nice enough to call home.

  Personally, I can think of a lot of things more appealing than living in a concrete bunker on the red, red sands of home — where psychotic bludgeoners and body-pierced ghouls roam.

  Then again, this movie is not aimed at me. I have no idea just who Carpenter was trying to reach with this dreary mess of cartoon violence, lame lines and cosmetics abuse, except perhaps the handful of genuine psy­chotics who feel they, too, have been possessed by Martians — but there's little doubt that even the most hardcore Carpenter fan will find Ghosts of Mars a com­plete disappointment.

  The film had promise. Opening with a scene of butchy banter between team leader Braddock (Pam Grier) and Lieutenant Melanie Ballard (Henstridge), I thought I was about to experi­ence another sci-fi kitsch fest in the spirit of Paul Verhoeven's satirical Starship Troopers. No sooner do we arrive at our desti­nation of a small Martian mining colony, however, than we lose Grier, our tough-talking team leader.

  Poof. Gone. Decapitated just like that.

  Things just get worse from there. In one pathetic sequence, we go from Henstridge telling her macho sergeant that "I might sleep with you if you were the last man on Earth ... and we aren't even on Earth," to necking with him in a storage room five min­utes later.

  If that weren't had enough, the only two people who do have any chemistry -Henstridge and Ice Cube, who plays a dangerous criminal named Desolation Williams (aieee! scary!) — save each others' lives several times over, but don't so much as kiss.

  No logic. No motivation. Bad special effects and little more than a thread of a script, Ghosts of Mars makes the old Star Trek look like Blade Runner.

So I guess in the big picture, the premature decapitation sort of fits the movie perfectly. A loose collage of moronic dia­logue, screaming fits as an excuse for acting, and blurry shots of blood spurting from sev­ered limbs, nothing quite sums up the experience of seeing the mindless movie called Ghosts of Mars like someone losing their head in the first few frames.

  Next time, Mr. Carpenter says "cut" — I hope he doesn't mean it literally.

Vancouver Sun Movie Critic

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