Horrors of the Red Planet. 1965 ---- aka a rewatch of: Wizard of Mars
A cool cut-out spaceship zooms towards Mars, as the crew chat and joke - in the far future - Jan. 1975 on a readout. We see some reel-to-reel tape discs, and what looks like a flashing Bingo scoreboard. Suddenly, every alarm goes off, and fake lightning bolts appear on the monitor screen.
A crew member half-heartedly shoots a very weak fire-extinguisher at a non-fire, a bit of smoke shows up near the commander as he and Betty and a wisecracking ensign make comments like "activate all available rocket systems," but it's no use. They close in on some black-and-white footage of some hills in California, then a painting of Mars, which has tall white mountains? Then they are down, trapped on Mars, and uttering mundane dialogue about whether they can send radio messages, in the four days O2 they have left. After this chat, the ship decides to explode, so they grab stuff and run.
They inflate two life-rafts... and head off down a Martian canal. There's some air on Mars, so they crack their helmets for a booster. They sleep in the rafts, and are woken by some huge centipede-plant creatures, which Charlie shoots about 20 times with his rifle, though they don't appear to be able to crawl into the liferafts..
Now a creepy cave, scary mist, horrifying dialogue. They are going deeper underground... though they don't move in relation to the cave walls, for the entire scene.
'There's something familiar about this rock..."
"Aw, come on, rock's rock! Let's get a move on."
Whoops, giant fire pit, huge waterfall of lava. They stand ten feet from it talking for a while, then a long walk up a cave... the odd small fire burning here and there...
"Let's see if there's a way out of this inferno.."
" I... almost wish this weren't the right direction." ( I can see the director of this movie, watching it today)
Now they don't know how long they've been underground. Four days? No chronometers in the future, apparently, oh wait, NOW we are told watches don't run on Mars. Fine.
They get out and trek through the desert. They head for a pulsing dome on the horizon. Air is running out... "Crummy desert! Every dune looks like the last, like a crummy-"
"Cut the chat! Wasting oxygen."
They find an ancient spaceship, marked USA BioLaB, but it has no supplies, so Charlie rants and shoots it a couple times, breaking a fuel line. Liquid oxygen!
Various electronic gadgets still work, just not clocks... so they find something. "Hey... I think I've found something." Turns out to be what looks like... kitchen tiles, made of rock, ancient. Unbelievably inane dialogue is used to point this out. Then they find a city, and the soundtrack beeps wildly, heavy theremin and echo. With all the dialogue removed, this movie is probably somewhat far out and groovy.
They find more things..."Be careful! You don't know what that alien thing is!" Of course, the thing goes off, like a mini-flamethrower, and our hero sticks his face close to it to see how to turn it off. It looks like a pencil sharpener with some nails stuck in it.
Finally - a dead Martian in one of the endless tubes. It wakes up, with early cheesy glowing-eyeball and transparent pulsing-brain FX... and after some unintelligible echoey whispering, over a weirdly-beeping soundtrack, to the Captain from our Martian, still nobody knows what it means.
Big-eared Martian directs them to a cobwebby cave, where a lot more whispering, and beeping, and transparent ghostly Martian images, go on, but nothing happens, until a big red brain, in a bubble, turns into John Carradine's head, talking backwards.
Turns out John is a multi-minded ancient race, all by himself. He finds out they are from Earth, tells them many other greedy ETs had been here, and they were destroyed, or something.. and now they are all trapped. The Martians are ghosts, they have no way to help. John's head floats in space and rants on and on about how great his race once was. "... before we returned to mindless dust! Time was insensitive to us... the very fabric of time... the unborn tomorrows... it was then that we impaled time upon an axis... "
A discussion about stopping and starting time goes on for many long paragraphs, until a big cymbal crash, then they have to go fix the time-mechanism by replacing a part. Aha, it's a sphere, like a bowling ball, which the captain drops, it breaks, and there's a tiny city inside. "Plucked from time!"
Now a big metal Mr. Sun-face on a huge pendulum... and a big wheel... they insert the bowling ball, loud martian whispering starts, and... time is re-started! A speech from Carradine, about your destiny awaits at the end of the golden road... "farewell... "
Everyone runs as: "The past and the present are coming together! We've got to get out, while this dimension still exists!"
They make it, but: They wake battered and bruised on the ship, and the whole adventure has happened in two minutes. Huh. Carradine's voice lectures briefly against a space background, about life and death, and it's The End.
