Movie #29: Ghosts of Mars

Welcome to Sci-Fi 100! 
100 Sci-Fi movies in 100 days!

"Ghosts of Mars" is a 2001 sci-fi movie written & directed by John Carpenter (Halloween, The Thing, Escape From New York, Christine.) It has an all-star cast including Natasha Henstridge, Ice Cube, Jason Statham, Clea DuVall and Pam Grier.
The story is set 200 years in the future on the planet Mars. It's about cops who are sent to a mining facility to investigate why the mining corporation has lost contact with them. What they find when they get there is that the miners have been taken over or possessed by the ghosts of Martians who lived their long ago. These ghosts are very violent and are determined to kill any aliens (humans) who have come to their planet. The cops must team up with a few prisoners and remaining miners who haven't been possessed yet in order to have a fighting chance of getting out of the mining facility alive when the ghosts invade with their army of host bodies.

I have always known about this movie, but this is my first time to watch it. I had listened to friends that saw it and basically said it sucked, so I never watched it for myself. I wish now that I would have watched it because I thought it was awesome! I mean, how could it not be... you have John Carpenter at the helm, the beautiful Natasha Henstridge,

Natasha Henstridge

 Jason Statham, and a Hollywood legend like Pam Grier and they are on Mars! Just hearing that should have made me check it out.

Jason Statham in one of his first major roles

 

The movie plays like a western... you have a mining town, a sheriff, a posse', a prisoner, a train, and lots of shootouts. All that was missing were horses. LOL. There was tons of action and extreme violence, including lots of beheadings and cannibalism. The violent martians would put the human heads on pikes in the ground. They also threw circular saw blade looking weapons that would cut off arms, legs, heads, etc. The makeup was creepy too. 
The set construction was awesome. The mining town looked very gritty and something cool that I read was that much of the location shooting was done on a gypsum mine near Albuquerque, New Mexico and that gypsum is pure white in color... so to make it look like the red surface of Mars they sprayed the ground and hills and mountainside with a biodegradable red food dye to make it look like the Martian landscape. A lot of detail went into the art design of this movie.

                    Click on the box above to see the trailer.


If you like John Carpenter films and Sci-fi action films then I think this one might just be for you.
Check it out! It's available on Youtube, Netflix and DVD.



- Patrick Shawn Bennett
Broadcasting from a runaway train on Mars.