Cheap The Angry Red Planet (DVD) (Ib Melchior) Price

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Customer Reviews of The Angry Red Planet

The Slightly Disgruntled Red Planet
Sid Pink and American International Pictures produced it. Ib Melchior wrote it. It had a cast of virtual unknowns, and a gimmicky new photographic process called "Cinemagic" that was nothing more than solarizing the film with a red lens. It had a Paul Blaisdell-designed three-eyed, antennaed Martian, man-eating plants, a giant rat-bat-spider-thingey and an enormous protoplasmic Martian sea-amoeba with eyes that roll in opposite directions. And it played at the drive-ins...in 1959.

Come on! What's not to love?

This is easily one of the cheesiest movies ever made, and one of the most fun.

PLOT?! What are you, some kind of purist?

Okay, okay. The world's first quartet of astronauts to land on Mars - consisting of three older men and one knockout female redhead (it was 1959, remember?) - is overdue for return, and not answering our hails. The military brings it down by remote control, to find one astronaut missing, another dead, a third dying of some unknown alien gangrene, and the knockout redhead completely amnesiac. The mission tapes all appear to be wiped as clean as the redhead's mind. What happened? Only the redhead can tell them, who consents to undergo narcosynthesis to provide their answers. While on Mars, she and the other brave voyagers encountered all the various perils recounted in the first paragraph of this review - which we, the audience, get to relive in all the solarized red terror of...CINEMAGIC!!!

Oh! I forgot the best part! The end credit music abruptly turns the eerie electronic synthesizer theme into a 1950's jazz number! Ya gotta hear it, to disbelieve it!

Any questions? So, enjoy, already!

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DVD delivers beautiful print of legendary SF schlock classic
Is Angry Red Planet the greatest schlock SF movie ever made? If not, it's definitely in the running. For starters, it's in semi-gorgeous Eastman color by Pathe, and shot by the legendary Stanley Cortez (Magnificent Ambersons, Flesh and Fantasy). It's got a memorable combination-electronic/militaristic percussion score by Paul Dunlap, and "Cinemagic" effects credited to Norman (late-era Stooges cohort) Maurer. (Cinemagic is really just a combination of solarizing and tinting to cheaply combine live action with painted scenery and pencil drawings.) But the really great thing about Angry Red Planet is how everything about it perfectly emulates the look and feel of a 1950s SF comic or pulp novel, translated to the movie screen. The wild monsters (woman-eating plant, giant blob-creature, cool Basil Wolverton-look alien, colossal rat-bat-spider [immortalized on the cover of Misfits Walk Among Us]) and overall art direction and special effects are consistently imaginative and colorful, if not totally convincing. Plus, bad movie fans can relish the ripe dialogue and acting (particularly the sexist comments and leering manner of creepy 'leading man' Gerald Mohr); lots of deadpan, meaningless jargon/technobabble; and the bizarre "Iris sneaking a dab of perfume" montage (one of my favorite non sequitur moments in movie history).
The DVD includes no real extras other than the trailer (I don't count subtitles and chapter stops) but who cares! As with most of their other Midnite Movies DVD releases, MGM Home Video gives us a terrific print of both the movie and trailer. Other than some sporadic very light speckling/spotting the print looks gorgeous: bright, sharp, and detailed, with excellent contrast and great color (well, as great as Eastman color ever gets, anyway). Even the stock footage looks better than ever. You'll never see a finer print of this movie until someone digitally restores the negative; it makes my VHS copies look sick. Expect a small stampede as fans of this film rush to grab it at the bargain price.

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Terrible Effects But A Fun Film
The film is easily one of the worst ever done as far as effects goes. The backdrops are easily painted sheets and you can see where the sheet meet the ground in the film. Plus a lot of the monsters show their strings as well; like the bat-rat-spider.
Although the film has major flaws effects wise, the story is entertaining and pretty neat. Even the concept of some of the alien life forms were neat despite their flaws.
The acting is pretty bad but does have good parts. A lot of you might be asking, well since you keep talking about the film's bad sides, why did you give it 5 stars then? I gave it 5 stars because it delivers what it was supposed to: entertainment. The film is worth the buy if you are a fan of these types of movies. In the end, an entertaining film.