i know i wasted 90 mins of my life.

Fantastic!

Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

I enjoyed watching this film and would recommend other to give it a try , (as I am) but this movie, although enjoyable to watch due to the better than average acting fails to add anything new to its storyline that is all too familiar to these types of movies.

Another foray into the science fiction horror genre for Horror maestro John Carpenter, sees a group of 22nd Century police officers lead by Helena Braddock (Pam Grier) and Melanie Ballard (Natasha Henstridge) head to Shining Canyon, a mining town on Mars, to collect and transport a dangerous criminal to stand trial. Upon their arrival, they find Shining Canyon deserted, aside from a group of self mutilated, homicidal beings, who turn out to be the townsfolk who have been taken over by the titular ghosts. Cue lots of guns, running and decapitation.There is no two ways about it, Ghosts of Mars is a mixed bag. On the whole it is very entertaining, but has moments of pure ridiculousness and stupidity.A lot is crammed into the 94 minute run time, and it is a lot considering the action takes place over a relatively short space of time. Told in flashback, and containing flashbacks within said flashback, the story is kept sharp and simple, never feeling over complicated and nothing is superfluous. The action is fast and furious; the fight sequences are compelling and the deaths of our police officers are thoroughly enjoyable. Decapitation and dismemberment agogo; a little extra gore wouldn't have gone amiss though.However good the fight sequences are, one does wonder our heroes keep shooting at our ghost hosts? The deaths of the hosts releases the spirits so they can go find another host to inhabit. Truly moronic. And their solution to the destroying the alien race? Blowing up the town. Which would release all the ghosts. Um, slightly flawed...Anyway, the production of Ghosts of Mars is great. The planetary aspects are done well, everything is steeped in red and the barren, dust filled landscapes around Shining Canyon only add to the isolation. It feel like the Mars one would expect. Also, the town of Shining Canyon itself seems plausibly tiny, giving a wonderfully claustrophobic feel to the main body of the film. Perhaps the best thing about the film is the make up and costumes of the mutilated hosts; they are grotesque, interesting, creative and a lot fun. The heavy metal soundtrack compliments our pierced, painted and sliced monsters beautifully.Our other characters, despite being developed well enough, are a mixture of stereotypes and extremes. Jericho Butler (Jason Statham), the womanising alpha male; Arlene Whitlock (Joanna Cassidy) the bumbling scientist; Desolation Williams (Ice Cube), the no nonsense serial killer criminal type; Bashira Kinkaid (Clea DuVall), the naive rookie... There is nothing new here in terms of disposable characters. Sadly our two female leads are the most disappointing. Pam Grier is unconvincing as the tough, lesbian commanding officer; a role which apparently just requires an ample cleavage and no acting skills whatsoever. Thankfully she is dispatched relatively quickly. Even Henstridge falls a little flat most of the time as our drug fueled Lieutenant, bordering on dull and wooden. Perhaps the vacant look that occupies her face for the majority is a side effect of the hallucinogenic pills she pops at frequent intervals. The disappointing female characters are a surprise seeing as Carpenters forte is the slasher genre, a genre where female characters are usually strong, engaging and sympathetic. Not so much here...BOTTOM LINE: An extra star for Pam Griers head on a stick. Fabulous.

I just caught another John Carpenter movie that I had never seen before, 2001's "Ghosts of Mars." This film does not have a very good reputation, to say the least; the Maltin book says that it is "routine, predictable and dull," and even my "DVD Delirium 2" reference book, which has a higher degree of tolerance for these kind of genre films, has nothing nice to say about it. But you know what? I enjoyed it, and I suppose that's all that matters, right? In this film, mankind has almost finished terraforming Mars by the year 2176, and there are primitive settlements and mining operations all around the planet. A matriarchy is in control of the government, and the Martian Police Force is comprised mainly of women, it seems. Now, a dangerous criminal needs to be transported from where he has been captured in one of those mining settlements, but when the police force gets there to deliver him by train, it finds all the miners dead and decapitated. Long story short: An archaeological dig has released the spirit ghosts of the planet, which have proceeded to possess the bodies of various Earth settlers, turning them into homicidal ghouls who look like members of the rock group Kiss! Yes, it's a pretty wacky conceit on which to hinge a film, and to the picture's detriment (it was co-written by Carpenter), we never do find out what those spirits are, or how they were imprisoned in their cavern. Still, as I say, the film was a lot of fun for me. It stars Natasha Henstridge as one of the cops, the great Pam Grier as her superior (Pam, sadly, gets killed off and beheaded pretty early on), Ice Cube as the main criminal (his acting style is not exactly Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, to say the least), Jason Statham as another cop, Joanna Cassidy as a scientist, and Rosemary Forsyth. The film is presented in a very unusual manner, with flashbacks within flashbacks within flashbacks...as a matter of fact, there must be almost a good dozen such interlocking flashbacks to be had here, with practically every character in the cast telling his or her remembered story. And you thought the Humphrey Bogart film "Passage to Marseilles" had a lot of flashbacks, with only three! The action in the film's final half is fairly relentless, and the FX are cheesily endearing. Some have complained that this film is basically just a rehash of Carpenter's "Assault on Precinct 13," which itself was a rehash of sorts of George A. Romero's "Night of the Living Dead" (a group of people barricades themselves in a building to ward off nasty attackers), and I suppose that this is true, but still, "Ghosts of Mars" is done on such a pulp/comic book level that it was hard for me to complain. Who could possibly be unhappy at the sight of Pam Grier in a leather trenchcoat talking tough, or with Natasha kicking ass on Martian ghouls? In all, great mindless entertainment; nothing serious, but a nice way to spend 90 minutes. And again, this film looks just great in high def and widescreen.

Another nail in the coffin of John Carpenter's long-dead career, this braindead action romp is an empty offering missing all the right spots and ending up as an oh-so-predictable seen-it-all-before mess of a movie. Sure, it's pretty enough; the Martian landscapes, bathed in red, are impressively portrayed for the film's budget and the night shooting gives it an extra level of atmosphere it might otherwise have missed. Unfortunately, the visuals are all that this film offers. After some effective scene-building, it becomes yet another us vs. them gung-ho action epic with the heroes shooting hundreds of bullets and using martial arts to destroy the zombie-like bad guys. Not that I'm against action, but this is so suspenseless and uninteresting that I have no choice but to complain.Carpenter seems to think that excitement equals shooting loads of action really fast and intercut, so the action bits are over really quickly. For the best example, look at the difference between this film and his '70s classic ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13. The latter was dark, brooding, mysterious, and exciting, because Carpenter let the audience take their time to get to know the characters before bombarding them with increasingly elaborate scenes of action. The film was low budget, the action scenes limited in scope, but nonetheless it has ten times the impact of this glossy, overblown effort with not one element of suspense in it whatsoever. The only good things about the fight scenes are some groovy gore FX (including a couple of nifty decapitations by frisbee) but these are over so quickly as to be unsatisfying. The score, which sounds like a dirge all the way through, is so out of place in this film (or any), that it's astonishing for Carpenter to misjudge this key element so badly.The film's foes are quite interesting but sadly nothing is ever made of their alien personalities, they just become faceless attackers, zombie-like in the worst sense. Carpenter builds up the mystery by showing some alien artwork (metal implements arranged into bizarre hanging displays) and has an interesting, original element in the body piercing done by the aliens on their bodies, perhaps to disfigure themselves to show their hatred of the human form. But their origins and motivation are never explored. Heads on sticks are a concurrent theme but the effects here are cheap-looking and Carpenter cribs his first shock scene (the hanging bodies) from PREDATOR 2. I had to laugh at the cheap CGI aliens who appear in a flashback dream, their features masked by overlaying the image of somebody's face, wish we could have seen more of their cheesiness.Natasha Henstridge leads a cast of uninteresting two-dimensional characters through this movie. Henstridge is dreadful and upstaged by Ice Cube, himself putting in a lazy performance which is nonetheless the best in the movie. British actor Jason Stratham is wasted in the sidelines as a hard-as-nails sergeant whilst blaxploitation icon Pam Grier looks awful in a silly wig and is killed off almost straight away. Add into the brew ludicrous character names like Jericho, Desolation, and most unforgivably "Big Daddy" and you have an idea that the scriptwriters didn't give a damn. You won't either. Thumbs down to this vapid enterprise in effects and no magic.

Ghosts of Mars (2001): Dir: John Carpenter / Cast: Natasha Henstridge, Ice Cube, Jason Statham, Pam Grier, Clea DuVall: Natasha Henstridge plays an officer sent to Mars to transport a dangerous prisoner and she narrates the film because she was the only one to return alive. Bodies litter the prison and Ice Cube is blamed until it is discovered that ghostly beings inhabiting human bodies are responsible. We witness possessed bodies being inflicted with wounds. Eventually Cube and his crew show up and it appears that both forces will have to unite if they are to survive. This leads to a graphic climax where heads detach from torsos and blood splatters the screen. Horror films that are reduced to heavy amounts of gore prove that they lack faith in their delivery. John Carpenter use to make terrific films such as Halloween and Escape From New York. This isn't one of them. In fact, this looks like a variation between his own version of The Thing clashed with Dawn of the Dead. Other than Henstridge and Ice Cube the film features wasted appearances by Jason Statham, Clea DuVall and Pam Grier. They basically spend ninety minutes bickering followed by running and then fighting back where creatures are blasted to pieces and human characters are torn to bits. That is exactly what should be done with the film. The special effects have all the potential of a bag of puke. Score: 0 / 10