The Angry Red Planet (1959) – Review

Since H.G. Wells penned the classic tale of the War of the Worlds back in 1897 the planet Mars has continually been seen as a threat to the planet Earth, either by launching invasions or attacking astronaut interlopers, and this idea had really come to the fore by the end of the 1950s with a film that perfectly summed up the public’s fear in the aptly titled film, The Angry Red Planet.

The structure of The Angry Red Planet tries to fool the audience into thinking we are stumbling upon some science fiction mystery as the story is being told in flashback, and from a rather unreliable narrator, but why is she unreliable? Well, she’s a woman in a 50s space adventure film and the only thing reliable about them is their ability to provide good coffee service and the likelihood of going into hysterics as if on some sort of schedule. As the film opens we learn that the long-overdue spaceship MR-1 (Mars Rocket 1) has suddenly appeared in orbit over Earth, which causes the military brass to scramble all hands on deck to recover the craft, despite their failure to make any contact with the crew. Fearing everyone on board is dead they remote pilot the rocket to a safe landing only discover that there are two survivors, the ship’s biologist Dr. Iris Ryan (Nora Hayden) and the mission commander Col. Tom O’Bannion (Gerald Mohr), unfortunately, O’Bannion is in a coma and his arm is covered with a strange green alien growth, while Iris is suffering from a sort of trauma-induced amnesia and it’s up to the base’s doctor to help her remember the events of her doomed mission.

Needless to say, this will involve some screaming.

The bulk of the film then deals with her debriefing as she reports in detail the crew’s experiences while travelling to the Red Planet and exploring its surface. We learn that the trip to Mars was rather uneventful, well, if you call every member of the crew making sexist remarks uneventful, but as this was the 50s this kind of attitude was common and having a “dame” aboard your spaceship makes this kind of conduct pretty much expected. We get Warrant Officer Sam Jacobs (Jack Kruschen) overtly sexist remark, commenting on her attire “You know, I can’t say that I recommend spacesuits for beautiful young dolls. What happened to all your lovely curves?” and even pipe smoking Professor Theodore Gettell (Les Tremayne) can barely treat his colleague with a modicum of respect and like everyone else calls her “Irish” instead of Iris, but the worst offender is the commander who is in full-on creeper mode throughout the film, when she asks why he calls “Irish” instead of her name “I never know if you’re calling me by name or nationality” and his cringe-inducing response of “When I call you by your name… you’ll know it” a comment which would get him flagged and fired by any modern HR department.

“You’ve got a nice pair of cans there, honey.”

The rampant sexism is briefly put on hold when they finally arrive on Mars as they are quickly unnerved by the planet’s stillness, even to the point where the Professor posits the idea that the eerie silence must be caused by some superior mental control over the planet’s inhabitants, which has me asking “Are we sure this guy is a scientist?” I’d put my money on the reason Mars is so quiet is more due to the fact that the atmospheric pressure on the Red Planet’s surface is small, amounting to less than 1% of Earth’s sea level pressure, so even though there would be some sound on Mars I’m not sure what he expected to hear through the hull of their ship and that he immediately leaped to “Alien Mind Control” as the most logical explanation makes me question his academic qualifications. The crew eventually decide to leave the confines of the ship and explore the Martian surface, taking along Sam’s really cool freeze gun, and while wandering around they come across a variety of Martian flora and fauna and a gigantic bat-rat-spider creature, which they mistake for a grove of trees because of course they do.

Note: It’s strange that trained scientist sees a grouping of leg-shaped “trees” that are at least 40 feet high and yet they fail to notice the rat-bat-spider monster standing in the midst, at least in Kong: Skull Island the body of the creature was hidden by the jungle while this creature was just standing out in plain sight.

Unfortunately for the crew, gigantic bat-rat-spider creatures are the least of their problems for while exploring the distant shore of a large Martian lake – yes, there are no bodies of water on Mars but let’s not have facts get in the way of our fun – our heroes discover a Martian city with towers a mile high, but before they can do any further investigations a giant amoeba-like creature with a single spinning eye rises out of the deep and chases them back to their ship. Poor Jacobs is grabbed by the creature and drawn inside its gelatinous body to be digested, right in front of his horrified crewmates. The film wraps up rather quickly after this, with Iris figuring out a cure for O’Bannion infected arm, which he obtained when in contact with the giant amoeba, and listening to the message left by the Martians on the ship’s recorder, a message that basically said “Get fucked” and never come back to Mars on pain of udder destruction.

Question: Would this destruction come in the form of giant amoeba being sent to devour the citizens of Earth? Could 1958’s The Blob be considered an early test run from these nasty Martians?

Stray Observations:

• One of the Airforce generals states a possible reason for the crew being dead is that take-off from Mars at 5 to 6 G’s could have killed them, sure, if they were toddlers as the average person can survive up to 9 G acceleration.
• Col. O’Bannion returns to Earth with his entire right arm covered by a strange green alien growth yet no one thinks to put him in quarantine, instead, he’s simply in a hospital bed behind a privacy curtain. That’s how you get the Earth wiped out by an alien plague, thanks, guys.
• This film keeps up the tradition of having a “Brooklyn Guy” as one of the spaceship’s crew, “Shall we go out and claim the planet in the name of Brooklyn?”
• They grumble about the time lag in communications to Earth “Just wait until it’s a couple of hours!” but at their greatest separation, the radio lag between Earth and Mars would only be about 22 minutes. Maybe they were referring to a trip to Pluto.
• For what should look like a desolate landscape this Mars seems rather rife with plant life, I wonder why our telescopes never picked up the jungles of Mars.
• Iris is almost devoured by a giant man-eating plant because when it comes to adventure films being attacked by killer plants is a woman’s job.

Where’s Tarzan when you need him.

Ib Melchior’s The Angry Red Planet gets the distinction of being filmed in something called CineMagic a process used by the filmmakers to combine hand-drawn images with live-action by hiding it via a strange red filter that would also create a ghostly red look to the planet Mars, and though I’ll admit this did provide the film with a unique visual style it can best be described as someone with glaucoma looking through rose coloured sunglasses. What’s particularly hilarious is that Melchior would occasionally forget that Mars had a red atmosphere and thus randomly the view outside the ship’s portal would show a blue sky. Who said continuity is important in filmmaking? The film was shot over a mere nine days on a budget of only $200,000 with an end result that at best can be labelled “interesting” and the bizarre-looking bat-rat-spider monster will forever keep this particular entry in the genre memorable, but with such a curtailed budget certain things did suffer and is why we only get a glimpse of this “superior” Martian society.

This is all we can afford to show you, I hope you enjoyed it.

The Angry Red Planet is another fine example of 50s space adventuring where men are men and women will occasionally scream hysterically, the use of the CineMagic technique to hide the film’s technological failings didn’t quite work but that goofy-ass bat-rat-spider creature was truly a thing of nightmares and has remained an indelible element of the genre making this particular entry a must-see for fans.