Ghosts of Mars: 25 Years of John Carpenter’s Infamously (And Intentionally?) Awful Film
Carpenter remixes his filmography in a movie which has since garnered cult attention despite being the nadir of his career
If there’s one complaint about movies I hate more than any other it’s “oh, they just didn’t care. They weren’t trying.” That someone watching a film for 100 minutes seems to think they put in more thought and effort than everyone involved in a film’s production over the years it took to make. Even the worst movies have people slavishly working away trying their best. Except when that movie is Ghosts of Mars.
John Carpenter would apparently say it was the biggest piece of shit he’d ever made. And not in interviews afterwards. On set. To the cast. Before shooting a scene. It is a film so bad, made by a good filmmaker, that it is one of the few examples where my most hated of criticisms is correct. John Carpenter, with his penultimate film, stopped caring and embraced directing a total flop.
The only real question is when did he stop caring? Was it on set or was it before? One gets the sense that the film’s very conception is a self-deprecating inside joke. Filmmakers usually repeat ideas, iterate on themes, but with Ghosts of Mars Carpenter seems to use tropes from his past work as a kind of self-referential take down. It’s almost a remake of Assault on Precinct 13, has a small cast in an isolated location facing off against a villain who possesses people like The Thing, and theorised to have originally been intended as a third Escape… film because it has such a Snake Plissken vibe. It’s a compilation of Carpenter’s greatest hits but instead of shaping them into a magnum opus, he mocks them and executes them at the worst quality possible.
There is no potential for hyperbole when describing how bad the film is. Despite having a very basic story, it struggles to get going. As well as Carpenter’s past work, the plot riffs on Aliens, multiple Star Trek episodes, and has the feel of a PlayStation 2 game. Martian ghosts have been released and are possessing colonists, space cops have to fight and escape. Simple. And yet the first hour is interminable. Characters stand around trying to explain the exact same information to each other. The film is told in flashback with another flashback inside that flashback and then another flashback inside that flashback for a full flashback matryoshka showing information the original narrator wouldn’t be privy too. And it’s only presented as such to seemingly muddy and disguise the simplest of narratives.
The production is awful. The visuals are flat and too clean and bright, missing the darker and grainier feel of Carpenter’s previous work, making it seem like a Sci Fi Channel TV movie. The greenscreen is awful, and unfortunately so too are the practical effects, with the miniature train looking like something from Thunderbirds. And then there’s the editing. There’s no doubt in my mind Carpenter in the editing suite was trying to mess with the movie as a joke. There are some wipe transitions even George Lucas would object to and the stupidest fade transitions I’ve ever seen to try and marginally speed up the movie. Why wait 5 seconds for a character to walk down a hallway when you can fade them to the end in 4?
Assault on Precinct 13 is essentially an honorary zombie movie. Ghosts of Mars literalises it, repurposing the plot, now with supernatural enemies and Ice Cube in the Napoleon Wilson role, playing a character called ‘Desolation’ Williams. Ice Cube has never been a strong actor but I usually have time for him – his XXX film was a childhood favourite – but he is terrible here. But only slightly more terrible than everybody else. Pam Grier’s characterisation begins and ends with her leather duster, outrageously being killed offscreen. Peter Jason and Doug McGrath (Sgt. Nash from Black Christmas) only get the briefest of cameos. And I feel bad for Natasha Henstridge, who clearly didn’t get the memo that this is supposed to be a terrible film. She’s trying her best, and while she’s convincingly physical and authoritative, her protagonist is so dull and emotionless I was expecting a reveal that she’s actually an android or something.
Despite being a horror film, the scariest thing is seeing Jason Statham with hair. He gives the movie some flavour at least, although spends most of the runtime locking and unlocking the same few doors. Although this happens offscreen so he actually spends the film entering rooms and telling people about the doors he’s just locked and unlocked. He gets the first look at the film’s villains in a very Temple of Doom scene, perched on a rock and looking down at a ritual. I would complain about their look but I can’t get over how the Martian ‘language’ is just them shouting “gah-gah-gah!” over and over again. It must have been a placeholder sound that Carpenter, out of fucks by this point, decided it’d be funny to leave in the finished film.
Finally the film’s back half gives us some action sequences and they are pretty fun. I don’t think I can stretch to calling them good but they are entertaining at least. Stupid, of course, especially with the reveal that when a possessed person is killed it frees the ghost inside to possess someone else. Does this stop our heroes from blasting every bad guy they see? Of course not, that would mean unique ways of taking them down and nobody is putting the effort in to work out what they could be. The only unique tactic the film does offer is that taking drugs repels the ghosts. Drug use and imperialism (the fact that the ghosts are just native inhabitants wanting to be left in peace) are certainly odd messages for the film to proffer, with none of the satire of Starship Troopers.
Rather than ‘Written by John Carpenter’ or ‘Directed by John Carpenter’, the only credit that matters on one of his movies post-1994 is ‘Music by John Carpenter’. You get the sense that when he’s directing he no longer gives a shit; he’d rather be at home playing video games. But composing the music? He still gets excited for that, he still puts the effort in because he can do it from home, tinkering away and then bringing in members of Anthrax to beef up his themes. The music is the only thing vaguely good about Ghosts of Mars. 25 years after its disastrous box office run (or stumble), the film has developed a cult following but I can’t bring myself to be one of them. It’s not just bad, it’s bad bad. As Carpenter has said himself: “It’s called Ghosts of Mars, for Christ’s sake. Why would people take this movie seriously?”
