The Angry Red Planet (1959)

This one is wonderfully goofy, gimmick heavy fun, complete with a stylized, stifling atmosphere, hilariously ridiculous dialogue, and a couple of very distinctive monsters. The screenplay (by director / noted sci-fi writer Ib Melchior ,and Sid Pink, based on Pinks' story) tells a tale of a disastrous manned expedition to Mars. The spacecraft is brought back to Earth, and only two survivors remain. However, one of them is suffering a hideous-looking infection. It's up to scientist Iris Ryan (gorgeous, flame haired Nora Hayden) to dig into her memories in order for puzzled military officials to find out what went wrong."The Angry Red Planet" gets most of its entertainment value out of its visual approach. It combines sets, paintings, special effects, and the much ballyhooed "Cinemagic" process to create a memorable look. "Cinemagic" basically turns everything red for sequences set on the Martian landscape. It also has some weird and wonderful monsters, pulling out all the stops. We have a Venus flytrap type carnivorous plant, an enormous rat / bat / spider / crab (once you see this thing, you never forget it), and an even more vast one eyed amoeba. At about the 36 minute mark, when our heroes (Hayden, Gerald Mohr, Les Tremayne, Jack Kruschen) first set foot on the Martian landscape, that's when the fun really begins. Mohr is amusing because he's playing a rather cocky, smarmy guy who insists on calling the leading lady "Irish". Sci-fi icon Tremayne is solid as the obligatory professorial character, and excellent character actor Kruschen - an Oscar nominee two years later for "The Apartment" - supplies the generous comedy relief with his priceless lines.Melchior gets right down to business: the action just starts immediately, with ALL of the credits, including the title, saved for the end. And those closing credits are supplemented by one of the grooviest tracks one might ever hear in this genre.A most agreeable diversion for people who just want to put their brains in neutral for 84 well paced minutes.Seven out of 10.

Well, I'll give the film makers this much credit: the planet sure seems angry. And quite red, for that matter. This is fairly typical low-budget 1950s sci-fi right here, complete with shoddy effects and no more than a passing knowledge of science, or even the laws of physics. It's about a manned mission to Mars in which stuff goes wrong, which is a theme that shows up even in today's movies; here, it's told mainly in flashback by one of the survivors.Rocketship MR-1 (you know, for Mars Rocket 1) blasts off with four crew members on board - Tom O'Bannion (Gerald Mohr), Iris Ryan (Naura Hayden), Theodore Gettell (Les Tremayne), and Sam Jacobs (Jack Kruschen). A couple of days later, they land on Mars. To put that in perspective, if the fastest spacecraft around today left while Mars and Earth were closest to each other, it would arrive at Mars in a little over a month. That's if it's an unmanned craft, as the human body can't take super-duper fast speeds. But, okay, this was 1959, so we'll just have to accept that the writers were spitballing some ideas and didn't care if they fudged some numbers.Contact is lost a couple of months after departure from Earth, and suddenly the MR-1 is detected in orbit around Earth (yeah, I know); immediately, the science types spring into action and return the rocket to terra firma by remote control. Which is totally a thing, at least in science fiction. Anyway, Iris staggers out of the ship and is essentially in shock, while one of her crew mates is rushed to an operating table with some green thing on his arm. It's up to amnesiac Iris to fill in the blanks for the doctors, who for some reason need her to explain just what in tarnation happened before they can do anything.This is where the flashback comes in, as Iris is hypnotized. We learn, in quick order, that the ship did land on Mars. Upon landing, the crew note only vegetation - no, as they said, life. Plants aren't life, people! And if someone from 2015 told this crew that plants are, indeed, life, the answer would be along the lines of "well, not REAL life!" Anyway, the plants are there, and they appear to be completely still. This unnerves everyone, particularly Iris, who as the lone female is prone to emotional outbursts, not like the manly and/or thoughtful men on board.Much of the movie was shot in Cinemagic, a process that was supposed to simulate hand-drawn animation. It doesn't really work to that extent, but the scenes on Mars do have a very strong reddish hue to them. Seems appropriate. But here are a few other interesting bits that this laugher provided. 1) while the crew is on board their ship and looking out of the portholes, the sky changes from red to blue and back again between scenes. I'm not sure if the blue was supposed to mean daytime and the red was night, but even in 1959 people knew why the sky looks blue to us. 2) While on Mars, the crew encounters what they call a lake (although it's massive enough that "ocean" would have been the first thing to pop into my mind), so they come back later with a - wait for it - inflatable raft. Just the kind of thing you'd take onboard a spaceship that needs to be as lightweight as possible to escape Earth's gravitational pull. And then 3) about that gravity. The ship itself appears to have plenty of it, as no one's floating around. Understandable, since it would probably break the budget to turn on the antigravity in 1959. Mars also has plenty of it. In fact, it's the same gravity Earth has! Neat little coincidence.But sure, this was 1959, and the extent of outer-space exploration was...what, Yuri Gagarin? We can let them slide on a lot of this science stuff. Science is for nerds, right? Let's see this crew take on the aliens! Which they do, and spoiler alert, the aliens aren't at all pleased we're on Mars. After a while, you can kind of see their point.The Angry Red Planet is a relic of its era; it's light on facts, light on humor (other than the forced or stereotypical kinds), light on drama, and just plain light overall. Even the tone is light. I did get a kick out of the prehistoric Mission Control, which consisted of a bunch of people crowded around one terminal. Who knows how big the mountain was that housed the actual computer. Gerald Mohr, who plays the crew's commander, is sort of a poor man's Peter Graves and looks like a poor man's Humphery Bogart, which is why he was hired. Kruschen, who plays Sam the warrant officer (why?), is your garden variety comic relief. He's even from Brooklyn, which means he's got your back and just let him at those aliens! Tremayne, who had had a long, illustrious career in radio by this time, is the requisite "thoughtful scientist" on board; Iris is also a scientist, but everything she says is dismissed, because she's a woman.

From the glorious 1950s – THE golden decade for unhinged Sci-Fi and monster movies – comes this wonderful but sadly obscure gem with a dark atmosphere and deeply melancholic morals, and yet delightfully silly and inept special effects and set designs! This is, in fact, the most entertaining combination possible because it means that the stern actors are citing their lines about mysterious unknown planets and deadly alien lifeforms with a straight face and a serious tone of voice, while at the same time the landscapes and monsters look preposterous, cheap and downright ludicrous! And it has to be said that the team behind "The Angry Red Planet" really did their best in order to provide an intense and overwhelming Sci-Fi/thriller, however the budgetary restrictions made it quite difficult to succeed and the film didn't pass the test of time very well. Still, for admirers of '50s Sci-Fi flicks and cinematic oddities in general, this film definitely comes with my highest possible recommendation. The story opens captivating and suspenseful enough, that's for sure! The NASA space-center on earth suddenly receives automated radio messages from the Mars expedition rocket that was considered lost for more than 60 days already. When it lands back on earth, it turns out that two of the four crew members have survived their journey, but the male commander Tim O'Bannon is unconscious from an unknown disease and the female biologist Iris Ryan has no recollection of what happened. At the hospital, doctors and scientist try to revive Iris' memories and she gradually narrates their horrific encounters on planet Mars through flashbacks. The scenes that are supposedly taking place on the "Red Planet" are just stupendous! You may take the planet's nickname very literal, as the explorations on Mars are filmed through a reddish/orange filter attached to the camera's lens. The landscapes and flora on Mars actually exists of drawings and sketches, massive amphibious monsters and carnivorous plants included! Our protagonist heroes also face a humongous rat-creature on spider legs, which is undoubtedly one of the most imaginative Sci-Fi creatures ever designed! But, as said, the overall tone of the film is deadly serious and thus features "The Angry Red Planet" a philosophical climax about the Martians being vastly superior to us and they do not want us to come and wreck their planet like we do with ours. In other words, Martians are intolerant racists but can you blame them? In spite of being the target of sexist jokes and disrespectful behavior ("I can't see your lovely curves in that spacesuit"), Nora Hayden depicts a strong female lead character. Ib Melchior's directing skills are somewhat pedestrian, but he certainly deserves all our respect for also being the writer of other terrific genre gems such as "Planet of Vampires", "Reptilicus" and "Robinson Crusoe on Mars".

..is Gerald Mohr's chest hair. Really. It's all out there in color and takes up a lot of room in the spaceship. Initially peeping out of the neckline of his spacesuit, and finally once completely revealed, it becomes as memorable as the famous bat-rat-crab-spider monster, and can match that beast follicle for follicle. Gerald gets infected by a giant amoeba, which means he has to wander around the spaceship with his shirt open for the last third of this supersaturated red solarized trip to a very unfriendly Mars. I think the Martians wanted him to get off their planet before he started to shed."Angry Red Planet" is about what you'd expect from an outer space adventure filmed in 1959. It has some big ideas that weren't served well by a small budget. A single low grade set serves for the spaceship interior and of course there's "Cinemagic", a process using red/pink filters which accounts for the eyeball blasting red sequences on Mars. Some surprising local creatures wander around creating havoc, among them are the bat-rat (everyone's favorite) and a fairly sexy carnivorous plant that looks like a huge vagina. Yes indeed. It must have been related to another lady parts monster seen a few years later in "Battle Beyond the Sun". Still, this features an ahead-of-its-time performance by Nora Hayden as a very smart scientist, a female who manages to upstage the men by coming back alive with Gerald Mohr and his chest hair.Nostalgic fun for a rainy afternoon.