The Sicko Canon: Ghosts of Mars

Welcome to The Sicko Movie Canon. Every so often I will be adding a film to the canon that embodies the sicko spirit. These are the films for the true film lover. The deep diver. The weirdo nerd. Our first addition is John Carpenter’s Ghosts of Mars.

John Carpenter has made two of the greatest horror movies ever made (Halloween, The Thing), two of the greatest action movies ever made (Escape from New York, They Live), one of the greatest cult movies ever (Big Trouble in Little China), and 5 other pantheon genre classics (Assault on Precinct 13, The Fog, Starman, Prince of Darkness, In the Mouth of Madness), and he can’t get a movie funded.

The movie industry is constantly in flux, the amount of filmmakers that can still get a large budget to make original films has shrunk smaller than ever. Christopher Nolan and PTA’s newest movies have been based on Thomas Pynchon and Homer. Martin Scorsese and David Fincher have retreated to the streaming bosoms of Netflix and Apple. Greta Gerwig has adapted Louisa May Alcott and its soon to release yet another adaption of The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe. IP is the most important driver of movie releases, above originality, talent, and even celebrity.

Carpenter isn’t a complete stranger to IP. He has adapted Stephen King and remade The Thing from Another World, but if you’ve seen The Thing you know that even his remakes are imbued with his originality and aesthetic and create something completely new.

Carpenter, a known Howard Hawks acolyte, has remade Rio Bravo a few times. Hawks’ classic 1959 western is about a rag tag group of cowboys under siege from a never ending horde of enemies. Carpenter’s second feature, the mean-spirited (meant as a compliment) Assault on Precinct 13, transposes Rio Bravo’s action to South Central L.A., and in his penultimate feature, Ghost of Mars, he remakes it again, this time on the red planet.

Ghosts of Mars is a load bearing film for the Cinema Sickos ethos. It is the quintessence of all we desire from the cinematic experience - a slam bang genre picture, and like all John Carpenter films, it has a few interesting social/political ideas underneath the surface.

Because of my age Carpenter’s late work was my gateway into his world. I had seen Halloween, but The Thing, They Live and Escape from New York were still in the offing. Vampires and Ghosts of Mars were my intro to Carpenter’s unique tone. Of GoM, Carpenter has stated he was trying to make a movie where "the universe allows its characters and plot points to be silly without being full-fledged comedies." This is all I want in art. The combination of Jason Statham (who I knew and loved from Guy Richie’s Snatch), Pam Grier (who I knew and loved as Jackie Brown), and Natasha Henstridge (who I knew and loved from the TV commercials for Species, playing an alien so sexy it was worth having your brain ripped out just to be close to her) were ample reasons to seek out Ghosts of Mars.

I trudged my little 13 year old self down the highway to the K-mart that I knew would give me no trouble trying to buy rated R movies and I blind bought Ghost of Mars. Shockingly, I friggin loved it. A cool new version of Night of the Living Dead meets Rio Bravo, featuring Ice Cube on mars(!) wielding dual machine guns(!!), What’s not to like? The soundtrack features a track called “Pam Grier’s Head” by Anthrax. It wouldn’t be until years later I found out that this was thought of as a big misfire. One that basically ended Carpenter’s career. Roger Ebert, the god, gave it 3 stars! I didn’t understand. Though it has been somewhat reclaimed by a certain sector of the internet cinemirati (including an awesome Indicator Blu Ray release, which I may or may not own (I do)) it is still low down on the Carpenter totem. Understandably. It is peak Nu Metal Cinema, and Carpenter has no less than 10 stone cold classics. Ebert sated in his review - “Ghosts of Mars delivers on its chosen level and I enjoyed it.” It’s the phrase “chosen level” that resonates with me the most now. Similar to Ebert’s adage “it’s not what it’s about it’s how it’s about it.” For his faults Ebert was usually pretty good about meeting a film on its “chosen level.”

Children, around the turn of the millennium, we were really into Mars - Red Planet, Mission to Mars, and Ghosts of Mars. The bulletproof set up of the picture is a team of futuristic Mars cops led by Pam Grier show up at a outpost in the Mars boonies to do a routine prisoner transport, although when they arrive the population of the entire town is either dead or missing. The prisoner, played by Ice Cube, is named Desolation Williams. Carpenter is master of names, and considering the film was written to be the third in the Escape from New York series, it makes sense that his lead character had to have a name that rivals “Snake Plissken.” The team of future police is filled out by a no-nonsense Natasha Henstridge, a lecherous pre-fame Jason Statham, and a squirrely Clea Duval.

The film becomes one of Carpenter’s many secret westerns and structurally bears more than a passing similarity to Carpenter’s incredible debut - Assault on Precinct 13. Eventually the cops must team with their prisoner to take on a more existential threat: an army of Mars zombies led by Richard Cetrone in a wonderfully guttural performance playing a character named Big Daddy Mars that looks exactly like the wrestler Sting. The film is told as a series of flashbacks within flashbacks and includes a climax that looks like it came from a 90s TV show, including the very charming thing of low angle shots of explosions launching people 30 feet in the air. Carpenter said in an interview “I just love Westerns. My favorite Western is Rio Bravo – its situation and set-up. So I [could] remake that a hundred times and be happy.” HOLLYWOOD YOU’RE BLOWING IT. Just give this man money and let him do exactly that.