Editorials
‘Ghosts of Mars’ – Revisiting John Carpenter’s Sci-fi Monster Mash
Horror legend John Carpenter turns 78 this Friday, and Halloween Night: John Carpenter Live from Los Angeles is now streaming on Screambox. Bloody Disgusting is celebrating with John Carpenter Week. After celebrating part of Carpenter’s Apocalypse Trilogy, Jenn Adams champions the horror legend’s sci-fi monster mash.
No one blends action and horror quite like John Carpenter.
Following the breakout success of his 1978 masterpiece Halloween, Carpenter would cement his status as a genre icon by directing a series of action horror hybrids, including Escape From New York (1981), Big Trouble in Little China (1986), and They Live (1988). These testosterone-fueled spectacles have become genre-defining classics and fan favorites alike thanks to Carpenter’s deft blend of thrilling action sequences, dark humor, and horrific setups thrust upon uniquely likeable anti-heroes.
While these films, and the majority of Carpenter’s extensive filmography, have proved they can stand the test of time, his 2001 film Ghosts of Mars has been largely forgotten. Featuring the director’s trademark themes of paranoia and isolation, this 2001 Martian showdown shares DNA with many of his most popular genre entries. Ghosts of Mars may be the least successful entry in an impressive career, but this cinematic curiosity has won its share of cult obsessives while veering dangerously close to “so bad it’s good” territory.
In the year 2176, Mars has been mostly colonized and is governed by a diplomatic matriarchy. When a rogue train approaches the city of Chryse, a search team finds Police Lieutenant Melanie Ballard (Natasha Henstridge) alone and handcuffed to her bunk. Called before a military tribunal, she’s asked to explain her spectacularly failed mission and the deaths of everyone else on her squad. In a series of overlapping flashbacks, she remembers her mission to a remote mining outpost to retrieve a convicted felon known as Desolation Williams (Ice Cube). But they arrive to find the village deserted and the mess hall filled with decapitated bodies hanging from the ceiling by their feet.
As they search the outpost, Ballard and her team discover a handful of frightened survivors, some of whom have barricaded themselves in jail cells. Science Officer Whitlock (Joanna Cassidy) explains that the mine uncovered a cadre of disembodied spirits determined to possess and destroy what they perceive as a human invasion of their home planet. Thrust together by circumstance, Williams and Ballard must form an uneasy alliance in order to escape the Martian canyon alive.
While based on an exciting premise, Ghosts of Mars is hampered by an admittedly clunky script and a budget woefully unequipped to handle the film’s ambitious effects. Though the red environment is visually stunning, many sets look decidedly cheap, particularly the mine’s exterior shots. The story manages to be simultaneously predictable and outlandish, with jarring moments of stunning violence and gore intermingling with nonsensical narrative beats.
Ballard struggles with an addiction to pills that winds up protecting her from alien possession, but this plot device contradicts everything we know about the straight-laced lieutenant, and we never learn enough to make it make sense. We also learn very little about the notorious Desolation Williams, and it’s nearly impossible to get a read on the character. We’re led to believe he’s been driven to a life of crime by Mars’ exploitative system, but there’s not much in the script to back this up, and he winds up feeling like a by-the-numbers bad guy with a heart of gold.
The film boasts an impressive cast of mostly known actors following recent hits. A former model, Henstridge was riding high off her breakout role as a murderous alien in Roger Donaldson’s sci-fi hit Species and its resulting sequel. Ice Cube had similarly parlayed a successful music career into remarkable performances in John Singleton’s Boyz n the Hood and Higher Learning, followed by F. Gary Gray’s stoner comedy Friday. As rookie cop Bashira Kincaid, Clea DuVall was following recent teen hits The Faculty and Girl, Interrupted, while Jason Statham (playing Sgt Jericho Butler) was best known for Guy Ritchie’s 1998 crime comedy Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. Jackie Brown and Bones star Pam Grier plays Commander Helena Braddock.
While this may all look great on paper, the main cast has almost no chemistry with each other and never really seem like they belong on Mars. Henstridge tries to create a female version of Carpenter’s iconic Snake Plisskin (Kurt Russell), but can’t summon the gravitas to pull it off. After an hour of brushing off Butler’s unwanted flirtation, she suddenly agrees to have sex with him, but a distraction interrupts their interlude, and the relationship is never mentioned again.
Despite these glaring flaws, Ghosts of Mars compensates with a lot of heart and a surprising amount of oddball humor. A master of his craft, Carpenter knows how to construct a scene and almost seems to lean into the feeling of artificiality. While not quite the intentional comedy of his fan-favorite Big Trouble in Little China, several bizarre moments spark belly laughs. Just moments after rescuing Williams, his brother Uno (Duane Davis) and a few goons accidentally lock themselves in his cell, immediately handing back hard-won power to Ballard and her team. When an ingenious plan to run for a train fails — because the train simply isn’t there — Williams launches a direct attack on the Ghosts, extending his arms to fire dual machine guns into the night.
While preparing for this ultimately doomed mission, Dos (Lobo Sebastian) gets high and attempts to flirt by opening a can with a machete, only to also chop off his thumb. Williams deems the injury “beautiful” and then laughs as his bleeding friend falls to the floor. And that’s not to mention a jaw-dropping coda in which he and Ballard dismiss dueling suggestions that they should swap allegiances with a simultaneous, “Nah” before they head out to kill more Martian Ghosts with their trusty silver machine guns.
Amidst these moments of surprising humor are extended sequences of impressive action. The Ghosts have built a ferocious army of possessed minors who seem to function as a murderous hive mind. Shortly after infection, the victim exhibits signs of disorientation, which quickly gives way to unbridled aggression. They begin mutilating their bodies with decorative shards of metal and fashioning jewelry out of the dismembered bodies of their victims. Though we never see them feast on human flesh, the Ghosts file their teeth down the cannibal points.
Ordinarily, this would seem like a terrifying cross between the Crawlers of Neil Marshall’s harrowing The Descent or the feral cannibals of Jack Ketchum’s Off Season. But these Ghosts are styled in futuristic black leather infused with heavy Mad Max-style energy. Their leader is a hulking brute cheekily known as Big Daddy Mars (Richard Cetrone), who galvanizes the alien army while decked out in black leather pants and heavy shoulder pads. Like a cross between Kiss’ Gene Simmons and Clive Barker’s Pinhead (Doug Bradley), he roars through the film commanding his ever soldiers with effusive rage and grisly aggression.
In fact, the entire Ghost army feels pulled from an early aughts music video, their battle sequences set to Carpenter’s infectious rock score. With their industrial weapons and converted blades, they descend on the human survivors with murderous glee, seemingly impervious to fear or pain. Along with barbaric blades, they also hurl sharp discs capable of decapitating limbs at the slightest touch. While some one-on-one flights feel noticeably staged, large-scale battle sequences are unabashedly fun.
Well-versed in the art of action cinema, Carpenter treats us to a number of impressive throwdowns, spiraling all over the doomed mining town. The Ghost horde not only storms the mine’s police station, referencing the director’s 1976 Assault on Precinct 13, but they also follow survivors into the open courtyard, a bloody affair made all the more spectacular thanks to omnipresent fire and massive explosions lighting up Mars’ blood-red exterior. A final sequence sees Williams and Ballard fight a hideously burned Big Daddy Mars on the roof of the train as it speeds through the crimson night.
Carpenter’s propulsive score — executed by legendary guitarists Steve Vai, Robin Finck, and Buckethead — adds urgency and excitement to each action set piece. But these sequences can’t quite overcome the decidedly campy atmosphere that harkens back to a bygone era. After all, when compared with The Wachowskis’ The Matrix, released just two years earlier, the film’s special effects and fight sequences leave much to be desired.
While Ghosts of Mars might sit well alongside Carpenter’s earlier films, particularly the genre curio They Live, 21st-century audiences expect more in terms of visual effects, and the film winds up feeling like a trip down memory lane. But there’s an unabashed charm to the experience of watching this bombastic popcorn movie that continues to grow as the years go by.
I’m not claiming Ghosts of Mars is as good as the aforementioned action comedy, and it pales in comparison to Carpenter’s The Thing and Halloween, but if you can survive a strained script, bizarre casting, and plot holes big enough to house a space train, there’s a lot to love in this Martian monster mash.
Follow along all week long as we salute John Carpenter.
Editorials
Not Another ‘Scary Movie’: Revisiting Forgotten Parody ‘Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th’
After Scream (1996) made a killing at the box office, as well as won over critics and audiences, a lot of folks in the movie biz thought they could do the same thing (and yield similar results). That thing, of course, being a slasher. Most of these opportunists wound up being pretty straightforward; they were low on humor or commentary. Yet others, like Scary Movie (2000), saw the potential for spoofing Scream, and acted on that impulse with both haste and excitement.
A few months after the Wayans’ comedy first hit theaters, Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th landed on the USA Network, as part of the channel’s “Shriek Week” programming. That straight-to-cable (then home video) destination is possibly why many people still don’t know about this one. Or they simply chose to forget. Whatever the reason, only one of these two horror parodies came out on top—and it’s certainly not the movie where Coolio channeled Prince, and Tom Arnold saved the day.
Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th previously went by the name of I Know What You Screamed Last Semester. That Trimark acquisition then settled on a wordier title, just so it could avoid the litigious wrath of Miramax Films. Folks may or may not remember that Columbia Pictures was sued over the “implied connection” between I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997) and Scream. So, yeah, there was no way that this competing Scream parody wasn’t going to be kept on a tight rein.
A Heavy Reliance on Late ’90s TV References
Simon Rex, Julie Benz, Majandra Delfino, Harley Cross, Danny Strong, Tom Arnold and Tiffani-Amber Thiesen in Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th.
Naturally, there would be similarities between Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th and Scary Movie—their scripts are built on the backs of the same two movies. It goes without saying that the other big slasher of the 1990s, I Know What You Did Last Summer, was as much of a target as Scream. However,the film pads itself with more TV references than Scary Movie did.
Half the cast coming off of (and in some cases, returning to) a WB show could be a reason why. Dawson’s Creek is particularly zeroed in on, based on how there’s a central character named “Dawson Deery“, and how the teen drama’s teacher-student affair plotline is satirized to the nth degree. As if there weren’t enough nods to television, Baywatch, VH1’s Pop Up Video, and even those cheesy Mentos commercials all serve as joke prompts.
Shriek director John Blanchard and writers Sue Bailey and Joe Nelms all hailed from television, so it’s understandable that they would stick close to home. The movie’s humor in general makes more sense, in light of learning that Blanchard worked on SCTV, Kids in the Hall, and MADtv. The writers, on the other hand, were each fairly green, with Bailey being the most experienced of the two; she wrote and produced the game show BattleBots. Nevertheless, they, plus Blanchard, churned out a passable, joke-a-minute movie. The whole thing is staggeringly of its time, but no one here was aiming for longevity.
Having seen enough of these kinds of movies, we know to expect jokes of the low-hanging fruit variety. That’s the parody’s whole prime directive. From the characters having names like “Screw Frombehind” and “Doughy Primesuspect”, to stereotyping that feels taboo nowadays, this is a movie from a different era of comedy. Its coarse, corny, and unapologetic sense of humor won’t sit well with everyone in these more enlightened times. In which case, Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th can be treated as a time capsule.
Does Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th Humor Still Hold Up Today?
“You may already be a victim”—Someone receives a most peculiar threatening piece of mail in Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th.
Although Shriek doesn’t live up to its own claims of being so funny that you’ll die of laughter, its bawdier parts could still lead to some nervous laughter. For instance, after this movie’s parallel to Drew Barrymore’s Scream character is done in—not by the killer but by a bug zapper—the movie throws a newspaper next to the victim’s fresh corpse. The headline? “Popular slut killed! Football team mourns”.
We then move on to the wacky and inappropriate goings-on at Bulimia Falls High School, home of the Hurlers. At this nexus of constant absurdity, indecency, and surrealism, students are seen fornicating on the lawn, cheerleading squad applicants are advised to be comfortable with partial nudity, and terrorists openly prepare for an anthrax attack. It can be a tad jarring to watch, especially if you didn’t grow up witnessing this style of comedy firsthand. Hell, even if you did, you may still have a “what the hell were they thinking?” reaction.
It’s not just the aggressively edgy humor here that can make you chuckle—the slapstick, the sight gags, and the ribaldry all have a decent chance of landing. The movie’s own villain, whose hockey mask was instantly transformed into a crudely Ghostface-esque one after coming in contact with an open flame, commits more cheap laughs than kills. His and his victims’ chase sequences, most of which are cartoonish in nature, left this writer grinning. The Scooby-Doo fan in me also totally ate up that clever unmasking joke.
Final Thoughts on This Forgotten Horror Parody
Shriek If You Know What Did Last Friday the 13th
Now, the jury is still out on whether these comedies are to blame for the death of the first slasher revival. There is more to consider than some parodies. At the very least, the likes of Scary Movie didn’t exactly encourage big studios to put their money on a trend that was being derided to death (and not as profitable as the spoofs). These sorts of movies also felt unnecessary at the time, given how their principal inspiration is already a deconstruction of the genre. But like anything else that quickly becomes popular, mockery is unavoidable.
Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th is indeed a movie nobody asked for, much less needed. As a sample of pre-millennium humor and cultural attitudes, it’s not always precise. But as I’ve laid out, your mileage may vary. Horror parodies typically don’t have the best track record, so managing one’s own expectations here is recommended.
Upon rewatching, I for one laughed a bit more than I did back then. Only this time, I responded to the jokes that my younger self didn’t notice or find all that amusing. So it just goes to show that the movies don’t change—we do.
Harley Cross and Majandra Delfino must unmask the killer a number of times in Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th before learning their true identity.
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