I Saw A Film!

Set in the far future of 1990, when man has made trivial traveling to the moon, The question of whether or not there is other intelligent life in the universe is shattered when a message arrives from Mars that Basil Rathbone as Dr. Faraday decodes as a distress call. Our fabulous crew, including a baby Dennis Hopper, of intrepid explorers suits up and jumps in their animated spaceship and heads off for Mars. When they get to the red planet the team locates only one dead astronaut and instead of being amazed at the discovery–the sort of thing that should rock the world–they end up pondering where the rest of the impending visitors are. Well, they locate one survivor a green lady, in a spacesuit on Phobos. There is some logistical nonsense and they finally juggle the alien (a very important find), who says nothing, but likes smiling at the fellows, onto the ship for the return to Earth. Unfortunately on the way it turns out our new green alien is a kind ectoparasite and pulls a bit too much blood from its hypnotized hosts. Before long it’s discovered that our blood-sucking alien with the behive hairdo has laid some jello-shot looking eggs. Sadly, she’s a hemophiliac and a defensive scratch from a lady astronaut (more feminism!) causes the poor green creature to scream, run and expire. Oh well.

John Saxon is a lot of fun to see in this alongside Hopper. Basil Rathbone sounds remarkably like he was filling in for John Carradine. The flight sequences look so charmingly home-made and the sound effects so like a Krautrock offering from Popul Vuh you can’t help tripping a bit. Especially when you’re staring into the eyes of Dennis Hopper close-ups. These films always manage to imagine that Earth in space would be the domain of a handful of not especially qualified folks. These few louts making all our decisions and representing the human race, instead of a vast team of networking international people who would necessarily be on board with all the decisions and analysis of data.

This one is short and sweet and almost more like a Futurama episode than a sci-fi movie. It’s too bad Leela wasn’t in this. Free on Prime.