Guilty Pleasure #121: The Angry Red Planet (dir by Ib Melchior)

1960’s The Angry Red Planet opens with the return of the first manned space flight to Mars. When the rocketship reaches Earth, NASA is stunned to discover that only two members of the crew — Iris “Irish” Ryan (Naura Hayden) and Colonel Thomas O’Bannion (Gerald Mohr) — are still alive and that O’Bannion seems to have been infected by an intergalactic fungus of some some sort. Iris tells the story about what happened during their fateful trip to Mars.

I always enjoy the cheap science fiction films of the 50s and 60s, especially the ones that were made before America even conquered the Moon or really even went into space. Not having anything to really guide their vision of space travel, these films almost always trotted out the old war movie stereotypes and dressed them in a shiny space suit. In The Angry Red Planet, there’s gravity in space and Prof. Theodore Gettell (Les Termayne) smokes a pipe on the ship. Warrant Officer Sam Jacobs (Jack Kruschen, who, the same year this film came out, gave an Oscar-nominated performance in The Apartment) reads comic books and wonders if there will be any life on Mars. Meanwhile, O’Bannion flirts outrageously with Iris and everyone drinks coffee.

The film starts out as a standard low budget sic-fi flick, complete with sexist humor and scientific gobbledeegook, but things pick up once the crew actually reaches Mars. Of course, the Mars that they find has plant life and looks absolutely nothing like the Mars that we all know and love. That’s a part of the film’s charm. Whenever the crew leaves their rocket and explores the Martian landscape, the film suddenly becomes red-tinted. The tinting works far better than it really has any right to. That said, I did look away from the screen a few times. My eyesight is already bad enough without burning it up by watching a tinted movie.

The highlight of the film is…. well, sometimes it’s better just to let the visuals do the talking.

As soon as this fellow showed up, I knew that I was watching some sort of classic.

The Angry Red Planet is a thoroughly silly and implausible movie but, like most guilty pleasures, it’s also a lot of fun. It’s one of the least accurate science fiction films ever made and I love it.

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