Ghosts of Mars -- a review

I was watching Doom on Netflix recently, and throughout the movie, I kept thinking of a much better take on the same material. Based on a video game, Doom starred Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson as a super Marine in charge of a team of super Marines who are sent to Mars when the interplanetary colony suffers a strange outbreak of videogame violence. Despite all the shooting and alien gore, Doom managed to be extremely boring, which made me reach for the OTHER “there’s trouble on Mars” movie, Ghosts of Mars.

Released just a few years before Doom, Ghosts of Mars was helmed by legendary director John Carpenter and starred Ice Cube and Natasha Henstridge. Instead of a team being dispatched from Earth to solve whatever problem has arisen on the Red Planet, in Ghosts of Mars, it’s the Martian colonists who deal with the red menace. Henstridge plays a member of the Mars Police Force who is sent with a team of other officers to pick up the notorious criminal Desolation Williams (Ice Cube). But a regular job of picking up a criminal quickly goes sideways when the cops discover that everyone in the entire town has been massacred.

Well, not everybody. The criminals in the local jail, including Desolation, have survived--all while being locked in their cells--but nobody knows for sure what’s going on. Until a archeologist (Joana Cassidy) explains that rage-filled ghosts of the previous Martian residents were released when a recently dug up vault was opened, unleashing these ghost all over the Martian landscape, where they possess the humans, who promptly kill those who have not been turned.

While it may sound just as hokey as Doom, Ghost of Mars was directed with Carpenter’s usual stylish flair, using Southwest American desert locations for the terra-formed Martian landscape. This movie was clearly made on a smaller budget than Doom, yet Ghost of Mars ably pulls off its Martian settings in a manner that’s believable. The storyline is also treated with intelligence with fully fleshed out characters played by a superb cast that also includes Pam Grier, Jason Statham and Clea Duvall.

And unlike Doom, Ghost of Mars has clearly defined villains who are extremely intimidating. They are a variation on the traditional zombies, but they are still alive and can run very fast. They’re led by an unnamed leader (played by stuntman Richard Cetrone) who is called Big Daddy Mars in the film’s end credits. As their leader, Big Daddy Mars serves as a much-needed focal point for the villains.

Thanks to its touches of humor, as well as the intensity of its suspenseful scenes, Ghosts of Mars is still a vastly entertaining blend of science fiction and horror that holds up very well nearly twenty years after its original release. --SF

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