by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night’s Mars movie
screening in Golden Hill, http://marsmovieguide.com/,
billwas a double bill of a 1954 British “B” called Devil Girl from Mars and a 1964 (though imdb.com lists the date as
1965) American cheapie alternately called The Wizard of Mars and The Horrors of the Red Planet. Devil Girl from Mars was one of those weirdies in which a femme
fatale from another planet
descends on earth because millions of years of war between the sexes has
essentially emasculated the indigenous male population to the point where the
only way the Martian women are going to be able to make little Martians is if
they can import breeding stock from some other planet … and of course they’ve
chosen Earth because at just 33 million miles away at their closest point,
we’re practically their next-door neighbors. The gimmick on this one is that
the Martian spaceship, which looks less like a flying saucer than a flying
bathtub stopper (or maybe a flying merry-go-round, since it’s circled by a band
of flashing lights that rotates when the ship is in motion but grinds to a halt
after it lands), is flown by just one crew member, a hot-looking woman called
Nyah — it’s pronounced to rhyme with “Maya” but in cold print in the closing credits
it looks like a line from a Three Stooges script — played by Patricia Laffan
and dressed in an amazing form-fitting black polyvinyl chloride costume, with
an accompanying cape, that looks so spectacular Ronald Cobb got a special
credit for designing it. Alas, it also meant Laffan could neither eat nor drink
on set because the difficulty of getting her in — and, even more importantly,
out — of the costume meant they couldn’t risk losing valuable shooting time by
letting her use the restroom. (Some of the actors on the original Star Trek had this same problem: since Gene Roddenberry had
decided that 25th century clothes would have invisible fasteners
that didn’t exist in the 1960’s, many of the Star Trek actors literally had their costumes sewn on around them.)
Alas, the rest of Devil Girl
from Mars is pretty dull: it’s set
in a pub called the Bonnie Charlie in a remote part of Scotland, and it’s based
on a stage play by John C. Mather and James Eastwood (presumably no relation),
which Eastwood adapted into the film’s script and David MacDonald directed.
It’s all too obvious that this movie started out as a play since it almost
never leaves the first-floor room of that combination inn and pub; occasionally
we get a cut-away shot to one of the rooms or something from outside, but for
the most part we’re stuck in that room and things get awfully claustrophobic.
The human principals are scientist Arnold Hennessey (Joseph Tomelty, who looks
like some odd attempt to cross-breed Sydney Greenstreet and Robert Morley) and
his traveling companion, reporter Michael Carter (Hugh McDermott), who drive
out to Scotland to investigate a meteor that’s just fallen to Earth but end up
seven miles from where it fell. Carter shows up at the inn and immediately
falls in love with former model Ellen Prestwick (Hazel Court), who previously
had been in a relationship with the designer she was modeling for but broke it
off when she found out he was already married (to which I couldn’t help but
think, “A dress designer — married — to another woman?”), then fled to Scotland because he wasn’t about to take no for an
answer from her and she needed to hide out in as remote a location as possible
to keep him from finding her. There’s another star-crossed couple at the bar:
Doris (Adrienne Corri, whose most famous credit is as the rape victim Mrs.
Alexander in A Clockwork Orange), a barmaid who’s in love with escaped convict Robert Justin (Peter
Reynolds), who’s using the name “Albert Simpson” at the pub until reporter
Carter recognizes him and figures out who he really is. It seems that Justin
was in prison in the first place for murdering his wife, and Doris has forgiven
him for that but not for
leaving her to marry the wife he killed in the first place. There are also the
Jamiesons (John Laurie and Sophie Stewart, the latter in a marvelous busybody
performance that proves they didn’t break the mold after they made Una
O’Connor), the owners of the Bonnie Charlie; and Tommy (Anthony Richmond), your
typically obnoxious and insufferable movie kid.
The action, such as it is,
occurs when Nyah demands that one of the males in this unlikely assemblage
accompany her back to Mars and be her stud service — originally she was
supposed to arrive in London but she miscalculated her landing trajectory and ended
up stuck in the Scottish Highlands instead — and she’s also got an enforcer
robot named Chani. The film’s special effects are otherwise quite good, but it
loses all credibility when Chani enters and he’s basically just a big box with
a head, arms and legs sticking out in the appropriate places, the box being
mostly featureless except for four dials stretched across his chest and a few
other bits and pieces of holes and protuberances apparently meant to represent
controls. Nyah puts a force field around the pub to prevent anybody from
communicating with the world outside, and at one point, when Michael volunteers
to be her stud but then grabs her ray gun with which she controls the robot,
she manages to get it back from him and tells the group at the pub that out of
revenge for Michael’s attempted deception, she’s going to kill all of them
except for the one who agrees to go with her. Dr. Hennessey gets inside the
spacecraft and realizes its power source is a spherical nuclear core, and if
someone can get inside the ship and make the core go super-critical, it will
blow up the ship and the Devil Girl from Mars as well, though it will also be a
suicide mission for whichever Earthling tries it. Eventually Robert Justin
agrees to go inside the spaceship because as a convicted murder and escapee
from prison, he knows his life is forfeit anyway and he ultimately redeems
himself by blowing up the spaceship — represented by a cool little fireball
effect that consumes whatever model the production crew was using.
Devil
Girl from Mars is that frustrating sort
of movie that’s not good enough to be entertaining on its own merits but not
bad enough to work as camp, either; it’s got the usual impeccable acting from
the all-British cast (what is it with British actors? Is there some strain in the British DNA that
keeps churning out all these beautiful, well-spoken, reliable and always
convincing actors?) and a degree of understatement that’s refreshing,
especially given the melodramatic overwroughtness with which American filmmakers
usually handled plots like this. But it’s also dull, dull, dull, especially when Nyah isn’t on screen showing off
that ultra-cool costume designer Cobb made for her — the screening organizer
wondered why more recent “cosplayers” at fan conventions haven’t taken up her
dress: probably because of the sheer difficulty of taking it on and off and the
need to put various excretory functions “on hold” while wearing it.
