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The Worst Film Ever

Plenty to Like, Plenty to Dislike

It's an amazing and heartbreaking story.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

First, I want to say that this movie was not what I expected from just the title. I was caught up in the story very quickly. Peter Graves is well-cast as the scientist Chris Croyn (sp?) The viewer has to take a lot on faith here. It isn't clear how the "messages" are decoded but that really doesn't matter once we see what the messages say. I found this film to be about clear communication and the panic that can happen when people misinterpret what they hear or read. This is a good one to see because it takes us back to a different time in our history. The Iron Curtain is still there and there is a lot of mistrust. Side note: young Stuart Croyn is a wonderful character! I'm so glad he was given a big part to play!

Peter Graves, looking like a poster boy for the Gestapo, is about as dull as a fifty cent knife. He's married to a tiresome, whiny woman who complains constantly. I won't go into the science (which is so vacuous and imprecise as to be laughable) because this is a rallying point for the McCarthyites of the early fifties. Science is actually the enemy here. The message is to go back to the caves and wear sandals. Did you see any black people in the movie. Did you see any Hindus or Native Americans. Apparently the Martians had a copy of the King James Version of the Bible. They suddenly began to speak in Thees and Thous in their messages. The concept of this film rolls along nicely. Peter and his wife are blamed for the destruction of the Western economy. This in itself is ridiculous. Since the Martians never do any more than talk. In the end we know why. Did the people who made this film think the world stupid? I guess when you see the workings of Tailgunner Joe at the hearings, we kind of know an answer to this question.

I saw this movie in 2013 and I think it has some good ideas. After 61 years we see that some things are naive and anyone who likes action movies will not like this movie. But who likes intellectual movies might like this one. 100 years more and many ideas of this movie will make a lot of sense: the collapse of the political and economic institutions and people turning to religion. Unfortunately the movie seems much like a play with a very passive action. Peter Graves also does not help the action. This is not very appealing to today viewers. I think it would be a good idea to do a remake. Taking out the bad things, it is a good movie!

If Red Planet Mars is not at the top of the approved list of films for the 700 Club than Pat Robertson missed a bet. But ironically the film did call something quite right, the fall of the 'godless' Soviet Union.Peter Graves and Andrea King are a pair of husband and wife scientists who manufacture something called a hydrogen valve. The presence of pure hydrogen allows for ordinary radio waves to magnified to an exponential distance. So Graves decides to see if he can contact the Red Planet Mars and find out if there is any life on it once and for all.The hydrogen valve is not of his invention, the blueprint was discovered in the Nazi archives of a missing scientist played by Herbert Berghof and Graves followed his work. Berghof like all good former Nazis is hiding out in South America, in a remote place in the Andes where the famous Christ of the Andes looks down on him. By the way the real Christ of the Andes statue does not look like that at all, what the producers used was a snowbound replica of the famous Christ statue that overlooks Rio De Janeiro harbor.Berghof is in the pay of the Russians, but he's got no love for them either, he remembers both America and the Soviets joining forces to sink his beloved Fuehrer, so Berghof wants payback for both. Economic messages showing that USA technology is woefully out of date send our capitalist economy into collapse. But later messages from Mars of a religious nature send the Soviet Union into something very similar to what happened after the Berlin Wall came down. Is all this product of Berghorf's fevered brain?For that you have to watch the film which during the Cold War was the wish dream of every anti-Communist in the world. The film is part science fiction part fantasy and all Cold War propaganda. But in fact the Soviet Union did fall and the Russian Orthodox Church in this film took the political reins of the country. They didn't do it in real life, but their influence is felt and the reactionary policies they do endorse aren't any better for their own people than the sterile political system they helped overthrow.Interesting also that in 1952 there is no question that the movie would show Christianity as the one and only true religion out there. If someone were to remake that film now, a more pluralistic society would be shown to be the Utopian one.Red Planet Mars is one of the Cold War era films that is now a curiosity to be viewed and studied as a symbol of American attitudes during the Fifties.