Mars Needs Women

1967 sci-fi nonsense

Rating: 4/20

Plot: See title.

I took notes while watching this movie, but I can't read any of them:

"a short otter to cheetah"
"Martian flashlights--gnarly"
"mok lather then scientific centuries"
"hop nature/pot hypnotic states"
"That's a long chance!" "Time is short--we have to take long chances."

Ok, so I can read that last one. I'm just not sure why I wrote it down. I must have liked it. This is a film from my main man Larry Buchanan, maker of this and this and this and that. The latter is a Manos Award winner, and one of those is called Attack of the the Eye Creatures according to the title screen. This one's rated a 4/20 which makes it the best movie of his that I've ever seen. Nondescript Martians [By the way--Isn't 1967 a little late to have "Martian" movies? I'm not an expert on the history of astronomy or anything, but this is well after we knew that Mars didn't have anything living on it, right?] body snatch some women for their snatches, and nondescript heroes have to stop them. The acting conists of reading lines although Yvonne Craig is in there. So is troubled Disney actor Tommy Kirk who called this "undoubtedly one of the stupidest motion pictures ever made," apparently before he was involved with Buchanan's It's Alive. The most inspired performance is from "Bubbles" Cash who plays a stripper and one of the Martians' abductees. Blue-tinted stock footage stretches this into a feature length, as do a whole lot of scenes where people just kind of stand around and wait. My favorite bit is when the Martians have a conversation about neckties, a "male vanity" with "no practice purpose" that Martians gave up a long time ago. This movie isn't as obviously inept as Buchanan's other movies, but with silly Martian costumes, special effects that barely pass as special effects, and bad actors reading bad writing, it's worth the time for fans of crappy movies. And the extended screen time that "Bubbles" Cash gets definitely helps.

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