The last two cinematic journeys to the fourth rock from the sun have been bumpy trips: MISSION TO MARS was widely mocked for its lugubrious spirituality, while RED PLANET crashed and burned at the box office. Fortunately, genre auteur John Carpenter isn't the type of guy to blast off into ordinary Hollywood territory. JOHN CARPENTER'S GHOSTS OF MARS is a different sort of Mars movie: a high-octane action/horror/sci-fi hybrid about ancient Martian spooks who terrorize Earthling colonists on the red planet.
"It's a cross between THE WILD BUNCH and THE LONGEST DAY," explains Sandy King, the movie's producer (and Carpenter's wife). "Mars is the warrior planet - it's fascinated everybody for years. It seemed like a good place to take an action thriller just 'cause it's different and it could be a new frontier."
Because the movie's action unfolds less than two centuries into the future, director Carpenter envisioned an environment far different than the gleaming, high-tech settings found in most science fiction films.
"You go to another planet, even 174 years in the future, and it's not going to be THE JETSONS yet," King explains. "[This] is not a hardware picture and it's not a sci-fi picture in the techno sense - you're not going to see spaceships flying around. It's grittier."
Most of the story takes place in a remote mining outpost where a cop (Natasha Henstridge) has been dispatched to transfer bad-ass felon (Ice Cube) back to the main Martian city of Chryce. When the officer gets to town however, she discovers that the mining operations there have disturbed the ruins of an ancient civilization. A terrifying army of spirits is unleashed, killing everyone in the area except the criminals locked away in the local jail. To make the premise even knottier, Carpenter decided his Martian society would be matriarchal.
"The way that's manifested is that you have a lot more women in power," King says. "But those women are very matter-of-fact about their power. It just shifts the movie away from having all male characters. We have neat action women that span a 40-year age range, going from Clea DuVall to Rosemary Forsythe, Pam Grier and Joanna Cassidy. And they are all believable in these tough roles. When my girls kick ass, you buy it."
However, one kick-ass chick who didn't make it to the final cut was actress/singer Courtney Love (MAN ON THE MOON). Originally cast in the lead Martian cop role, Love had to drop out of the production after suffering an ankle injury. Although the filmmakers had to quickly recast the part with SPECIES seductress Henstridge, King says it was a surprisingly seamless process.
"There were a handful of actresses who were always under consideration from the get-go who could act the role and perform with the physicality needed for the part," she says. "Natasha had always been a consideration. It wasn't a desperation move - we always thought she was a good choice. I think she's a stronger actress than she's been given credit for in the past, and we knew she was physically adept. She turned out to be a great sport and really fun loving."
The movie's titular villains, on the other hand, don't have much of a sense of humor. Carpenter decided the Martians should be ghosts from an ancient warrior civilization similar to the Celts or Zulus.
"The way they manifest themselves is that when they take over humans, they start filing their teeth down, taking other people's faces and using them as masks, piercing the bodies," King explains. "It's not Casper."
But the producer insists that GHOSTS OF MARS doesn't take a gore-filled approach with its special effects or makeup. Then again, this is John Carpenter's wife talking, so everything is relative.
"There's a lot of makeup for the ghosts because they're supposed to be tattooed and pierced, but it's more for fierceness than grossness," says King, before breaking out into giggles. "But I don't know if the beheadings come under that description or not."
