Mars Needs Women

Of all the sci-fi movies that I have seen that were filmed in Houston, this is among the best.

Mars Needs Women is watchable fun. Tommy Kirk pilots a spaceship with a crew of 4 Martian males into an abandoned ice making factory, which is spooky and heavy with the fetor of rotting chemical containers.

They have 24 hours to acquire 5 women who are both beautiful and healthy which they can use to repopulate their loathsome planet.

Tommy must assume the identity of a newspaper reporter and convince a rather strapping Yvonne (Batgirl) Craig through a series of soliloquies and expertly maneuvered tarradiddles that he is more than a bromide journalist rather he is ultimately the urbane, suave Prince Charming who can make her pretty little head swirl with thoughts beyond the realm of standardized lucubration. Behind her horn-rimmed glasses, she quivers for this alluring myrmidon from beyond the stars. He is captivated by this autochthonous siren. To want- to love- to live.

He in turn bespeaks the confusion of his soul, an embodiment of the whole piece, rightly an olla podrida of mental acuity and the most conspicuous of all jigs; that quasi-caromed, state of palpitate we mortals call seduction.

It gives us much to mull. It is to cinema what T.S. Eliot's "The Wasteland" was to prose; only this classic has a stripper, a groovy soundtrack, and a harpoon gun.

Sometimes bad movies are just bad. Not campy. Not funny bad. Just awful. This is #1 with a bullet.

This is what I call a "Fast Forward Film", meaning you can put your VCR on fast forward for extended periods, and not miss anything important. Actually there isn't anything important or interesting in this entire flick. There's about five minutes of story, so to pad things out, someone will walk into a room, and then walk around the room, then pour themselves a drink, then walk around the room again, just to kill time.

If I can convince even one of you not to waste your time with this film, I can die a happy man.

I'm not kidding. Don't believe for one second that Tommy Kirk and Yvonne Craig star in this waste of celluloid. The actual star (at least for the first 15 minutes) is a white air raid speaker broadcasting a blow-by-blow account of the incredible stock footage scenes!

The cameraman does his best to capture the emotions of the speaker, zooming in and out of the speaker during moments of high drama, captured for all time in glorious stock footage.

By the time Kirk and Craig show up, you'll miss the speaker and the stock footage. At least they were a more interesting couple. And remember..."don't eat the Earth food."

Supposedly the location is Houston the movie was all shot in the Dallas area. You get a couple skyline shots,a couple scenes at the old White Rock Lake Pump station-where the spaceship was hidden, The Athens Strip-actual name of Striptease Bar where Bubbles Cash performed in reality, Fair Park and even out at Collins Radio in Richardson where the big Radar Telescope dishes can be seen. There are also some scenes around Southern Methodist University (SMU).

It is a campy movie, really hiring an actual Striptease artist to play a stripper? So set back and laugh and try to spot bits and pieces of Dallas from almost fifty years ago!

The aptly titled "Mars Needs Women" is a rather tepid piece of science-fiction, that feels like you're watching someone on a Sunday afternoon, the movie just kind of loafs around, takes it easy, never tries to over exert itself. It's got some fine cheesy moments (And Yvonne Craig is about as sexy as they come), but overall, more of a yawn than a laugh riot.

Tommy Kirk is one of the Martians desperately in need of women (I guess their bizarre pick-up moves aren't scoring the babes like they used to on Mars), and they come to Houston, TX to try to get them. Well, since Kirk's the leader, I'm sure you can assume it all goes badly, and that the effects are silly, the plot inane, and the dialogue downright awful in points. This you know.

But you might not know that the Martians can teleport, but still need cars. And they can hypnotize women, yet they resort to trying to seduce them (In really awkward ways too...a planetarium for a date? Yuck.) You are probably also unaware that scene after scene go by without a single piece of dialogue or plot development (The stock footage of the aircraft scene is my favorite...five minutes of a big plane deploying a small plane, which then lands, while 5 different faceless people with near-identical voices converse on an intercom). Just so you know.

At least I don't blame the Martians for wanting these women, they are all rather fetching, especially Yvonne "Call me Batgirl and I break you" Craig as a sex specialist/astronomer/geneticist/librarian (I dunno, she's like the Bionic Woman or something). Call me crazy, but I love a girl in turtle shell glasses.

My own personal tastes aside, there is some good mocking material in "Mars Needs Women" but not as much as a "No Holds Barred" or a "Gymkata." Not for lightweights.