Mars Needs Women

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.

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."

A genetic problem on Mars has decreased their female population so that there is only 1 female born to every 100 males. They believe that they can solve their problems by acquiring a few choice females from the Earth, for scientific study experimentation, and they're prepared to get the women whether they receive cooperation or not.

If properly fleshed out, the premise could have promise. But it's not fleshed out, and Mars Needs Women is loaded with problems. The plot as it stands makes very little logical sense. Not that this is a completely unwatchable film--it has many "so bad it's good" qualities, and my final score was a 6 out of 10.

Another problem is that the film seems extremely low budget. They barely even built any sets. Quite a few shots are just a couple of characters talking, framed tightly, against a solid-color backdrop. Most of the "fancier" shots, such as those of military aircraft flying and landing, are stock footage. The film is also full of padding--the stock footage goes on far longer than it should have. There is a scene that seems to go on forever where we just see a loudspeaker and listen to mostly unintelligible "military radio" banter. There is a striptease scene (apparently strippers are one of the prime candidates for the kind of women that Mars needs) that goes on for minutes and minutes with the stripper taking nothing off.

The Martians are just like humans for the most part, sparing the trouble of expensive make-up and sparing having to explain why Earth women would work for the task at hand. The Martian costumes are just shiny material with something like bathing caps on their heads and big headphone cups on their ears (this aspect is somewhat reminiscent of My Favorite Martian, and was even echoed in later material like Mork & Mindy, but in Mars Needs Women it doesn't have the intentional humor).

So why did I give this film a rating as high as 6 out of 10? Well, believe it or not, a few aspects of the film work as they were intended to. The whole sequence of the two Martians at the hotel, acquiring a press badge and so forth, was actually engaging and not really unintentionally funny. But most of the film is unintentionally funny, and most of it works on that level, too. You can laugh at the bad decisions made due to budget. You can laugh at the pacing. You can laugh at the hammy dialogue. You can laugh at how the Martians pick their women. And most of all, the more you spend time analyzing the ridiculous plot, the more you'll laugh.

I love this movie because it is just so darn sincere. There is not a moment in the film that suggests its author understands the ridiculousness of his premise. This wants to be a good movie, an intelligent piece of science fiction, and yet, it is called Mars Needs Women. The movie even has some literary pretensions showing.

Everything about this movie is inept, but done with such earnestness that it is reminiscent of when a cute little kid says something totally absurd and laughable with a straightforward demeanor that just makes it all that much funnier. I rank this up (or is that down) with camp classics like Glen or Glenda. I just found it very funny.