1960s SF film

[peteryoung]

Mars Needs Women, 1967, USA   DIRECTED BY LARRY BUCHANAN
Larry Buchanan was known for both working under tight schedules and also radically cutting production corners, and Mars Needs Women is an example of both: the amount of Air Force stock footage used is proportionally higher in this film than just about any other Hollywood z-movie. It also took a total of two weeks to make: Buchanan would often finish his screenplays one day and begin shooting the next. One noticeably odd thing about this film is that it's something of an anachronism, as if production values or any degree of sophistication in the screenplay had been frozen back in time: you feel like you're watching a movie ten years older than it actually is. It's also a film that I wanted to be far more camp and the fact that most of the Martian acting is so deliberately unnuanced perhaps leaves them wide open to some uninvited reinterpretation: even though the main star Tommy Kirk had been released from his contract with Disney a couple of years previously because of his sexuality, and while there's little visible enthusiasm from the five clean-cut handsome Martians for their cruising Houston for available women, there's also little room for any suggestion of homoeroticism (though one could leap unfairly upon a mention of "a freak in their genetic code"). Abductee Yvonne Bolan also played Batgirl in the 1964 TV series of Batman, and here too she is the liveliest actor on set. To get the complete story it's sometimes hard to fight the feeling that Mars Needs Women is intentionally sleep-inducing, there's so little material that's visually captivating, although the Martian ship is as retro-cool as their shiny Martian uniforms and headgear are just plain ridiculous. A pretty bad film compared with other science fiction being made around the same time, but as it's meant as harmless fun it's probably best to just see it as neither great nor completely worthless.

Comments

[dfordoom.livejournal.com]

I've seen one Larry Buchanan movie. A TV movie called It's Alive (not to be confused with the 1970s movie of the same name). It was amazingly bad, and also not quite camp enough to succeed on that level.