I found the Ghost of Mars to be full of wonderful violence and graphic scenes. The special effects were pretty cool and the body count was high. What I didn’t like was an implausible storyline and many unanswered questions. The acting was not all that great either, but that is not something you would expect in a film of this genre. The movie takes place in the future entirely on the planet Mars where we can now breathe the air, only it supposedly took a long time for us to get used to that. The year is like 24 something and we are stripping the planet of its resources and mining camps are all over. The Martian police seem to be letches and users of illegal substances. In fact if you come away with anything from the film it would be that if you want to survive on Mars you need to take hallucinogenic drugs.

The film begins with a council meeting to debrief Martian Officer Melanie Ballard (Natasha Henstridge from Bounce). She was the sole survivor of a ghost train that was supposed to be a routine transfer of the accused murderer James Desolation Williams (Ice Cube- Anaconda, Three Kings). Then she recalls the incidents taking place as they left to pick up Desolation. From the train ride to the mining camp we learn Pam Grier is Helena, their Commander and she gets her head chopped off and fastened to a stake, I liked that. The letch is Jericho Butler (Jason Staham, Snatch.), plus two rookies are on board. To make the ride enjoyable Henstridge pops a pill from her necklace. This is where she keeps her stash. She is a hard nose cop but it is fine to take illegal drugs. We know these are still illegal drugs on Mars because when they describe how they found the sole survivor she was handcuffed to the bunk and had an illegal substance in her blood stream. Yeah the Ghost of Mars didn’t put that there, she did. The train lets this team off at a mining camp that had to shut down recently and will be back in a few hours to pick them up. Off they go to pick up their prisoner. However what they find is a ghost town except for a bunch of decapitated people hanging upside down in a hall. The people in the jail are all safe and locked away though.

My unanswered questions would be when the mining company set free this ghost or zombie like substance, who locked it away in the first place. Doctor Whitlock (Joanna Cassidy, Dangerous Beauty) whom was responsible for setting it free stated it came from a corridor not made by man. Okay who made it then? Humans didn’t and nothing else was living on the planet prior to their arrival. So who locked the ghost away and with all the fighting and death why weren’t more people inflicted with this? Then the issue of travel, if it didn’t have a host anymore how did it travel? Since it wasn’t human what was the ritual of decapitating humans and putting their heads on sticks? Why the self- mutilation of the host body? None of this was explained and instead of just enjoying all the graphic gore I kept thinking of more questions and whys. John Carpenter (Vampires) wrote and directed this film and quite frankly he could have done a better job at least on the writing end. I give the Ghost of Mars a four on the About-Movies.com scale.

Last updated: Saturday, October 28, 2006 05:37:37 PM

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