by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night’s Mars movie screening paired Stranded with a TV episode, three short films and an
intriguing “ringer,” a promo reel Paramount prepared for their proposed version
of John Carter of Mars, the
long-awaited film of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Mars books whose rights passed from
Disney to Paramount back to Disney again, which ultimately made the film but
scissored off the “ … of Mars” from the end of the title, thereby alienating
science-fiction fans who might have flocked to theatres to see a film of the
Burroughs Mars cycle and not attracting anyone else. The version Paramount was
contemplating looks, from this promo reel (with some of the special effects,
especially the detailing on the CGI of the animal characters, definitely
unfinished), pretty much like the John Carter Disney actually released (and lost tons of money
on). Easily the most professional piece of filmmaking we saw last night was the
television episode, “The Invisible Enemy” from the 1963-65 series The
Outer Limits, whose opening sequence I
remember more than anything from the shows themselves: the TV image blacked out
and an unseen voice started barking at us, “There is nothing wrong with your
set. We have taken control” (and
at the end the same voice said, “We now return control of your television set
to you, until next week at this time, when we return you to … The
Outer Limits”).
This was from the tail end
of the series’ run (episode 7 of season 2 originally aired October 31, 1964 —
and I suspect that originally showing it on Hallowe’en was no coincidence) and
it begins with a prologue showing the M-1, the first manned human expedition to
Mars, which carries two crew members, one of whom gets out of the spacecraft,
walks across a sea of sparkling sand and is on his radio telling his crewmate
that everything’s just fine, when … his voice turns into a scream and then cuts
off, indicating his death. The other crew member goes out and meets a similar
fate, and then … after the original credits sequence we get a Lifetime-esque
title, “Three Years Later,” and three years later the snazzier, more
streamlined M-2 is about to land on Mars. Its mission is partly to do what M-1 was
supposed to do — examine Mars’s resources to see what human colonizers would
have available to them and what they would have to bring, or figure out how to
make — and also to find out what happened to M-1. One of the quirkiest aspects
of this show is the casting: the mission commander of M-2, Major Charles
“Chuck” Merritt, is played by Adam West, who two years later would be Batman on
the high-camp 1966-1968 TV version produced by William Dozier, while the
mission control scientist is played by Ted Knight, Ted Baxter on The
Mary Tyler Moore Show — and he did such a
good job as the amiable bumbler Ted Baxter it’s hard to believe Knight as
someone who’s supposed to be super-smart. Another is the director, Byron
Haskin, who’d already entered Mars-movie hall-of-famedom with the 1953 version
of The War of the Worlds and when
he made this had just finished Robinson Crusoe on Mars (also with Adam West, though not as the title character!), which Haskin once hailed
as the best film he’d ever done, only he hated the awful title its distributor
slapped on it and blamed the title for the film’s commercial failure.
The M-2
contains four crew members instead of just the two that flew on M-1, and
they’re solemnly instructed by Mission Control that even if they leave the ship,
they’re supposed to remain visible to the people in the ship at all time. Only
one of the astronauts, curious about the wreckage of the M-1, goes behind it,
out of view of his comrades in the spacecraft, and while he’s out of eyeshot a
monster emerges from the “sea” of sand and gobbles him up. The people inside
the spacecraft are alerted by his frantic screams in the last minutes of his
life that something dire has
happened to him, but they have no idea what it was. (One imdb.com reviewer
asked why they didn’t carry video cameras with them so they could photograph
the menace.) Eventually two of the people on the M-2 are killed by the menace
and a third, Jack Buckley (Ricky Solari), goes out in search of the monster and
escapes only when he realizes that it can only move inside the sea of sparkling
sand — if he can get to un-sandy ground he can escape. Alas, Major Merritt goes
out to try to rescue him and ends up stranded on a rock outcropping in the
middle of the sand sea, safe from the monster but with no way of getting back
to the ship — which is going to be piloted off the planet’s surface
automatically within half an hour. The show’s final suspense sequence shows how
Major Merritt drips some of his own blood onto his belt and throws it at the
monster to decoy it so Buckley will have a chance to escape; then Merritt fires
a nuclear-armed bazooka at the monster — only that has exactly the opposite
effect intended: instead of knocking off the monster, it splits it open like a
starfish and each piece grows into a new one. “The Invisible Enemy” has its
flaws, mainly because Adam West is too uncomplicatedly “heroic” an actor to
play a man at his wit’s end, desperately trying to survive (and the John Wayne
vocal tics he goes into at times don’t help) and the monster itself is one of
those hideous papier-maché contraptions that were also frequently the risible
“menaces” on the original Star Trek
series (which shared at least two key people with The Outer Limits, Robert Justman and Gene Coon, though neither is credited
here), but it was still a clearly professional work and the best piece of
filmmaking on the program.
