This movie is the proof that the world is becoming a sick and dumb place

Terrible acting, screenplay and direction.

Simply A Masterpiece

The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

This one is wonderfully goofy, gimmick heavy fun, complete with a stylized, stifling atmosphere, hilariously ridiculous dialogue, and a couple of very distinctive monsters. The screenplay (by director / noted sci-fi writer Ib Melchior ,and Sid Pink, based on Pinks' story) tells a tale of a disastrous manned expedition to Mars. The spacecraft is brought back to Earth, and only two survivors remain. However, one of them is suffering a hideous-looking infection. It's up to scientist Iris Ryan (gorgeous, flame haired Nora Hayden) to dig into her memories in order for puzzled military officials to find out what went wrong."The Angry Red Planet" gets most of its entertainment value out of its visual approach. It combines sets, paintings, special effects, and the much ballyhooed "Cinemagic" process to create a memorable look. "Cinemagic" basically turns everything red for sequences set on the Martian landscape. It also has some weird and wonderful monsters, pulling out all the stops. We have a Venus flytrap type carnivorous plant, an enormous rat / bat / spider / crab (once you see this thing, you never forget it), and an even more vast one eyed amoeba. At about the 36 minute mark, when our heroes (Hayden, Gerald Mohr, Les Tremayne, Jack Kruschen) first set foot on the Martian landscape, that's when the fun really begins. Mohr is amusing because he's playing a rather cocky, smarmy guy who insists on calling the leading lady "Irish". Sci-fi icon Tremayne is solid as the obligatory professorial character, and excellent character actor Kruschen - an Oscar nominee two years later for "The Apartment" - supplies the generous comedy relief with his priceless lines.Melchior gets right down to business: the action just starts immediately, with ALL of the credits, including the title, saved for the end. And those closing credits are supplemented by one of the grooviest tracks one might ever hear in this genre.A most agreeable diversion for people who just want to put their brains in neutral for 84 well paced minutes.Seven out of 10.

Well, I'll give the film makers this much credit: the planet sure seems angry. And quite red, for that matter. This is fairly typical low-budget 1950s sci-fi right here, complete with shoddy effects and no more than a passing knowledge of science, or even the laws of physics. It's about a manned mission to Mars in which stuff goes wrong, which is a theme that shows up even in today's movies; here, it's told mainly in flashback by one of the survivors.Rocketship MR-1 (you know, for Mars Rocket 1) blasts off with four crew members on board - Tom O'Bannion (Gerald Mohr), Iris Ryan (Naura Hayden), Theodore Gettell (Les Tremayne), and Sam Jacobs (Jack Kruschen). A couple of days later, they land on Mars. To put that in perspective, if the fastest spacecraft around today left while Mars and Earth were closest to each other, it would arrive at Mars in a little over a month. That's if it's an unmanned craft, as the human body can't take super-duper fast speeds. But, okay, this was 1959, so we'll just have to accept that the writers were spitballing some ideas and didn't care if they fudged some numbers.Contact is lost a couple of months after departure from Earth, and suddenly the MR-1 is detected in orbit around Earth (yeah, I know); immediately, the science types spring into action and return the rocket to terra firma by remote control. Which is totally a thing, at least in science fiction. Anyway, Iris staggers out of the ship and is essentially in shock, while one of her crew mates is rushed to an operating table with some green thing on his arm. It's up to amnesiac Iris to fill in the blanks for the doctors, who for some reason need her to explain just what in tarnation happened before they can do anything.This is where the flashback comes in, as Iris is hypnotized. We learn, in quick order, that the ship did land on Mars. Upon landing, the crew note only vegetation - no, as they said, life. Plants aren't life, people! And if someone from 2015 told this crew that plants are, indeed, life, the answer would be along the lines of "well, not REAL life!" Anyway, the plants are there, and they appear to be completely still. This unnerves everyone, particularly Iris, who as the lone female is prone to emotional outbursts, not like the manly and/or thoughtful men on board.Much of the movie was shot in Cinemagic, a process that was supposed to simulate hand-drawn animation. It doesn't really work to that extent, but the scenes on Mars do have a very strong reddish hue to them. Seems appropriate. But here are a few other interesting bits that this laugher provided. 1) while the crew is on board their ship and looking out of the portholes, the sky changes from red to blue and back again between scenes. I'm not sure if the blue was supposed to mean daytime and the red was night, but even in 1959 people knew why the sky looks blue to us. 2) While on Mars, the crew encounters what they call a lake (although it's massive enough that "ocean" would have been the first thing to pop into my mind), so they come back later with a - wait for it - inflatable raft. Just the kind of thing you'd take onboard a spaceship that needs to be as lightweight as possible to escape Earth's gravitational pull. And then 3) about that gravity. The ship itself appears to have plenty of it, as no one's floating around. Understandable, since it would probably break the budget to turn on the antigravity in 1959. Mars also has plenty of it. In fact, it's the same gravity Earth has! Neat little coincidence.But sure, this was 1959, and the extent of outer-space exploration was...what, Yuri Gagarin? We can let them slide on a lot of this science stuff. Science is for nerds, right? Let's see this crew take on the aliens! Which they do, and spoiler alert, the aliens aren't at all pleased we're on Mars. After a while, you can kind of see their point.The Angry Red Planet is a relic of its era; it's light on facts, light on humor (other than the forced or stereotypical kinds), light on drama, and just plain light overall. Even the tone is light. I did get a kick out of the prehistoric Mission Control, which consisted of a bunch of people crowded around one terminal. Who knows how big the mountain was that housed the actual computer. Gerald Mohr, who plays the crew's commander, is sort of a poor man's Peter Graves and looks like a poor man's Humphery Bogart, which is why he was hired. Kruschen, who plays Sam the warrant officer (why?), is your garden variety comic relief. He's even from Brooklyn, which means he's got your back and just let him at those aliens! Tremayne, who had had a long, illustrious career in radio by this time, is the requisite "thoughtful scientist" on board; Iris is also a scientist, but everything she says is dismissed, because she's a woman.

The Angry Red Planet starts as the US spacecraft the X1 returns to Earth after a 60 day radio silence, the top brass at the US military are particularly interested in X1 as it was the first manned mission to Mars. Only two of the original crew that left Earth have returned alive, female scientist Dr. Iris 'Irish' Ryan (Nora Hayden) & the Captain Col. Thomas O'Bannion (Gerald Mohr) who has a strange green fungus like growth on his arm. It is quickly discovered that all the tape logs have been erased so the top Dog's have no idea what happened, the only chance of finding out what happened & to possibly find a way of saving Col. O'Bannion is to hypnotise Iris & unlock the secrets of her mind & provide the answers that their bosses want. As Iris is put under & starts to recount the expedition some of the things that she says may not make for easy listening as various encounters with martian aliens threaten the very existence of Earth itself...Co-written & directed by Ib Melchior this is one of those 50's sci-fi 'classics' that many people to seem remember for various reason & still enjoys a somewhat cult following even today, personally I think there are better sci-fi monster films out there from around the same period (It! The Terror From Beyond Space (1958) to name one I much, much prefer) but for what it is I suppose it's watchable enough. The script is your basic space adventure in which a team of astronauts find themselves on an alien planet battling native dangers including killer plants & three eyed Martians. Despite the potential for a cracking sci-fi adventure I found the majority of The Angry Red Planet quite dull, it takes ages to get to Mars & then not that much really happens, the crew walk around a bit, talk a lot & finally leave. As for Col. O'Bannion back on Earth infected with alien fungus I am surprised they just didn't cut his arm off, hell limbs have been amputated for a lot less that the potential threat of wiping out all mankind with an alien disease before! At 80 odd minutes it's not too long but again not that much happens, its hardly exciting & it just felt a little underwhelming to me. The final moral message about mankind destroying itself & becoming a threat to everything else in existence is a well used one & comes as no great surprise, it was clichéd even back in 1959 when The Angry Red Planet was originally made & released. I guess the word 'classic' can mean different things to different people but it's hardly a term I would endear The Angry Red Planet with.While watching The Angry Red Planet you have to bear in mind the period in which it was made, it goes without saying that the scientific & technical aspects of the film are laughably bad. From huge computers to the clichéd cylindrical rocket ship to the fact the US military seem to be pulling all the strings & making the decisions rather than NASA or any proper scientists to the idea that plants grow on Mars to the fact that the crew seem to enjoy perfect Earth gravity throughout their entire journey including in the X1 & on Mars itself. The makers advertised they had used a new filming process called 'Cinemagic' which was apparently supposed to blend hand drawn paintings & monster puppets with the live action actor's seamlessly, it failed although it does hide some of the cheapness of the effect since the whole screen is just tinted an annoying orange colour. The process was also used in The Three Stooges in Orbit (1962) a few years later & looked just as bad.Shot in about ten days on a budget of about $190,000 a lot has actually ended up on screen to be fair, maybe with a bit more time & money The Angry Red Planet really could have been a classic. The effects aren't too bad considering when it was made although it's hard to believe none of those scientists saw that Rat-Bat-Spider monster in an open clearing! The acting is pretty wooden here.The Angry Red Palnet is alright for a few laughs & a bit of light Saturday afternoon fun, it's an innocent enough sci-fi adventure that doesn't really hold up to inspection & hasn't dated that well but it'll pass 80 odd minutes harmlessly enough I suppose.

The title of the movie caught my attention as a possible anti-communist movie, but the release date falls outside of the time when a majority of the anti-communist movies were made. The last HUAC hearings were in 1953 and the bulk of the movies appeared between 1951 and 1958 (though I have not seen many of them). Angry Red Planet is not an anti-communist movie, and if it is, it is very subtle. Rather Angry Red Planet is a reaction against technology. The theme really rises up at the end of the movie when the Martians deliver a message to Earth demanding that they do not return to their territory. One begins to think that the Earthlings come to Mars peacefully and are attacked, but the Martians say at the end that they have been watching Earth develop and because of their endless wars, they desire nothing to do with them. Earth is a violent and offensive planet and has been commanded to stay away from Mars. The main idea that comes from Angry Red Planet is that we are not ready for space exploration. Though the movie is slightly in the future, when the expedition arrives on Mars, they encounter creatures that are very hostile, and very dangerous, such as the human eating plant, the giant spider, and the amoeba. The expedition catches a glimpse of the huge technological achievements of the martians when they see their city through binoculars, but they never reach the place. Humanity is humbled with the experience on Mars. All that remained of the journey are two of the four members. None of the recordings remained except for the message of the martians to stay away from Mars. There is no emphasis on humanity approaching Mars peacefully, but rather they are being chased away and told that to return would be to invite the wrath of the vastly superior Martians. This seems to be a reaction against uncontrolled expansionism and modernisation. It is a movie designed to humble the American people, to remind them that they are not the most power people in the world. This is not a pro-Russian movie, but rather one that shows that our desire for expansion will never be unchecked. Even though we might have great technological wonders, there is always going to be somebody that can stand up to us. Maybe it is more of a warning not to anger the Russians too much because they have the power to destroy the United States. The title, Angry Red Planet, has the connotations of the possibility of advanced life on Mars, but more so, seems to me a warning against Soviet retaliations against unprovoked attacks.