MARS ATTACKS!

The Martian Ambassador

MARS ATTACKS! (1996). Director: Tim Burton. 

"They blew up Congress, ha, ha, ha!" -- Grandma.

President Dale (Jack Nicholson of The Fortune) and his military advisers, including hawkish General Decker (Rod Steiger) and General Casey (Paul Winfield), prepare to welcome Martian visitors, not certain if they are friend or foe. When the Martians open fire, initially it is all blamed on a miscommunication, but when the Martian ambassador and his envoys disintegrate all of Congress, it is clear they are up to no good! 

Jack Nicholson as the president

Mars Attacks! is based on a bunch of trading cards that were packaged with sheets of bubble gum, so with source material that looney you know you're not going to get anything that serious, especially not from Tim Burton. My opinion on this film has gone from liking it to hating it and back again -- it would be all too easy to tear it apart, as it is monumentally silly, and I'm not certain that the black comedy approach is the best idea when you're dealing with an alien invasion that will leave thousands dead. But I have to say this is not an unmitigated disaster like Burton's Dark Shadows, and good taste was never the filmmaker's strong point. 

In the Kennedy Room: Martin Short and Lisa Marie

There is a lot of funny stuff in the picture, especially the sexy, buxom alien visitor (Lisa Marie of We Are Still Here) who winds up in the White House in the--get this! -- Kennedy Room for a supposed assignation with the press secretary (Martin Short). Most of the actors -- the cast includes everyone from Glenn Close to singer Tom Jones -- play this stuff just the way it was intended, with the cast stand-outs being Nicholson (who plays two roles) and Steiger. The cinematography and FX work are excellent -- including a homage to Ray Harryhausen's flying saucers in Earth vs the Flying Saucers -- and there's an especially exciting sequence when a giant, Martian-controlled robot chases pell mell after Richie (Lukas Haas). It's nice that his elderly grandma (Sylvia Sidney) survives and even becomes a hero of sorts. There are occasional flashes of humanism, but mostly this is just weird fun. 

Verdict: Unless you're in a peculiar mood, you might prefer to watch The War of the Worlds, either version. **3/4. 

WE ARE STILL HERE

A demon from We Are Still Here

WE ARE STILL HERE (2015). Writer/director: Ted Geoghegan.

Anne Sacchetti (Barbara Crampton) and her husband Paul (Andrew Sensenig) lost their college-age son two months ago due to a car crash. The Sacchettis have bought a house in the small town of Aylesburg, where Anne can feel the young man's presence despite the fact he neither lived nor died in the house. Anne importunes her supposedly psychic friends, Jacob and May Lewis (Larry Fessenden; Lisa Marie) to come to the house and see if they can contact the deceased son. Unfortunately, May is convinced that there is something else, something evil, inside the place. In the meantime old Dave McCabe (Monte Markham) tells the Sacchettis about the weird history of the house and its owner, Dagmar. Then the killings start ... We Are Still Here is a fairly inept, highly unoriginal (and overly-familiar) combination of ghost-demon story with the "old-town-with-a-dread-secret" genre, and doesn't work as either. A large part of the trouble is that Ted Geoghegan is even worse as a director than he is as a writer, showing no panache at all and utterly failing to give the film its required atmosphere. The script has no internal logic and seems to plod from scene to scene with (often unaccountable) spurts of violence just to keep the audience awake. It all ends with a gory bloodbath (at least these gruesome effects are well done, for what it's worth), but there's something almost comical in how a very bloody head-gooshing scene is followed by a sappy and unconvincing mock-sentimental conclusion. The movie is a figurative and literal mess. Neither Crampton [You're Next] nor Sensenig manage to get across (except for some of Crampton's early scenes) that these are people who lost their son only two months ago. The only actor who comes across unscathed is Monte Markham [The New Perry Mason] as the elderly neighbor who is not as benign as he seems. Vaguely reminiscent in some regards of the vastly superior Burnt Offerings, but this picture borrows liberally from dozens of better movies.

One has to ask: why did this bad movie get so many positively rave reviews? Perhaps these particular critics are very young people who haven't seen enough horror movies, or haven't the critical facilities to recognize schlock when they see it. Apparently audiences weren't quite as enamored of the film as some critics were.

Verdict: A badly-directed home movie. *1/2.