tles7 The Cinemagic effects were a total failure. The red tint at times looked a bit like Tron on a shoestring budget. Unfortunately, the drawings looked like drawings and not the desired 3D realism they were hoping for. I wonder if it was so visually poor when it was released in the theater...a psychedelic version of The Blob that must have given people headaches to watch. Maybe they just turned up the color so you couldn't see clearly how cheap it all is.

Scott LeBrun 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.

mark.waltz So says the female scientist aboard a risky flight to Mars of all places, 58 years later still pretty unknown in spite of all the things that have been discovered. I wish other scientists had that sentiment and left the fantasy of what is there to the movies, of which this is one of the better ones. It's not just the ethical sentiment that I share with the pretty redhead; it's just a darn good movie that instantly grabs you, setting the mood with all the right elements!The story starts with the launching, and switches to the return of the rocket. As fast as it is back, the audience is back on the ship, and thanks to pretty Nora Hayden (the reddest of redheads), we learn what transpired. There's mystery, romance, humor, science, adventure and obviously danger, tightly mixed together in a very fast moving 85 minutes. It's a living nightmare for Hayden who must relive what she witnessed, and there's no fun loving, fast killing little green men going around to destroy the earth. Even with the humor, this is not a comedy, and not even unintentionally funny, although a few times I managed to suppress a few giggles, especially English speaking message from whatever inhabits the unseen elements of the angry red planet. With Gerald Mohr as the dashing captain, Jack Kruschen as the comic book loving crew member and Les Tremayne as the brilliant professor on board, Hayden is surrounded by a too notch cast. The planet does indeed turn red when the earthlings explore it, a great effect they perfectly adds to the mood. Yes, the set often looks like a painted background, and there's an abundance of scary looking monsters and a futuristic city that looks like architecture of today. But I really got spooked by a flesh eating giant plant, a giant six legged creature that appears to be part arachnid/part rodent, and a giant sea creature the size of a steam-liner. They come out of nowhere, and it's better not to see stills of the film to build up suspense. The dreamlike memories of what Hayden experienced gives this psychological brilliance in telling the story. Along with only a handful of others, this has to be one of the best written science fiction films, reminding me that on occasion, they could really be profound. Of course, some of the moments may seem silly to some, but they really got me surprised by the constant suspense. I've seen many of these films that left me either angry or red, but this is practically brilliant in every way.

Dan Franzen (dfranzen70) 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.