NORA HAYDEN ORBITS IB MELCHIOR'S 'THE ANGRY RED PLANET'

Title: THE ANGRY RED PLANET Year: 1959 Rating: *1/2

With five years until the exceptionally-creative science-fiction flick THE TIME TRAVELERS, writer/director Ib Melchior provided one of the first space-seed stories teaching banal humans that we began as smarter Martians, who basically slummed down to Earth before realizing they wasted their energy on creating such useless creatures...

Which is what THE ANGRY RED PLANET is as a whole... an utterly useless waste involving a crew in a ship, stranded on the titular Mars, waiting for something to happen and, when venturing outside, the film goes from technicolor to an intrusively horrible bright red, so the potentially-cool bat-spider monster's wasted in what ends up a showcase for red-head starlet Nora Hayden, a botanist both trusted and flirted with by three eclectic crew-mates, wrapped in a distracting frame story providing meantime upon meantime.

Comic relief gunman Jack Kruschen in THE ANGRY RED PLANET

Studly captain Gerald Mohr in THE ANGRY RED PLANET

Token calculating brain Les Tremayne in THE ANGRY RED PLANET

Gerald Mohr in THE ANGRY RED PLANET

Nora Hayden in THE ANGRY RED PLANET

Animated Effects from THE ANGRY RED PLANET

Animated Effects from THE ANGRY RED PLANET

Bat Spider Monster from THE ANGRY RED PLANET

Bat Spider Monster from THE ANGRY RED PLANET

Nora Hayden in THE ANGRY RED PLANET