cult film freak: BYRON HASKIN DIRECTS PAUL MANTEE 'ROBINSON CRUSOE ON MARS'

Title: ROBINSON CRUSOE ON MARS Year: 1964 Rating: ***1/2

A low-budget science-fiction film by super-low-budget producer Aubrey Schenck and WAR OF THE WORLDS director Byron Haskin is mostly known for not being as bad as it could have been... had it been full of cheap-looking space monsters, as originally intended...

Instead, ROBINSON CRUSOE ON MARS is more a cerebral lone-man's figure-it-out-as-he-goes journey that just happens to occur on the red planet, following a technical orbiting-capsule sequence, ironically conceived five-years before America landed on the moon...

Paul Mantee in ROBINSON CRUSOE ON MARS with Adam West

If intended as a mainstream space yarn, Hollywood-handsome Adam West's doomed secondary astronaut would have starred instead of newcomer Paul Mantee, who wound up playing smarmy villains on television crime shows... aesthetically fitting a severe, desperate expression built into a tight and lean, edgy countenance... and he'd done only shirtless modeling beforehand, literally taking acting classes during production...

So at times, while MARS feels like an actor's introductory workshop against an otherwise impressive matte-painted/red-sky background behind actual Death Valley landscapes, Mantee effectively blends into the land-roaming odyssey — that goes against the grain in both story and casting...

Paul Mantee in ROBINSON CRUSOE ON MARS

Where the more effective (and entertaining) aspects occur between the lone astronaut and his scene-stealing pet astronaut monkey... far exceeding the second half after finding martian slave Victor Lundin, looking a cross between a passive Western-flick Indian and a Tarzan franchise native...

Here's where CRUSOE becomes a mainstream friends-bonding melodrama (with sporadic WAR OF THE WORLDS spaceship attacks) after our gadget-tinkering hero had effectively progressed into the far more suspenseful survival tale, established in the title.