A Major Disappointment

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

This film is so real. It treats its characters with so much care and sensitivity.

This is ultimately a movie about the very bad things that can happen when we don't address our unease, when we just try to brush it off, whether that's to fit in or to preserve our self-image.

This is one of those movies that will make you laugh for no apparent reason. You have to love the movies that were never made to be taken serious. Pure entertainment. But, this film has a sense of sophistication and the appearances that actual research was done. Great entertainment, just don't dig too deep. Pop some popcorn, sit back and laugh. The only thing missing is 3-D glasses. Honestly, the acting is not to terrible for a 60's drive in movie. With this title, it is guaranteed to be one of those films that kids of today will watch merely because they think it's different. The film is a perfect model for the "hipsters" of our generation. Whatever works though. So, when you finish your Pedro The Lion CD and feel depressed, pop in this tape. It will make you happy (and hip).

A genetic problem on Mars has decreased their female population so that there is only 1 female born to every 100 males. They believe that they can solve their problems by acquiring a few choice females from the Earth, for scientific study experimentation, and they're prepared to get the women whether they receive cooperation or not.If properly fleshed out, the premise could have promise. But it's not fleshed out, and Mars Needs Women is loaded with problems. The plot as it stands makes very little logical sense. Not that this is a completely unwatchable film--it has many "so bad it's good" qualities, and my final score was a 6 out of 10.Another problem is that the film seems extremely low budget. They barely even built any sets. Quite a few shots are just a couple of characters talking, framed tightly, against a solid-color backdrop. Most of the "fancier" shots, such as those of military aircraft flying and landing, are stock footage. The film is also full of padding--the stock footage goes on far longer than it should have. There is a scene that seems to go on forever where we just see a loudspeaker and listen to mostly unintelligible "military radio" banter. There is a striptease scene (apparently strippers are one of the prime candidates for the kind of women that Mars needs) that goes on for minutes and minutes with the stripper taking nothing off.The Martians are just like humans for the most part, sparing the trouble of expensive make-up and sparing having to explain why Earth women would work for the task at hand. The Martian costumes are just shiny material with something like bathing caps on their heads and big headphone cups on their ears (this aspect is somewhat reminiscent of My Favorite Martian, and was even echoed in later material like Mork & Mindy, but in Mars Needs Women it doesn't have the intentional humor).So why did I give this film a rating as high as 6 out of 10? Well, believe it or not, a few aspects of the film work as they were intended to. The whole sequence of the two Martians at the hotel, acquiring a press badge and so forth, was actually engaging and not really unintentionally funny. But most of the film is unintentionally funny, and most of it works on that level, too. You can laugh at the bad decisions made due to budget. You can laugh at the pacing. You can laugh at the hammy dialogue. You can laugh at how the Martians pick their women. And most of all, the more you spend time analyzing the ridiculous plot, the more you'll laugh.

****SPOILERS**** Far out story about a crew of five very human-looking Martians led by their captain Dop, Tommy Kirk, who land on Earth and gather five very attractive healthy and child-bearing young women. To bring back to Mars to help re-populate that dying planet due to the low birth-rate of females there. Called operation "Sleep Freeze" the Martians have just a few days to achieve their mission. I was prepared to get a few laughs watching the movie "Mars Needs Women" just by what it's title indicated but was surprised about just how serious and intelligent the movie was. "Mars Needs Women" is, I think, the first movie to ever even mention much less explain what DNA, Deoxyribonucleic Acid, is: The unique and individual blueprint of every single human and animal that ever lived on Earth. This in a movie released in 1967 when most people never even heard of DNA. The Martians abduct a number of women through their use of hypnosis, stewardesses exotic dancers and home-coming queens, to take with them back to Mars. Where the Martians there are desperately waiting for and eagerly wanting to impregnate them in order to save their dying race. Yeah thats all the Martians want from the young and shapely earthling. Having a good time making out with the beautiful young ladies never crossed their minds for one second. Dop falls in love with the woman that he's supposed to bring back to Mars with him the pretty as well as brilliant young Dr. Majorie Bolen, Yvonne Craig, who's a Pulitzer Prize winning author in the field of DNA and extra-terrestrial genetics. Dop has a change of heart at the end of the movie and scuttles the plan "Sleep Freeze" at the expense of his safety and well being back on Mars. The movie is much like another film about aliens who come to Earth to destroy it. Then one of them rescues the doomed Earthlings by giving up his life to save them like the plot in the movie "Teenagers from Outer Space".The movie "Mars Needs Women" is not what you might think it is, cheesy and erotic, but very serious and will surprise you in how ahead of it's time it is in the science of human DNA. How it makes up what we all are at a time when the word DNA was just three letters in the English alphabet in the minds of those who heard it.

Of all the sci-fi movies that I have seen that were filmed in Houston, this is among the best.Mars Needs Women is watchable fun. Tommy Kirk pilots a spaceship with a crew of 4 Martian males into an abandoned ice making factory, which is spooky and heavy with the fetor of rotting chemical containers.They have 24 hours to acquire 5 women who are both beautiful and healthy which they can use to repopulate their loathsome planet. Tommy must assume the identity of a newspaper reporter and convince a rather strapping Yvonne (Batgirl) Craig through a series of soliloquies and expertly maneuvered tarradiddles that he is more than a bromide journalist rather he is ultimately the urbane, suave Prince Charming who can make her pretty little head swirl with thoughts beyond the realm of standardized lucubration. Behind her horn-rimmed glasses, she quivers for this alluring myrmidon from beyond the stars. He is captivated by this autochthonous siren. To want- to love- to live. He in turn bespeaks the confusion of his soul, an embodiment of the whole piece, rightly an olla podrida of mental acuity and the most conspicuous of all jigs; that quasi-caromed, state of palpitate we mortals call seduction.It gives us much to mull. It is to cinema what T.S. Eliot's "The Wasteland" was to prose; only this classic has a stripper, a groovy soundtrack, and a harpoon gun.