Mike T Lyddon's homage to grindhouse & video nasties is a deliciously gory slice of comedy horror that goes well with a couple of beers.Fellow fans of The Toxic Avenger and Hobo with a Shotgun will find plenty of fun in this mutated astronaut's rampage through the Louisiana swamp.
"First Man on Mars" doesn't know why people love old low budget horror movies, it tries to inject comedy in an awful B movie, it doesn't work, parodies like these almost never work, the only ones that work are effective because there is actual comedic talent behind them, like in "Black Dynamite" or "The Kentucky Fried Movie", most of the time we get lazy trash like this, don't they know that B movies are funny because they are genuine?Of course everything in this movie is awful, from the acting to the writing and uses the usual excuse of "its a parody of crappy movies" to be crappy unapologetically, I can stand a low budget movie made with love for schlocky trash flicks but it at least needs to be funny in some way.
Whoever wrote that this movie is offensive is a very biased person with some personal trauma. there's nothing offensive here, there's just a sort of parody.
It's hard to spoof 'vintage' drive-in fodder without some kind of understanding of the genre. Whereas those early films like 1959's "First Man into Space," was an earnest low-budget attempt, trying to use what knowledge (or lack thereof) they had at the time with a usually well known "B" actor, like John Agar or in this case Marshall Thompson; the film was later partially remade as "The Incredible Melting Man.
It took me a while before I realized this movie is kind of a take off of 1970's b-movies mixed in with satire of current culture, and on some levels it works very well. The story is simple.
First Man in Mars is totally different from the previous anthology movies they did and I'm not into the old b-movies that much, but it did have some very funny scenes. The scientists and the coroner were goofy and fun kind of like a slapstick comedy and the soundtrack music was perfect for those scenes.
Do not see this film if you don't know 60's and 70's b-movies, you'll probably hate it. Watch a few Roger Corman, Larry Buchanan and early Troma flicks before you see First Man on Mars.
A "friend" of mine asked me to watch First Man on Mars and rate it on this site. Big mistake.
"Do you like monster movies? I love monster movies, and the cheaper they are, the better.
