Mars Attacks [Blu-ray] [1996] [US Import]

*** REVIEW FOR THE BLU RAY REISSUE ***

I hadn't looked at my DVD of Tim Burton's ridiculously over-the-top homage to Fifties Sci-Fi movies in years - and I was stunned at two things when I popped this 2010 BLU RAY reissue in my Sony - first - the massive improvement in picture quality - and second - just how ball-breakingly funny "Mars Attacks!" actually is.

At times the great picture quality is a shock after the dull DVD I've been used to since 1996 - there's tremendous clarity on offer on almost all of the internal scenes. And the upgrade has somehow made the film seem all grown-up all of a sudden - a real contender for an all-time comedy classic too easily dismissed as fluff when it was released.

Genuinely anarchic in a way so few movies are these days, you also forget how good and varied the cast was... Glenn Close plays the President's fussy uptight wife Marsha Dale ("...they're not eating off the bone china, I can tell you that..."), Pierce Brosnan is brilliant as the pipe-smoking Professor Donald Kessler forever with a reasonable explanation about 'cultural misunderstandings' and why the Martians are delighting in ray-gunning everything in sight. Donald also has the hots for airhead news reporter Natalie Lake played deftly by Sarah Jessica-Parker (she and her irritating Chihuahua dog end up closer than they should at one point). Martin Short plays the permanently randy White House Press Secretary Jerry Ross (Lisa Marie does a great turn as a alien prostitute), Annette Bening as a dizzy hippy-chick saving her glass pyramid in her handbag as the Aliens wreck Vegas and Rod Steiger is just fabulously tacky as General Decker - the military dinosaur whose battle cry of "Kill! Kill! Kill!" turns out to be right all along.

There's Danny DeVito as a gross gambler, Lukas Haas as the only sane kid in a trailer-trash family ("...they ain't getting the TV...") trying to protect his wheelchair bound aunt (played with relish by Sylvia Stalwart). We get Blaxsploitation stars Jim Brown and Pam Grier as a couple trying to keep their family together (their kids gaming skills come in handy when the aliens attack the Whitehouse). There are even early roles for Jack Black and Natalie Portman before global fame consumed them both - and Tom Jones gives it a bit of swivel-hip as he belts out the irrepressibly brill "It's Not Unusual". Danny Elfman's score is suitably throwback and brilliantly woven into every scene - it even pays respects to the films Tim Burton so loved by taking the ray gun sound from the 1953 Sci-Fi classic "War Of The Worlds". And by the time you get to the end - you've enjoyed enough fried doves of peace, bowling balls taking out Easter Island and splattered alien brain matter in glass-dome helmets to keep any customer satisfied.

But the real shame of this Blu Ray reissue is the complete lack of any bonus material (not even a trailer for God's sake), when this release screamed out for an orgy of it (definitely docked a star for that).

My son Sean watched this with me (he's 14) and we then spent a good hour afterwards going around the TV room squawking "Ack Ack!" like giggling mayhem-inducing aliens. Buy this and do the same peopleoids.

Nice one Mr. Burton - and a bit of a wee gem frankly...

AUDIO Details:
Spoken Languages: English, French, Dutch, Italian, Castellano, Czech and Thai
Subtitles: English (SDH), French, German, Italian, Castellano, Dutch, Chinese, Spanish, Czech, Danish, Greek, Norwegian, Portuguese, Thai and Korean

This film is one of my favourites; camp, over the top, absurd, and as packed with sly sight gags and in-jokes as you can get. True, the acting is mostly ham of the Harrods food hall order, but that really fits with the style of the film - it isn't serious and it never tries to be. Even when there are apparently serious emotional moments, they are usually parodies of scenes and themes in serious s.f. films. What you are getting here is a daft, joyous, unashamedly violent and gross romp through the science fiction cliche, and Tim Burton has made the most of every minute. The blu ray version actually enhances it; the sound is much crisper, and the image far brighter and with better colour than my old dvd version. Which helped me to pick up a few gags I had missed before in the general fuzziness of the old version. It loses a star because there are no extras apart from subtitles, and I'd have hoped for at least a trailer. But this certainly is a serious upgrade from my dvd copy, which had no extras either and was in a rather naff cardboard case. Worth investing in.

It's difficult not to be fond Tim Burton's big-budget 50's sci-fi spoof Mars Attacks (1996).

The lead actors were clearly having a real laugh whilst making this, with hilariously cheesy over-acting and some great one-liners. Amid the mayhem, you don't really care what happens to most of these characters anyway, most of whom come to a gory end, but towards the end of the film, you'll want to get in there yourself to sort out the vicious little Martian creeps.

The admittedly shaky plot is pretty secondary to the excellent visual effects, and there is an eery 50's-esque score underlying the whole film, which is a good touch.

The scheming, skeletal aliens have a genuinely nasty look about them, whilst also coming across as quite comic, and go about their murderous human annihilation / experimentation with a twisted glee. In fact they are the most unsympathetic aliens to have graced our movie-screens since H R Giger's ultra-aggressive 'Alien' back in 1979.

The 50's B-Movie cliches are used to full-effect, with body-pulverising ray guns, saucer-shaped spacecraft and large-brained/puny-bodied aliens running riot throughout.

You just cannot take Mars Attacks too seriously (as did the producers of Independence Day in the same year), so if you'd like to see half the US Presidential Administration and Chiefs of Staff wiped-out within 90 minutes, this is your movie !