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 Tommy Kirk is described as the star of Pajama Party and a "[t]een heartthrob." He "leads a stellar cast as a sex-starved spaceman
lookin' for love on all the wrong planets." Four Martians come to Earth
looking for women because on Mars there's a "girl shortage of galactic
proportions [that] turns the Martian dating scene into a black hole." In the
Fun
Facts, they brag that director Larry Buchanan often would get the script for a
film one day and start filming the next. I would have never guessed it! 1967, 82 minutes, DVD
The details are almost too terrifying to report: a $25,000 budget, a two week
shooting schedule, Tommy Kirk, and a TV movie. That in a nutshell is what we
have with Mars Needs Women, a movie that can't hide the low budget, low star
power, low wattage script that it suffers from throughout. When I cracked this
baby
open, I thought that I was in for another silly Martian invasion movie. You
know how those Martians are. They're always giving our planet the bugged-eyed
once over because of its really sweet location in the universe. Usually they'll
send a few of their lesser-lights (that's the only way to explain the utter
lack of cunning in their lame plans) to hassle people that live out in the
middle of nowhere for awhile, before a scientist and/or reporter can team up
with the conveniently available hottie (always a professor's daughter) to
vanquish the smelly invader before he can do more damage than waste ninety
minutes of an earthman's life in front of his TV. In this case, the usual
invasion plan has been modified a bit to try and trick teeny-boppers into
watching the movie. See, Mars has gone into some kind genetic free fall
(probably because they kept sending their best and brightest to Earth in past
invasion attempts) and the result is that for every 100 male Martians there is
only one female Martian. I think you know what happens when you gots a planet
load of horny Martians: roadtrip to Earth! Specifically, they are after our
American women! I know that for most of you, that just burns your hide and
makes you want to go out and tie American flags to your Honda Civics and beat
up Martian-looking minorities in retaliation, but really, don't you think that
we
could spare about five of our skanks? That's all these Martian playboys are in
the market for. Besides, knowing how women always go for the bad boy in the
crowd, you can be sure that a pack of rowdy Martians in a fancy, new, flying
saucer would surely entrance some of our women with less than stellar
reputations (and I think I speak for all of us when I say that you can have our
loose women!)  Just how exactly is this devious plot going to unfold? What sort of demented
scheme have the Martians come up with this time to steal our nation's most
precious (and crabby) natural resource? Well, they kind of just send a coded
message to our military with this cryptic statement: Mars needs women. Egads!
What could it all mean? Obviously, the military doesn't want it getting out
that one of the planets in our solar system apparently has the same type of
luck with the ladies that your typical Alias fan has (when is Mars moving back into his mom's basement?) so they don't
release that information to us right away. Later we get some communications
from the Martian leader about how they don't have enough hot babes on the red
planet and just need to score about five goodtime girls and they'll be
peacefully on their way. You can imagine that we aren't too thrilled with the
prospect of some of our finer slices of grade A hooch being beamed out to some
loser planet that sends its invaders out in ugly gold saucers. Our military
takes a break from the Cold War to deal with this threat and the result is the
liberal use of stock footage of lots of different types of airplanes flying
around. Just so you don't get too bored and think that MGM somehow
accidentally mastered eighty minutes of the Discovery Wings digital cable
channel onto your DVD, they also intersperse these dull, grainy shots with
dull, static shots of a loud speaker that constantly gives us updates on the
progress of the stock footage. Just like in high school whenever someone came
over the intercom in class, I started doodling AC/DC logos and Iron Maiden
pictures on my kitchen table, until the tinny voice in my head stopped and
Tommy Kirk had suddenly materialized into the secret military room with the
loud speaker. He was dressed in one of those sissy skin tight foil get ups
that Martians without women seem to favor and he was trying to reset his big
Dating Game plan to the top brass. They didn't like what they heard, so Tommy
disappeared and he and his crew land in Houston, Texas. I don't know why they
picked Houston, but I'm sure that woman-wise, it was better than someplace like
Omaha.  Tommy Kirk, who earlier had trouble holding his own on the screen in various
Disney
movies where he had to co-star with such high-powered thespians as a monkey and
Flubber, leads this pack of geeks in a fairly unconvincing manner (he tries so
hard to be an emotionless Martian, but then has a crying scene with Yvonne
Craig at the end of the movie) as they land at the old abandoned ice factory in
the northeast part of town. Why have they chosen to land at the old abandoned
ice factory? Because even though it has been condemned and shut down by the
city for years, it still has a valuable chemical supply that they can mix up
and make some crap that will freeze people so they can be Fed Exed back to
Mars. Tommy starts giving the orders and you can see when he orders a guy to
rob a gas station for money and another to steal some suits from a clothing
store that you're not exactly dealing with General Rommel. Tommy even gets a
cheap shot in at America's youth, by first lamenting that the Martian who
robbed the gas station had to knock out the clerk, but then speculating that it
would just be written off as more juvenile delinquent violence that racks all
our cities! Is this guy a Martian Romeo or my dad? They all change into suits
and Tommy comments that us Earth losers still wear ties and that Mars is so
advanced that they don't wear ties anymore. Yeah, and you're also so advanced
that your love life has been reduced to secreting away the Sears catalog under
your bed so that you can price Playtex products once your parents have gone to
sleep. Once they get all dressed up as squares, they head out to their
assigned spots to go pick up broads! The first guy shows us that he's got his
head screwed on right, when he immediately hits the strip club down the street.
There he ogles a stripper strutting her stuff, though since this was a
made-for-TV movie, she just dances in a dress most of the time and doesn't
really sport the moves you would expect from an exotic dancer that has been
targeted by interplanetary studs bent on making her their love slave. The next
guy also shows us that all Martians aren't Tommy Kirk types, because he ends up
at a college football game! One of the teams was Baylor and I think the other
was SMU, but they haven't had a football team worth mentioning since the NCAA
shut their professional one down about 15-20 years ago, so I wasn't sure if it
was them with the puke-orange helmets or not. When you only have $25,000 to
shoot your flick and about 50 bucks went to a ticket for a football game, it's
understandable that you'd want to milk that location for all it was worth. And
milk it they did. We must have seen the entire first quarter, before everyone
remembered that there was a Martian in the house! 
After the big game, the Homecoming Queen is crowned and as you would expect
from a school like Baylor, she is quit the homely gal. This doesn't matter to
our Martian friend though and he goes off after her. Meanwhile another Martian
guy is stalking a stewardess at an airport. Tommy Kirk and his buddy are busy
hanging out at hotel bars and pretending to be reporters for some reason so
they haven't scrounged themselves up a prom date yet. Finally Tommy hypnotizes
a real reporter into leaving his hotel room and steals his press credentials so
that he can go visit the lecture that famed space geneticist, Dr. Marjorie
Bolen is putting on. Bolen is played by Yvonne Craig who we all know as
Batgirl from the fantasies we used to have as kids (we're all over those now
though, right?). She's a brainiac that none of the reporters take seriously
except for Tommy Kirk. By the way, his character's name is Dop, but that's so
stupid I'm not going to type it again. Tommy asks her some really good
question about chromosomes or something and the next thing you know, they're
going out on a date to the planetarium. Never mind that these Martians are on
a tight schedule and must leave Earth in 24 hours for no good reason. I would
also note that the Martians supposedly weigh twice as much on Earth as they do
on Mars, so they tire out quickly (sorry ladies!), but that little problem
never comes into play in this movie. At the planetarium, there's a program on
Mars and when the tape machine breaks in the middle of things, Tommy finishes
the lecture because he's really smart about Mars and stuff. They hang out some
more doing stuff like taking walks, visiting the wing of the
museum devoted to Marge's dead dad (shoot, if that's all Tommy has to do as far
as
meeting the parents, that sucker has it made!), and Marge leaking the army's
secret plan to secretly raid the Martian's secret lair at the old abandoned ice
factory. Tommy's buddy has also managed to find himself a girl. He said he
was going to get up early and get a co-ed because they're early risers. I can
only guess that he was talking about the chicks on the Baylor campus, because
at my community college, the chicks don't recover from their blackouts until
early afternoon. This guy finds a girl that is outside painting trees. They
engage in low-budget time-filler talk about how hard it is to paint trees and
about how hard it is to make a good movie with only $25,000 and Tommy Kirk. Thankfully, the time finally arrives when the army decides to launch their
sneak attack that they've told the Martian's girlfriend about. I wasn't real
sure why she was included on these top-secret meetings with the military. I
mean, wasn't she a space-geneticist? We all know how those sexy scientist
types are always mooning (hehehe) over the aliens they're supposed to be
dissecting. Tommy runs back to squeal to his buddies that the heat is about to
come down on them and they are a bit miffed that he wants to abort things.
This is where Tommy gives us the tearful goodbye that reminded me of Jimmy
Swaggert's tearful plea for forgiveness all those years ago in its utter lack
of sincerity and believability. Memo to Tommy Kirk: you can leave the
misty-eyed scenes to Tommy Hanks or some other girl. Okay, the aliens leave
their prom dates behind, fly away and the military and Yvonne Craig stand
around wondering what that stupid quote by some Russian guy is doing
superimposed over a picture of the sky. Without reservation, I can say that
this
movie trawls new depths in its jejune exploration of the idiotic conceit that
aliens from another world would actually want our women. The odds that these
aliens would be attracted to, let alone physically compatible with us, seems a
bit far-removed from reality. Piling on insult to injury here is the utter
lack of anything remotely resembling competence by all involved. The film is a
collection of static scenes with people doing little of interest except
listening to loudspeakers, walking around staring at women and going to college
football games. The whole "filmed on location in Texas" look gives this
feeling that we're watching an H.G. Lewis movie with no gore or memorably bad
style (that actors in Mars Need Women are still better than anything the self-proclaimed inventor of gore could dig
up in Florida). The print from on the MGM DVD is quite cruddy with a dirty
quality usually reserved for Zapruder footage and they also say the movie has
been modified to fit my screen, which I found interesting since this was
originally made for TV. Maybe the next time you modify it for my screen, you'd
could fix it so that it didn't smell like an 80 year old man that needs to be
rotated toward the sunlight. Without a doubt, the worst movie about Martians
ever committed to film. As far as Tommy Kirk goes, I can't believe that
someone as smart as Merlin Jones (the big screen's favorite absent-minded
student genius) could have ever read this script and not invented a way out of
doing it. There aren't enough adjectives to describe how awful it is, but
here's a few: humdrum, tedious, dreary, insipid, vapid, poky, leaden,
ponderous, inane, putrid, and my personal favorite - graveolent.
Reviews © 2004
MonsterHunter
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