Mars Attacks! (1996)

"For dark is the suede that mows like a harvest..."

I saw this once in the ‘90s- at a festival, I think, perhaps Phoenix ‘96. But I was very drunk, and let us not discuss any herbal substances which may or may not have been imbibed. Let us also, in the same token, disregard the bottle of Aragonian wine (yes, the bottle states it’s from “Aragon”, a name from the annals of history) that I have just imbibed at the time of composing this paragraph. Let’s just say that, yes, I can see this film is no classic, but it’s fun.

Tim Burton is always brilliant at making his films feel likes stylised worlds of their own, but he generally has his own gothic style. This film, like its superb predecessor  Ed Wood, gives us a style very different from Burton’s norm- in this case that of the ‘50s flying saucer movie. Hence the many CGI saucers look exactly as we might expect from countless movies. Hence the ever-present sound of the theremin. And the Martians, in old fashioned stop motion, look awesome.

Oh, and the film is bloody hilarious. No, it’s not the funniest film ever, but it’s a fun little spoof and extraordinarily well cast- Jack Nicholson is superb, as ever, as the cynical President. Pierce Brosnan is hilarious as a character taking the piss out of all those pipe smoking, exposition-spouting professors. Also excellent are Sarah Jessica Parker and the wonderful Pam Grier, with a small role for a Michael J. Fox presumably too far into his Parkinson’s disease for a larger role.

It’s also very, very ‘90s- Richie dresses just like I used to back then, and the less Grungy fashions are... yes, well. But the film is enormous fun, with its capricious Martians putting people’s heads on dogs’ bodies and zapping US Senators. And can we please have a Martian do you Trump what is done to the President here?

Ed Wood (1994)

"Nobody cares! These movies are terrible!"

That Tim Burton would make a biopic of Ed Wood is delicious. That it should be so bloody good is even more so. Monochrome, stylised and deeply evocative of both 1950s Hollywood and the schlock genres, this is a well-structured, good-natured and fun look at one of Hollywood’s more eccentric “talents” with an extraordinary performance of Johnny Depp at the centre of it all.

The opening titles, with the parade of ‘50s genre tropes and the glorious theremins, are wonderful, and set the mood perfectly. Then we move to setting up who Ed is, his transvestism, and the story of Glen or Glenda, complete with lots of 1950s trans people including the aristocratic but delightfully camp “Bunny” Breckinridge, played to perfection by Bill Murray. We then follow Ed’s, er, career right through to Plan 9 from Outer Space and see him happily married to a fellow geek- and then we stop, before we get any hint of his decline, alcoholism and early death.

Instead we see the tragedy of the great Bela Lugosi’s final years, forgotten by Hollywood to the point of appearing in Ed’s films, alone, homesick for a Hungary to which he can never return, behind an Iron Curtain. Martin Landau plays him with skill and much pathos, but also not without humour (“Karloff does not deserve to smell my shit!”).

We also see Juliet Landau (nepotism; fun for all the family), bizarrely using her native accent, and a superb cameo by Vincent D’Onofrio as the great Orson Welles. But this film belongs to Depp, and to Burton, who has conjured up perhaps his finest cinematic world.