A ghost train arrives at the Mars main train station, arriving from the mining outskirts with only one passenger: Lieutenant Ballard, cuffed to a bench on the train, tells her story of how their mission to transfer a high-security prisoner went awry, as the station where they were to pick him up was a battlefield, with all the settler turning into hordes of ravaging zombie-like creatures. It turns out they were possessed or infected by some native Mars inhabitant travelling as sand with the wind, seeking to make go away any intruder to the planet.
The John Carpenter nostalgia marathon continues, and now I venture into unknown territory: I had never before seen the film, and so much more I could now enjoy it, because it has all these guys in it that I surely could not appreciate at the time of its release: Natasha “Species” Henstridge, Jason “I don’t take my shirt of for anybody” Statham, Pam “Jacky Brown” Gier, Clea “Matt’s partner in Heroes” DuVall, and the completely untalented and hilarious Ice Cube as “Desolation” Williams. Zombie-Thingies that all look like cross-breed of Alice Cooper and “It”, decapitations with sharpened discs, heads on sticks, ill-choreographed battle scenes that looked more like attempts at “West Side Horror Story” than Mad Max. And a lot of red dust and futuristic trains and really hard-assed female interrogators (Social System: Matriarchal” says the insert at the beginning). And Jason Statham doing his Jason Statham voice thing, which is enough for an evening of nice SciFi-Horror-Funtertainment.
