Christmas On Mars

- ‘Christmas on Mars’ is a fantastical and disturbing film freakout. Seven years in the making, ‘Christmas on Mars’ was directed and written by The Flaming Lips’ visionary frontman Wayne Coyne and features the band members and many of their associates as actors in a story set during the colonization of Mars. The 86-minute film and its original score are presented in this stand-al
‘Christmas on Mars’ is a fantastical and disturbing film freakout. Seven years in the making, ‘Christmas on Mars’ was directed and written by The Flaming Lips’ visionary frontman Wayne Coyne and features the band members and many of their associates as actors in a story set during the colonization of Mars. The 86-minute film and its original score are presented in this stand-alone DVD. With ‘Christmas on Mars,’ psychedelia finally has its epic film. Wayne Coyne’s directorial debut, Christmas on Mars, is a kitschy, homespun masterpiece that subverts film-judging criteria the way Ed Wood’s B-movies must have when they were first compared to horror back in the day. Co-directed by Bradley Beesley and populated with many local Oklahoma City characters, including most of Flaming Lips, Coyne’s brothers, Denny and Kenny, and his wife, starring as the female of the film, Mother (Michelle Martin Coyne), Coyne explains in extras interview footage that the movie took seven years to complete simply because the musician shot between tours. Rumors of this film’s release have been floating around forever, and the wait was worth it. Christmas on Mars, plot-wise, stars Major Syrtis (Steven Drozd), the captain on a spaceship who notices, between hallucinations of a baby dying, that the crew is in danger due to malfunctioning equipment. Clues include psychosis, as experienced by a man the script calls Astronaut Confronting Cosmic Reality (Kliph Scurlock), and other bizarre hardships, as other crew members that Major Lowell (Steve Burns) and the Sunglasses Wearing Astronaut (Michael Ivins) can attest to. The resident Psychiatrist (Adam Goldberg) tells everyone to chill out on the baby visions, which look like 2001: A Space Odyssey and Eraserhead, to no avail. Lucky for everyone, a mysterious green-faced Martian, played by Coyne, comes to the rescue. Christmas on Mars is not about plot originality, as it screens more like a tribute to Coyne’s favorite sci-fi films. Made almost exclusively in Coyne’s backyard, the sets impress because they really transport the viewer to space despite being made of recognizable hardware store materials. Each scene, and its way of either slowing down or speeding up time, feels deeply imagined from the subconscious. What matters is the film’s undoubting sincerity. Filmed mostly in black and white, blasts of color during moments of psychic realization surrealistically tie the film’s visuals to Flaming Lips music, in which guitars and heavy drums explode rhythm. Moreover, the score serves the film well, carefully blending ambient, electronic space-age melodies with moments of sonic chaos. Christmas on Mars is another of Coyne’s attempts at expressing tension between peace of mind and utter insanity, and an undying, Lovecraftian attraction to abyss. –Trinie Dalton

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5 Responses to “Christmas On Mars”

1. Marching Orifice on February 6th, 2010 10:40 pm

   How many stars can I give? ***** There, there’s five more stars. Ten stars!! I love this movie so much, it just makes me giddy to think about. The highest praise. So good.
   Rating: 5 / 5

2. Shelby B. Stong on February 6th, 2010 11:35 pm

   And get ready to have your senses blown in this eargasm of sounds with a fantastical mix of visuals that will give you eyeboners. This is a must for any David Lynch fan! And a holy relic to all flaming lips fans. This is an instant cult film.
   Rating: 5 / 5

3. T. Scarillo on February 7th, 2010 1:37 am

   I watched this film on Sundance Channel. I am also NOT a hardcore Flaming Lips fan, though i think they’re a very interesting band and i have a couple of their albums. This film, years in the making, is just plain terrible on every level – acting, technical and otherwise. There’s no nice way to put it. The plot, if you call it that, is nearly incoherent – something having to do with the impending birth of a baby on a remote space station, a crew member going slowly insane, and the arrival of a mysterious alien (played by Wayne Coyne). The acting is terrible. The dialogue, loaded with profanity, is even worse-than-terrible. Virtually nothing offends me, but the dialogue was so awful and profanity ridden (at one point, i thought it was going to challenge “Scarface” for most ‘f-bombs’) that i found it just plain juvenile and pointless and it became a chore to sit thru this movie (and it’s only 82 minutes long). How Christmasy! Also – no ‘real’ Flaming Lips songs here, just score. Fred Armisen and Adam Goldberg, among others, show up in this mess. If the intention was to make a bad kitschy film, they needn’t have bothered – they could’ve just rented “Santa Claus Conquers the Martians”.
   Rating: 1 / 5

4. Pryor Fan on February 7th, 2010 4:19 am

   I love The Flaming Lips, and this film wouldn’t be hard to watch if it were shorter. The scenes where the characters were just walking in silence I sped up and enjoyed the film as I wondered “what is the point?” But in the end there seems to be a point. Watch it. Rate it.
   Rating: 2 / 5

5. Michael Medeiros on February 7th, 2010 5:23 am

   I really wanted to like this thing. I like The Flaming Lips and then whe I saw Fred Armisen I wanted to like it even more . But I couldn’t make it past the first half hour. It really started to irritate me.
   Intentionally trying to make a “bad” movie rarely works and at least in my case it didn’t this time either.
   Rating: 1 / 5

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