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How Sci-Fi’s Greatest Master Trashed His Reputation With One Space Movie

By Joshua Tyler
| Published

America loves convenience. After all, we’re the culture that invented the cell phone, 24-hour fast food, and my most beloved, the remote control. 

In 2001, in what was meant to be his final effort as a filmmaker, one iconic director took his love of convenience too far. That director was John Carpenter. That John Carpenter. The genius mastermind behind The Thing, Escape from New York, Starman, and They Live!.

Watch the video version of this article to see scenes from Ghosts of Mars and also some bad jokes from us.

Why John Carpenter’s Ghosts Of Mars Failed

Ghosts of Mars stars 90s VHS rental icon Natasha Henstridge as a tough-as-nails, pill-popping, Martian cop, sent with her squadron to retrieve ‘Demolition’ Williams (Ice Cube) from a remote mining town for trial back home. When she and her comrades, appropriately dubbed ‘The Commander’ (screen icon Pam Grier), ‘The Rookies,’ and the guy with the cool accent (a not-yet-famous Jason Statham) discover the town’s residents slaughtered, they are forced to team up with Williams to escape from the remaining residents’ head-chopping, alien-possessed clutches.

Natasha Henstridge and Jason Statham in Ghosts of Mars

Filled with a lovely overuse of storytelling flashbacks, flash-sideways, and viewpoint changes, Ghosts of Mars is a hapless mishmash of poorly constructed dialogue and ill-conceived action sequences. The only thing keeping this film from becoming an incomprehensible mess is the sheer idiotic simplicity of its story. Ripped straight from the pages of a 1970s zombie movie, Ghosts leaps from one convenient moment to the next, stopping only to kill the most convenient characters to lose.

Attempts at character interaction and development are rare and forced. Most of these moments come off as Kwik-E-Mart wisdom, dispensed heartily around the Slushee machine of life by the even-tempered streetwise hand of Ice Cube. With a gun in one hand and a dynamite cap in the other, Cube reminisces about his street life, comparing the zombie-stomping fun to ‘Me and my brother when we was kids.’ Apparently, crime in the Bronx has gotten so bad that the residents have actually taken to ritually decapitating one another for entertainment.

Natasha Henstridge and Pam Grier in Ghosts of Mars

But, even in the film’s darkest moments, fate conveniently lends a hand, supplying heavily armored transportation and easily accessible rifles and dynamite. Yes, in the future, man may travel to space and conquer Mars, but nothing beats a good stick of TNT. As we all know, every police station, past, present, or future, keeps a healthy supply of dynamite on hand.

Characters die, heads are lopped off, but they were only supporting roles anyway, so why should we care? As long as you have plenty of narcotics, immunity is guaranteed. Eventually, though, even the most well-trained zombie alien gets a bit uppity and needs to be taught a lesson.

Space zombies in Ghosts of Mars

What better way than by sacrificing a few minor characters to a convenient nuclear detonation, killing anything the machine guns can’t handle. Explosions are fun. And even if the nukes don’t get them, the conveniently placed dynamite packs on the train stolen from the set of The Road Warrior certainly will.

Ghosts of Mars defines itself when our cop’s tribunal pronounces, ‘Is that all you have to tell us?’ Indeed, this was the place where master filmmaker John Carpenter ran out of things to say and instead decided to use whatever was convenient to tell a ridiculously bad story.

GHOSTS OF MARS REVIEW SCORE

Ghosts Of Mars Ended John Carpenter’s Career

Ghosts of Mars John Carpenter

Released on August 24, 2001, the film grossed just $14 million worldwide against a $28 million budget, marking it a significant box office disappointment. Worst of all, nearly everyone hated it. Ghosts of Mars holds a 23% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Audiences were similarly unimpressed, awarding it a C− grade on CinemaScore.

John Carpenter stepped away from the camera for nearly ten years after the failure of Ghosts of Mars. He returned for one last movie called The Ward in 2010, but it was received with little fanfare. Ghosts of Mars was the real endpoint for the directing career of the man who gave us some of the best sci-fi ideas of all time.

After Ghosts of Mars, Carpenter moved into the music business. Music has always been one of his passions, which is why the sound in his movies is so unique. Doing what he loves is the perfect way for an icon to spend his later years. Now, do your best to forget about Ghosts of Mars.

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Super Bowl 2026 Gatorade shower color: What it was and why people want to know

The Super Bowl is built on tradition. Cracking open a beer, demolishing a plate of wings with friends, filling out Super Bowl Squares, and at this point, betting on the color of the Gatorade shower.

Thanks to the widespread legalization of sports betting and the explosion of prop bets in the U.S., you can now wager on just about anything. Over the past few years, one of the strangest traditions to become fully normalized is betting on the postgame Gatorade dunk, when the winning team douses its head coach in the fluorescent sports drink.

You can currently place wagers on events far more serious than a locker-room celebration, including ongoing global conflicts. Against that backdrop, guessing the color of a sugary sports drink feels almost quaint. Last year, the winning color was yellow at +250 odds, even though purple was the favorite at +175, according to DraftKings via the New York Post.

Odds vary depending on where you place your bet. On Polymarket, blue currently has the most money behind it, while over at BetMGM, orange is favored at +225, with yellow, green/lime, and blue all trailing closely behind at +260.

The winner is a back-to-back champ

Sorry, blue bettors, but for the second year in a row, yellow came out on top. The winning Gatorade color once again defied expectations, even though it felt inevitable to anyone closely tracking the odds.

That said, a handful of fans were annoyed by how the result was revealed. Instead of waiting until the final whistle, the broadcast tipped its hand earlier than expected, effectively spoiling the prop bet before the game had officially ended.


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Super Bowl fans celebrate and spiral on social media as the Seahawks beat the Patriots

In what will likely go down as one of the least thrilling Super Bowls in recent memory, the Seattle Seahawks finally got their revenge against the New England Patriots, defeating the AFC champions 29–13 to win Super Bowl LX.

The game got off to a sluggish start, with one of the league’s most explosive offenses in Seattle running headfirst into a relentless New England defense. The same stalemate played out on the other side of the ball, as Drake Maye’s Patriots offense struggled to generate any momentum against Seattle’s top-ranked scoring defense. Dubbed the Darkside Defense, a modern successor to the Legion of Boom, the Seahawks held New England to just 13 points, racking up seven sacks (tying a Super Bowl record) and forcing an interception in the process.

As for Patriots fans, the vibes are bleak.

And for Seattle fans, the win brought the Seattle Seahawks even more joy. Not only did the franchise secure its second Super Bowl title in team history, but it also avenged one of the most infamous plays in NFL lore.

Sam Darnold is a Super Bowl champion

The funniest and most satisfying outcome of the win is what it’s done for Sam Darnold’s legacy. Once widely written off as a bust, the Seattle Seahawks quarterback has now won the biggest game of his life. His diehard supporters, who have long and very ironically dubbed him GEQBUS, short for “God Emperor Quarterback of the United States,” are absolutely losing their minds. Over on the subreddit r/the_darnold, fans are firmly on cloud nine, basking in the kind of vindication only a Super Bowl win can deliver.


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Insane, R-Rated 90s Sci-Fi Is A Computer Virus For Your Brain

By Robert Scucci
| Published

I have no issue admitting that when I write movie reviews, I spend some time on Wikipedia and IMDb because I am better with faces than names. I want to make sure I am getting the talent straight when I talk about the characters that talent is portraying, as well as refresh myself on the story. In the case of 1991’s Brain Twisters, however, I had to consult the internet just to figure out what story it was even trying to tell in the first place, because it really does not make any sense at all.

Conceptually, Brain Twisters has a cool R-rated premise, but it limps along like it is aiming for a PG-13 rating. It wants to be sexy, but there is no nudity. It wants to carry itself like a slasher, but there is no real violence. It wants to play out like a sci-fi mystery thriller, but instead feels like a made-for-TV crime drama about a computer program that forces people to go on murder sprees. At least, I think that is what it is going for.

None Of This Makes Sense On Any Level

Brain Twisters 1991

From what intel I have gathered, I am not alone in my assessment of Brain Twisters. The main story centers on Dr. Philip Rothman (Terry Lenderee), a university professor who runs mind control experiments on student volunteers involving sensory deprivation tanks and a wall of televisions a la A Clockwork Orange. Then a string of murders happens, drawing the attention of Detective Frank Turi (Joe Lombardo), who becomes involved after one of Dr. Rothman’s students, Ted (Shura McComb), commits suicide. This somehow results in a custody battle over his corpse.

Dr. Rothman wants Ted’s head for research purposes, while Detective Frank is more concerned with figuring out whether Ted was involved in the murder of his girlfriend, Denise (Heather Ann Barclay). As the film slowly meanders along, we learn that Dr. Rothman’s experiments are emitting radio waves, or something close to that, which cause his students to kill each other or themselves.

Brain Twisters 1991

The problem is that Dr. Rothman is apparently unaware of this side effect because the software company financing his experiments never disclosed that information to him. This explanation immediately collapses under scrutiny, since he spends most of the second and third acts behaving in an increasingly unhinged and openly evil manner that suggests he knows exactly what is happening.

Meanwhile, student Laurie Stevens (Farrah Forke) becomes romantically involved with Detective Frank after he cooks her boxed spaghetti, while her promiscuous friend Michelle (Donna Bostany) attempts to seduce Dr. Rothman in exchange for a better grade. That is it. That is the whole movie.

Not Even Charming In A Shlocky Way

Brain Twisters 1991

When I seek out movies like Brain Twisters, I genuinely try to identify their redeeming qualities. I have devoted an unthinkable number of hours to scraping the bottom of the Rotten Tomatoes barrel and logging onto Tubi in search of hidden or underappreciated gems that were not fully understood at the time of their initial release. More often than not, I am pleasantly surprised, and I report my findings here in case anyone else wants to check out something that was not on their radar but still fits their taste. It ain’t much, but it is honest work.

Brain Twisters, however, has no redeeming qualities, and it rightfully earns its seven percent audience score on Rotten Tomatoes. It is barely sci-fi, barely horror, and does not even have enough schlock to give it the kind of B-movie charm that lets you appreciate it as a diamond in the rough. Second-rate production values can be forgiven if there is a compelling story underneath them.The unfortunate truth about Brain Twisters is that there is not.

Brain Twisters 1991

If you want to see what Brain Twisters is all about, you can stream it for free on Tubi. Or you can jam toothpicks under your fingernails if you are looking for a more productive way to spend your time.

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