Popular culture owes Larry Buchanan a mountain of debt, because if not for the Texas-based filmmaker’s Mars Needs Women, what other dialogue could MARRS possibly have sampled for its smash hit, “Pump Up the Volume”? (And then, by extension, that Christian Slater movie would have been titled something generic like Teen Rebel DJ.) But Buchanan’s film itself? It’s no damn good.
At the United States Decoding Service — NASA Wing, mind you — decoders have been busy for three days decoding coded messages from outer space. These “mysterious signals” all say the same thing: “Mars needs women.” Further explanation is delivered via Dop (Tommy Kirk, The Ghost in the Invisible Bikini), one of a crew of five clean-cut Martian men who have come to Houston to enact Operation Sleep Freeze, in which they will recruit (read: abduct) five unmarried, but way-beautiful women for a mission of repopulation. Exclaims Dop to those aforementioned decoders, “We are in earnest! The life of our planet depends upon this!”
When Buchanan (The Naked Witch) isn’t busy padding his 83-minute picture with so much stock footage of military aircraft taking off and landing (not to mention a loudspeaker that shows up so much, it deserves a supporting credit), he shows us the Martians collecting their prey like so many Pokémon: a stewardess, a homecoming queen, a stripper (Hip Hot and 21’s “Bubbles” Cash, per the credits) undulating like a Bill Ward cartoon in the ever-livin’ flesh.
But in the midst of their rapey plan, what would happen should Dop — gasp! — fall in love? Enter Yvonne Craig (the same year she debuted as Batgirl to TV’s Batman) as a prim-and-proper scientist. That their date takes them to a planetarium is a foregone conclusion since it allows Buchanan to make it to feature length by working in what amounts to a slideshow on the red planet. Strangely, it is more compelling than the movie’s actual story. —Rod Lott