From the Rental Vault: Princess of Mars

2012 will mark the centennial of the publication of "Under the Moons of Mars" in All-Story Magazine, the first printed work in the long career of sci-fi pulp author Edgar Rice Burroughs. The feature film John Carter of Mars, directed by Andrew Stanton, is scheduled for release that year, the first time that the world of Barsoom will be seen on the big screen.

In the meantime, there is Princess of Mars, a 2009 release from The Asylum, the indie film studio best known for their straight-to-DVD famous movie knockoffs called "mockbusters." It stars General Hospital regular Antonio Sabato, Jr., and Traci Lords. Neither they nor any of the other cast members of Princess of Mars are best known for their acting ability, but studio responsible for 2006's Snakes on a Train is not in the business of creating great cinema.

Princess uses a few of the same characters found in Burroughs' novel, or at least the same names. But John Carter is now an Army sniper in Afghanistan instead of a Civil War veteran, Dejah Thoris is a blonde who seems to have stolen Princess Leia's metal bikini, and Tars Tarkas is missing a pair of his arms. Since the movie's minimal budget seems to have been unable to provide reasonable dialogue and story, it's likely that the money to present Burroughs' green Martians in all their four-armed glory was not there either.

On the one hand, Princess is a shameless rip-off, borrowing characters and a setting that are in the public domain and using them in a lame hack-and-slash movie that owes a lot more to the sword-swinging barbarian movies that followed 1982's Conan the Barbarian than it does to Burroughs. The cheesy cover tag line that suggests it's from the story that inspired Avatar is just a bonus (and no doubt prompted a Burroughs "Harrumph. He wishes" from the beyond). On the other hand, a lot of people who look down their movie-going noses at stuff like this gobble up "Syfy Channel" crap like Sharktopus like there's no tomorrow.

And there's a sense in which the quick-bucks version from The Asylum follows more in Burroughs' footsteps than the more expensive 2012 film will -- Burroughs turned to writing to make money when he failed at several jobs and mostly wrote for a paycheck's instead of art's sake. His best stories are timeless and his writing almost always smooth and efficient, but he offered plenty of schlock himself. He might not have cared much for what writer/director Mark Atkins did with his story -- he would definitely have recommended punching up the script -- but he would have understood the impulse behind the speedy production more than the six-year development hell the current version endured before picking up Stanton and screenplay writer Michael Chabon.

In the end, curiosity or boredom are really the only reasons to bother with Princess of Mars, and then only if you have them in healthy amounts. You could spend a better afternoon reading the original A Princess of Mars novel, which came out five years after the magazine serialization, in 1917. And you probably should.

PS -- I have no doubt that Burroughs would also wonder where in the heck the spider/bug things came from, having died well before the release of the fifth LP from one David Robert Jones that could have offered at least one possible understanding of spiders from Mars.