D-DAY ON MARS (1945, 1966) – Obviously, the Sixth of June marks the solemn remembrance of World War Two’s Normandy Invasion, but I did my annual salute recently. For today I’m reviewing D-Day on Mars, the edited down feature film version of the 1945 serial The Purple Monster Strikes.
During the 1960s, various studios truncated their old 1940s and 1950s movie serials down into feature film length and released them on television. For instance, the Commando Cody serial Radar Men from the Moon was edited down into the telefilm Retik the Moon Menace and Zombies of the Stratosphere was edited down into Satan’s Satellites.
In 1966 D-Day on Mars was broadcast as a very, very shortened version of The Purple Monster Strikes.
THE MOVIE:
Scientist Cyrus Layton is designing a spaceship but gets distracted when he detects what he thinks is a meteor approaching the Earth. The “meteor” turns out to be a space vessel from Mars, as Layton discovers when he reaches the impact crater. The Martian spaceship was a scouting mission for an invasion of Earth but only one Red Planet citizen survived the crash.
Despite the fact that he identifies himself as the Purple Monster (Roy Barcroft), Layton moronically shows him his blueprints for a more efficient version of the low-rent space craft that the Martians used to reach the Earth. The Purple Monster decides to use Layton’s designs to construct such a spaceship, return to Mars, and then lead an entire fleet of those vessels to invade and conquer our world.
(Yes, for some reason we backward Earth-schlubs can design better spacecraft than the Martians, even though they just traveled to Earth and we had never been to Mars.)
The Martian kills Layton with his “Carbo-Oxide” gas-gun but keeps the scientist’s preserved corpse on hand so he can transfer his mind into Layton’s body to impersonate him as needed, then transfer it back into his Purple Monster form for battle scenes. Layton’s daughter Sheila (Linda Stirling) and her boyfriend, Secret Service Agent Craig Foster (Dennis Moore) are fooled by the Martian-in-Layton’s-Body when they come face to face with him.
As the story rolls along, Craig Foster and Sheila Layton (above left) clash repeatedly with the Purple Monster and his hired Earthlings as the villain tries to assemble all the high-tech pieces needed to build the spaceship and get back to Mars.
If you thought those old movie serials got repetitive and boring with their cliffhanger, survival, rising action, cliffhanger pattern then you may be surprised to see how much more boring and repetitive it can all get when it’s trimmed down to 100 minutes from the original 4 hours plus of the serial runtime.
At any rate, we get what amounts to a scavenger hunt with the good guys trying to beat the bad guys to all the sci-fi components needed to construct the space vessel.
SPOILER AHEAD.
The title is rendered meaningless because Craig Foster kills the Martian before he can get back to his home planet, so we get no space fleet and no “D-Day on Mars” at all!
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