The Wizard of Mars has a reputation that is just as dreadful as the rest of David L. Hewitt’s films. The surprise upon seeing it, is that it isn’t as terrible as has been made out and is almost a decent film in many regards. Certainly, it is made with special effects that would have been fairly convincing for the period the film was made, including some quite decent planetary scapes and model effects.

The Wizard of Mars may well have been an attempt by Hewitt to copy the success of the previous year’s Robinson Crusoe on Mars (1964), which was a survival story about an astronaut trying to cope after crash-landing on Mars. There’s a fair survival story here – as long as one is prepared to tune out any scientifically accurate vision of Mars – with some discussion of the problems navigating and how to find oxygen supplies. The journey through the frozen tundra, canals and caverns of burning lava has an undeniable alienness. The scenes on the surface with sand dunes all in blue and skies that have been tinted orange look strikingly effective. As one of the party says, “It makes the sands look dreamlike,” and for once the description is perfectly true. And the meeting with the mummified, wrinkled grey-skinned alien in a glass canister with a brain exposed and lit up by a glowing red light is quite unearthly. There’s a soundtrack composed of ‘electronic tonalities’ along the lines of Forbidden Planet (1956).

Hewitt’s writing does tend to fall into cliche imponderables when it comes to the Wizard’s monologue – “space is vast, time is long ... It was then that we impaled time on an axis ... eternal stillness, transgression upon time ... Time tugs us to our yesterdays almost as strong as all the unborn tomorrows that stretch through all eternity.” [Hewitt clearly was so enamoured of the profundity of this dialogue that he lifted many sections of it and reused them for the opening narration of Journey to the Center of Time].

Hewitt’s customary cheapness does eventually set in – the attack by the crab creatures, which look like pieces of corrugated tubing, is thoroughly unconvincing; the initial part of the journey through the caverns takes place in cramped quarters – the party talk how the raft is moving towards something, where they are clearly perfectly still, and keep describing things that only happen off screen; while the Martian city seems to be represented by the same single stretch of corridor.

The greatest footnote The Wizard of Mars has is that it is an uncredited science-fiction version of The Wizard of Oz (1939). There’s a certain cleverness to the way that the film creates science-fictional interpolations of the imagery from The Wizard of Oz – the Yellow Brick Road ingeniously becomes the ruins of a highway leading to the Martian city; while John Carradine stands in for The Wizard, appearing as a head that is an embodiment of the Martian consciousness. Although the Wizard of Oz analogy has perhaps been overstretched. There are just as many non-parallels – there’s no equivalent of The Wicked Witch of the West or the Munchkins, for instance, and the head of The Wizard doesn’t eventually turn out to be a front for a charlatan. Nor for that matter are there any equivalents of Dorothy’s companions – The Tin Woodsman, The Scarecrow and the Cowardly Lion. There is however a party of four astronauts. And between the Neanderthal and blockheaded Doc; the brash Charlie whose natural impulse is to shoot everything he sees; and the token woman who barely gets to speak, nor is even referred to by her name throughout, this does seem an expedition that is decidedly in need of some brains. The film should at least be commended for playing its science-fiction version of The Wizard of Oz surprisingly straight.