10 Terrible Horror Movies With Amazing Concepts
3. Ghosts Of Mars
Though John Carpenter's career was already firmly on the downslope by 2001, Ghosts of Mars at least seemed like a fun match for his pulpy filmmaking sensibilities.
A sci-fi-horror romp set in 2176 in which a group of Martian cops find themselves battling a colony of people possessed by ghosts? Sounds neat as hell. Throw in an amusingly eclectic cast - including Natasha Henstridge, Ice Cube, Jason Statham, Pam Grier, and Clea DuVall - and you've got a gamy, knowingly trashy stew cooking, right?
Except, even the most passionate Carpenter die-hards will struggle to admit that this is anything less than a crushing letdown from the master filmmaker.
Carpenter's on pure auto-pilot mode here as both director and co-writer, and though he claims he intended to make a campy action-horror flick in the vein of Predator, he fell far short of the mark. Granted, a $28 million budget wasn't nearly enough to make this high concept work, but even so, it's seriously undercooked stuff.