Christmas on Mars

HALLOWEEN SPECIAL! ► Cosmically-minded psychedelic rockers The Flaming Lips try their chops at movie-making in this quasi-avant-garde space oddity that has the band freaking out in a mars-age daydream (pardon the mixed Bowie metaphors) one lonely Christmas Eve. Written and co-directed by Lips front man Wayne Coyne, with a bizarro holiday-season plot concerning imperiled human colonists on the Red Planet, the film was a DIY labour of love, made (on the cheap) over seven years, and shot mostly in Coyne’s Oklahoma City backyard. “Christmas on Mars is about as subtle and restrained as a film that includes emerald-green aliens, hallucinations of eating babies and a labia-headed marching band can be. Its mostly grainy black-and-white visuals and slow pacing give a surprisingly understated feel to its story . . . Christmas on Mars is as ambitious, strange, and homespun as most underground films. It plays like a three-way hybrid of 2001, Eraserhead, and Plan 9 from Outer Space, throwing together moments of haunted isolation, utter strangeness, kitsch and uneven acting in ways that gel surprisingly often” (Heather Phares, All Music Guide). “Forget plot. It’s all about textures: black-and-white images with psychedelic bursts; dashes of David Lynch, the ’70s midnight movie Dark Star and 2001; an echo of The Wizard of Oz”; maybe an iota of The Matrix . . . Dude, pass the munchies” (Andy Webster, New York Times). B&W and colour, 35mm. 82 mins.