Mars Attacks!

Director: Tim Burton

1996 / 106min / 35mm

Inspired by a 1962 trading card series from Topps that fired a young Burton’s morbid imagination, this blackly funny special effects–heavy comedy—its stacked cast including, among others, Jack Nicholson, Martin Short, Pam Grier, Sylvia Sidney, Jerzy Skolimowski, Pierce Brosnan, and, yes, Tom Jones—bears gleeful witness to the carnage that follows a Martian landing, a massacre that only Slim Whitman’s “Indian Love Call” can bring to abatement. A festival of inspired, antic destruction, with production designer Wynn Thomas evidently having a blast playing up the excesses of mid-century Jet Age chic design and, at one point, paying homage to the famous War Room set of Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove.

“Mars Attacks! was based on a series of graphic comics from the 1950-60s. The challenge in designing the film was finding an approach that could pull all of the visual elements together so that there would be some consistency in the look of the film.” —Wynn Thomas

Distributor: Park Circus