EDITOR’S NOTE: The Wizard of Mars was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, April 10, 1976 at 1:00 a.m.

David L. Hewitt was an illusionist in the Dr. Jeckyll’s Strange Show who wanted to be in the movies. He wrote to Forrest Ackerman and gave him his script Journey into the Unknown, which became The Time Travelers. After that, he directed the 3D short Monsters Crash the Pajama Party, which played with spook shows, as well as Dr. Terror’s Gallery of Horrors, Hell’s Chosen Few, The Mighty Gorga, The Girls from Thunder Strip and The Tormentors. He’s also Gorga in that giant monkey movie.

When this movie was released by Regal Video in the 80s, it was retitled Alien Massacre and it could have either been this movie or Dr. Terror’s Gallery of Horrors in the tape you got. That movie has no aliens. Neither has a massacre. But the box art and tagline, “Blood flows like water,” got plenty of people to watch whatever it was.

Let’s head to the future of 1975, where Steve (Roger Gentry), Doc (Vic McGee), Charlie (Jerry Rannow) and Dorothy (Eve Bernhardt) have barely made it to Mars alive. After crash landing, they battle monsters in the canals of the red planet, avoid a volcano and get caught in a dust storm, all of which makes Charlie lose it and start shooting his rifle at everything.

They find a stone road that leads them to a city that is empty other than a dead Martian and a silver globe which mentally directs them to fixing what has been broken and reveals the face of John Carradine, who tells them how Mars once ruled the universe before coming back to their home to ponder the next stage of evolution. Then, the city goes back into the planet.

Obviously, this is The Wizard of Oz in space, just like Zardoz would kind of be a decade later. That movie wasn’t made for $33,000 with a Don Post mask and it was not also edited for spook show audiences. It also rips off plenty of sound design from Forbidden Planet.

John Carradine gets to read a long speech, intoning ““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.” That’s really all it took to make me love this movie.