The Wizard of Mars

There's an awkward charm about the films of David L. Hewitt, an unjustly forgotten contemporary of more lauded schlock directors like Al Adamson (with whom Hewitt often shared the same sets and stable of actors) and Herschell Gordon Lewis. At his best, Hewitt is as bizarrely watchable as Lewis, and that's saying something. His most famous film, "The Wizard of Mars," is a sci-fi recasting of L. Frank Baum's "The Wizard of Oz" and features John Carradine in the title role. Carradine is not literally a wizard, but rather the representative of a vanished Martian civilization; he relates the story of his people's downfall to four astronauts from Earth who have become stranded on the Red Planet. The rest of the cast is interesting, too, especially Roger Gentry (who went on to co-star with Carradine in another Hewitt movie, "Gallery of Horror," and then shared screen time with two members of the Manson Family in "The Ramrodder," a softcore skin flick set in the Old West!) and Vic McGee (who appeared in three other Hewitt productions as well as Ed Wood's "The Sinister Urge," just to round out a fascinating if brief career in SoCal exploitation cinema). "Wizard" suffers from inconsistent pacing and was obviously produced on the cheap, but Hewitt made the most of things--particularly in terms of the visual effects, which he handled himself--and you can see what he might have accomplished with a bigger budget.