Once upon a time there was a brilliant horror director named John Carpenter. He burst onto the scene with Halloween, which was not only masterfully done, but spawned a whole genre of bad sequels that still plague us today. He followed that up with a string of hits, including The Thing, which is still for my money one of the scariest movies ever made. And throughout he showed a wonderful feel for what it was that scares us. But then something went wrong. Its hard to pinpoint exactly when it happened, perhaps as early as The Prince of Darkness, which was creepy but deeply flawed, or They Live, certainly by the time he made the regrettable Memoirs of an Invisible Man. But somewhere in there, a decade ago now, the great man lost his touch.<br /><br />**Minor Spoilers**<br /><br />And so we are left with jumbled, cliched garbage like "Ghosts of Mars" from a man who we should be able to count on for top flight sci-fi/horror. How does Carpenter's latest film go wrong? Let me count the ways. He begins the movie by making an early critical mistake that smacks of a film student trying too hard -- he decides to show the movie in flashback mode! I don't know how much worse of a decision you can make in a action/horror type yarn -- from the opening moments of the film we know exactly who is going to make it and who isn't (although the odds of Natasha Henstridge not making it were admittedly slim). And then after a decent setup, he proceeds to turn the whole thing into a brainless action flick in the style of his "Escape From" movies, or maybe a modern day Mad Max. Complete with stupid weapons and goofy makeup even. Truly lowest common denominator stuff -- no imagination whatsoever. It could really have been set anywhere in the past, in a post apocalyptic future, on a prison island, on Earth, anywhere, anytime -- Mars, which Carpenter claims he wanted to make a movie about, is totally taken out of the equation, and his martians apparently have nothing better to do than act like a primitive tribe and practice martial arts. And the worst part is that the basic concept buried underneath all the garbage was actually a pretty good one -- in the right hands it could have been very creepy. I feel embarrassed for Mr. Carpenter that its actually reached the point where I wish that another director had been given the chance to direct this same basic storyline. SO much more could have been done with it.<br /><br />As it is, we're stuck with this. And this is not good. At all.