Beware of movies with the director's name in the title. Take "John Carpenter's Ghosts of Mars" (please). If the Carpenter brand name wasn't superglued to the title, this embarrassment would surely have bypassed theaters entirely and gone straight to its proper home on the USA Network.

And I would have been spared a headache.

The latest from the director of "Starman," "Halloween" and "Escape from New York" is a lousy western all gussied up to look like a futuristic horror flick. The production is set on Mars in 2176, where humanity looks for relief from the overpopulation strangling their home world. Six hundred and forty thousand people in a matriarchal society live and work at outposts all over the red planet, terra-forming to make it more hospitable for future generations.

A matriarchal society. Terra-forming. Sounds pretty intriguing, eh? Well, don't get your hopes up.