by Heather Phares "A fantastical and disturbing humanistic freakout!" shouts the cover of the Flaming Lips' seven years in-the-making DVD/CD Christmas on Mars, but the film and its music aren't nearly as overtly wacky or sentimental as might be expected based on that description, or the other work the Lips released while they were working on the movie. In fact, Christmas on Mars is about as subtle and restrained as a film that includes emerald-green aliens, hallucinations of eating babies and a labia-headed marching band can be. Its mostly grainy black-and-white visuals and slow pacing give a surprisingly understated feel to its story, which involves the extreme technical difficulties Major Syrtis (played by the band's Steven Drozd) and the rest of his Mars colonization team face on Christmas Eve, and the alien visitor (Wayne Coyne) who helps them. It's difficult for artists as prominent as the Flaming Lips to make a true cult movie -- which, more often than not, comes from out of nowhere and finds its audience organically, usually through years of word of mouth and passing bootlegged copies from one friend to another -- but Christmas on Mars is as ambitious, strange, and homespun as most underground films. It plays like a three-way hybrid of 2001: A Space Odyssey, Eraserhead, and Plan 9 from Outer Space, throwing together moments of haunted isolation, utter strangeness, kitsch and uneven acting in ways that gel surprisingly often. Even so, the film is strangest and most successful in its lonely silences than in its blatantly weird moments. ...