Usually, low-rent comedy genre house The Asylum (Mega Shark Versus Giant Octopus, Transmorphers: Fall of Man) waits until just as a movie is released to unleash their own knock-off / parody of the project. But with Edgar Rice Burroughs and A Princess of Mars, the company gets a two-fer. Their new Princess of Mars is already close to finished, and with it the company can perhaps steal a few Avatar-related dollars while creating a product that will be ready on DVD shelves when Disney eventually begins to promote Andrew Stanton’s John Carter of Mars. See the first teaser for Asylum’s version of the Burroughs novel, after the break.

The rights to the Burroughs novel are in the public domain, so this is one case where The Asylum doesn’t have to do much tweaking with respect to names. And because James Cameron has said that Burroughs was an influence on Avatar, they get to say this inspired the director’s big new picture. But I wonder if Disney locked up film rights to the character name ‘John Carter’, as on the Asylum website photos of the character (as played by Antonio Sabato, Jr.) are labeled only ‘JC’. Meanwhile, the alien princess Deja Thoris has her name intact; she’s played in this version by Traci Lords.

My favorite part about this? On the teaser’s YouTube page, a comment claiming to be from one of the film’s actors praises the production value added by the recent LA fires. “Also, I have to hand it to the Orange Sky we had while filming in Lancaster (due to the LA Fires).” Those blazes had to be good for something!

Here’s the teaser, which looks like something I would have rented in sixth grade, then watched at 1am while devouring a one-pound bag of Skittles and trying not to puke.