Credit: Alamy

The pipeline from music to film and vice versa has always been one of Hollywood’s most fruitful, even if one of its biggest beneficiaries was left tinged with regret when Ice Cube voiced his displeasure with a starring role in a feature hailing from an iconic director.

Already a well-known name in the music industry and a pioneering figure in rap as a member of N.W.A., Cube made a stellar start to his big screen career when he played Darin ‘Doughboy’ Baker in John Singleton’s Boyz n the Hood, giving a stellar performance in the classic Academy Award-nominated coming-of-age drama.

Whether he’s been mixing it up with a giant snake and a scenery-chewing Jon Voight in Anaconda, searching for hidden treasure alongside George Clooney and Mark Wahlberg in Three Kings, bringing his deadpan comic stylings to 21 Jump Street and its sequel, or failing miserably at replacing Vin Diesel as the figurehead of the xXx franchise, Cube has been a regular presence on screens for more than 30 years.

Not that every movie is a guaranteed hit, but he was at least willing to admit that one of his ill-fated ventures as the first-billed name in the cast didn’t go according to plan. On the plus side, he did at least get the opportunity to work with a legendary auteur with a reputation for crafting top-tier films in both the action and sci-fi genres, although in this instance, the end result was neither.

“I mean, I don’t think I should have done Ghosts of Mars,” Cube said to Hustler when asked if he had any regrets over his cinematic exploits. “I don’t like that movie. I’m a big fan of John Carpenter. The only reason I did it was because John Carpenter directed it, but they really didn’t have the money to pull the special effects off. It was a movie that should have been done in 1979.”

He’s hardly along in denigrating Ghosts of Mars for being substandard, with the Martian escapade not only bombing hard at the box office after recouping just half of its budget in ticket sales, but a solid case can be made that it’s the worst movie of Carpenter’s entire storied career that gifted the world with Halloween, The Thing, Escape from New York, and Big Trouble in Little China among others.

In fact, Carpenter was about the only person willing to defend it, with the co-writer and director claiming that it was made with tongue planted firmly in cheek, something that was clearly lost on audiences when they were instead presented with a shoddily-scripted, poorly-acted, and altogether uninteresting sci-fi shoot ’em up. Cube may have been the star, but he’d rather forget Ghosts of Mars even happened.