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Friday, February 16, 2024

IT! THE TERROR FROM BEYOND SPACE (1958)

Astronaut Marshall Thompson, sole survivor on a mission to Mars gone wrong, gets picked up by a rescue team and heads home to face court-martial for the presumed murder of the rest of his crew.  Yikes!  But when the rescue team starts falling to the same monster one-by-one, his claims of innocence are validated in the worst possible way.  It’s find and destroy the stowaway monster or don’t make it back to Earth alive.  Double Yikes!  Easy to spot this as a ‘50s low-budget Sci-Fi precursor to ALIEN/’79, but it’s really more like a chump-change knock-off of Howard Hawks’ THE THING (FROM ANOTHER WORLD)/’51.  (Even the title a reflection.)  In the Hawks film (credited director Christian Nyby) an isolated team of Arctic scientists gets locked up with a killer vegetable.  (It looks like your typical humanoid flesh-eating monster, but it’s a plant.)  This one follows pretty closely (budget permitting), especially in highlighting the team effort so typical of Hawks.  But here, everyone’s locked inside a phallic-shaped multi-level spacecraft.  The big finale starts by trapping the monster on a middle floor so that, in a last ditch effort, two men can try a dangerous space walk down the outside ‘skin’ of the ship (untethered, using magnetized boots?) and work their way in on a level below the monster; the remaining survivors waiting on the top level.  This little film filled with decent ideas like this, and technically not badly accomplished.  That space walk featuring a dandy model shot, an example of hack director Edward L. Cahn rising all the way to acceptable mediocrity.  (Though blowing up grenades as defense inside a spacecraft an odd idea.)  And note two woman on-board as medical officers.  Okay, they also bus tables in the mess, serve up coffee refills to the men, and are objects of a romantic rivalry, but still . . . medical officers!  All told, the film not at all despicable.

DOUBLE-BILL:  As mentioned, THE THING FROM ANOTHER WORLD/’51.

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