IT! THE TERROR FROM OUTER SPACE

1958/Director: Edward L. Cahn/Writer: Jerome Bixby

Cast: Marshall Thompson, Shirley Patterson, Kim Spalding, Ann Doran, Ray Corrigan (as IT!)

1958’s It! The Terror from Beyond Space is one of the better entries into the Edward L. Cahn collection of low budget horror and films though mot them are fairly enjoyable b-movie fare to begin with. It! also features yet another fantastic monster costume by Paul Blaisdell that some would say is his best but I like them all actually and do not want to make comparisons. The film is notable online for always being called the inspiration for Ridely Scott’s influential horror/sci-fi classic Alien. It! Is not the only film said to have influenced Scott’s movie as Queen of Blood and Mario Bava’s Planet of the Vampires are also cited. It can be fair to say Scott and writer Dan O’Bannon may have seen this film and the others but Alien is in a class of its own as far as I am concerned. What It! does have in common with Alien is the story of a crew of men and women trapped inside a space ship with a murderous monster that seeks to kill them off one at a time. The monster –in both It! and Alien- is highly predatory and has a form of intelligence that, while not as high as the human’s, is enough when coupled with its superhuman strength to present the crew with a very serious problem.

The monster in It! is obviously a man in a big rubber suit but Cahn tends to mostly shoot the creature action in dark, shadowy shots and Blasidell’s costume’s shortcomings tend to be hidden most of the time. When the monster is shown in full lighting it is simply not has scary as when it is shown lurking in the shadows of the space ship. The film follows a rescue ship that is sent to Mars to locate possible survivors of a previous mission sent there some months before. The only survivor is Col. Carruthers (Marshall Thompson) and he is immediately suspected of killing off his crew in order to preserve their rations for himself. His story of some sort of space monster killing off everyone but himself is dismissed outright as hogwash. Soon however the crew of the ship begins disappearing and then being found with the moister and bone marrow sucked from their bodies. Maybe not only was Carruther’s not lying but it looks like the thing snuck onboard their ship before it blasted off form Mars no its return to Earth where Carruther’s was to be tried for murder.

There are a couple female crew members and it can be amusing to see how the roles of women have changed in films from the 50’s to now. They tend to wait on the guys at lunch and of course the more attractive of the two (Shirley Patterson –cast as Shawn Smith- as Ann Anderson) becomes the object of Carruther’s attention to which she succumbs rather quickly. In almost all of the old horror/sci-fi flicks gals are hit on from the get go by the alpha male in the film and the more persistent he is the more she falls for him by the middle of the film. The death of the creature is actually pretty similar to the how Ripley kills off the truly menacing beast in Alien in that a hatch is opened and the chamber of the ship with the creature, and crew, in it is decompressed or something. Of course there are some problems with these old films such as the creature being almost too powerful to believe and it being impervious to almost every method of destruction (including bazookas, which should probably not be fired inside a spaceship anyway). Of course the creature in old films always has some weakness the hero or heroes simply have to find before the film runs out of time. It may be salt or cold or ultra-violet light but by the gods there is something that the monster is not comfortable with. In this case it is the lack of enough oxygen to fill its huge lungs. The acting is not too bad over all and the film does create at times a believable sense of claustrophobia. The photography is nice and at a mere 68 minutes it does not drag on for too long. A real classic.

For a while now I have been working at getting a decent collection of old TV series. When I say old I mean pretty old, from the mid to late 60’s to the mid 70’s. Pre-cable shows that I grew up on essentially I can sometimes find these in boxed sets here in China. For example I have both the complete original Star Trek and Hogan’s Heroes and one day am going to get the Addams Family at the DVD stores I drop into once in a while. Of course these are all pirated and cheap as hell but of excellent quality so far. Other shows are a bit harder to locate and I am using a Rapidshare based site now to piece together The Munsters series little by little. Those RS sites have lots of series but I am really lazy about copying and pasting the files one by one so I tend to put them together over a long period of time. The shows can also sometimes be found the shows on sites like Isohunt or Pirate Bay which is great. I got the complete run of Kung Fu with David Carradine from Isohunt as well as all of the Gilligan’s Islands episodes. I also have a membership at a ratio based TV show site connected to Cinemageddon but it can hard to maintain a good ratio at those type of sites –which can result in getting banned- and so I cannot get the things I want when I want them. So I have a membership but am afraid to download anything I like. Right now working on getting in season one of Hawaii Five-O from that CG ratio based TV show site and may see if I can get somewhere else since I cannot seem to seed of any of it back. Well at the wonderful The Horror Charnel –another ration based site- I just got in the complete one season run of one of the best TV series of all time, Kolchak: The Night Stalker. I burned the 20 episodes and began watching them last night.

You can argue that if it was such a good series why did it last only one season? Who knows. We live in a world where Beyonce’s music and videos are in your face all day and night but not a person I know owns a King Crimson or Andy Summers album. The show just did not fare well against its Friday night competition on NBC it seems. The series aired in 1974 on ABC and was based on the character Carl Kolchak –played to perfection by the Darren McGavin- created for the made for TV movies The Night Stalker and The Night Strangler. The shows follow the adventures of the shabbily dressed Carl Kolchak who works at the under-staffed and under-budgeted INS news bureau in Chicago where he employs his journalistic talents either covered mob hits or filling in for the “Dear Emily” writer when she is ill. We hardly ever see any of Chicago’s horrid winter weather as Carl drives around in near constant sunshine in his convertible Ford Mustang talking into his cassette recorder. Of course the shows hook is that he is constantly getting pulled into supernatural situation or another as his investigation of a recent murder unfolds. He encounters anything and everything from incarnations of Jack the Ripper to Werewolves and Vampires. Kolchak is the absolute quintessential non-hero. He packs no gun or knife and more often than not winds up screaming like a little girl and jumping out a window in the presence of the evil force he is facing. And to be honest Clint Eastwood or Charles Bronson would have probably done the same thing in real life if confronted with a werewolf or vampire in their closet.

On top of supernatural terrors Kolchak must deal with one cynical police chief after another who ignores his questions at press conferences. But the greatest adversary he must contend with each week is his old school news paper chief Tony Vincenzo –played by perennial tough guy Simon Oakland who backed up Steve McQeen in Bullitt- who spends each episode trying to pull Carl off each case and assigning him to some mundane story. Invariably Vincenzo winds up backing Kolchak and having his faith in his ‘star’ reporter restored… only to lose it again again next episode. The relationship between Vincenzo and Kolchak is classic and adds comic relief to the show’s themes of horror and mayhem. Also refreshing is that McGavin and I have only seen The Ripper episode and half of The Zombie so far but am about to hit the sofa –I am supposed to be studying Chinese- and watch a few more episodes this afternoon. This is classic TV. Before the idea of drama of comedy became a bunch of selfish over sexed yuppies insulting each other for an hour. It was a time when shows had a simple but effective formula they stuck to each week and milked it for all it was worth. Just look what was done with shows like Gilligan’s Island or Hogan’s Heroes. The same cast and same props every week but I never got tired of it. The same with Kolchak. The same clutterd office and grumpy boss each week but with a different monster and resourceful method of whacking the creature during the shows last five minutes. I guess I am just old school but this is a lot cooler than Lost or Prison Break in my book.

IT CONQUERED THE WORLD

1956/Director: Roger Corman/Writer: Lou Rusoff

Cast: Peter Graves, Beverly Garland, Lee Van Cleef, Sally Fraser, Dick Miller, Jonathan Haze, Taggart Casey

I had originally planned to do this as a guest post Nate Yapp’s awesome Classic Horror site. I asked Nate for a film he needed reviewed and he suggested this one but as I am a master of procrastination way too much time has now gone by and if Nate reads this I apologize. Also my own sites suffer from neglect and regular posting and need to have something added to them once in a while as well. So thanks Nate for the offer and sorry for my scattered brained approach to horror-cult film blogging. I do not think I have the focus to be a dependable guest blogger. If you do not know about his site please go check it out. Like The Uranium Café it focuses on classic-cult-cheese classics and its focus stays primarily on films and offers guest posters a chance to to add a review to the archives. My restless nature has my site venture off into music and comic books sometimes as well and soon I am beginning a new series on movers and shakers behind the scenes of ‘great’ films, music and artwork. Some people in my bulging draft folder now include Sam Katzman, Paul Blaisdell (who did the makeup effects for this posts film), Edward L. Kahn and others. I went through a period of ‘blogging depression’ and apathy.  I think I am over that for now and Uranium Willy is back in the saddle for the time being but no doubt will slip off again.

Today’s post features a film that is surely among the classics of great American cheese. It Conquered the World may be one of the best example’s Roger Corman’s amazing ability to squeeze everything possible from a low budget and tight production schedule. Like many low budget horror/sci-fi films from the period there is a lot of dialog, rather than nail biting action and suspense, to carry the film. Now you either love all this dialog or you hate it. Many people find it all unbearably boring while others, like your humble  reviewer here, find the corny dialog, crazy scientific explanations and pompous messages more enjoyable than the action scenes. Just look at this sample from the film’s ending where  hero Paul Nelson (played by the late Peter Graves) muses over the actions of his misguided friend Tom Anderson (Lee Van Cleef):

He learned almost too late that man is a feeling creature… and because of it, the greatest in the universe. He learned too late for himself that men have to find their own way, to make their own mistakes. There can’t be any gift of perfection from outside ourselves. And when men seek such perfection… they find only death… fire… loss… disillusionment… the end of everything that’s gone forward. Men have always sought an end to the toil and misery, but it can’t be given, it has to be achieved. There is hope, but it has to come from inside, from Man himself.

I think he could have added “Goodnight sweet Prince” at the end there and it would have become as timeless as anything the Immortal Bard himself would have penned.

SEE HOW IT CONQUERED THE WORLD HERE >>

INVISIBLE INVADERS

1959/Director: Edward L. Cahn/Writer: Samuel Newman

Cast: John Agar, Jean Byron, Philip Tonge, Robert Hutton, John Carradine, Hal Torey

I just am not really into blogging much lately for whatever reason. Not the end of the world if I blog regularly or not I suppose. But since I brought up the subject of the end of the world I can think of no better segue into this post’s film, Invisible Invaders. This is a film I think I saw when I was ten years old or so and have not seen it again until only recently. But it is film that has stuck in my mind all this time for it images of reanimated corpses that have many people have come to feel must have been some influence on later films like The Last Man on Earth and George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead. I would not go so far as to say Invisible Invaders is a zombie film in the sense that we today are familiar with zombie films but I would say it serves as a sort of bridge between old time zombie films more modern living dead features. The film resembles more in its concept of alien beings using re-animated corpses to attack and defeat the Earth from to none other than Ed Wood’s Plan Nine from Outer Space which came out later in the same year of 1959. The really early zombie films had zombies that were typically under some sort of ‘voodoo’ type spell and were controlled by some witch doctor or white man who has been in the jungle long enough to learn the rituals necessary to bring a dead man back to life and have said dead man do his bidding. Modern zombies, since Romero and his Italian imitators, are either the flesh eating living dead or humans infected with some virus that drives them into a homicidal frenzy. Invisible Invaders rests somewhere in the middle of these great epochs of the shuffling dead.

While the dead are not ravenous flesh eaters they are still driven to kill living human beings (though not only with their bare hands as we shall see). They are not controlled by a witch doctor but they are manipulated nonetheless by some type of intelligence outside their own instincts. And unlike the army of living dead in Ed Wood’s entertaining Plan 9 (an army of basically Vampira and Tor Johnson) Invisible Invaders features hordes of chalk faced corpses lumbering over hillsides (most of them wearing Wall Street suits) that created the images that haunted me as a little lad. Of course now I am much older and I watch a film like Invisible Invaders not to terrified but to be entertained with outrageously bad acting and dialog as well as gigantic plot holes, confusing stock footage and pretentious, unnecessary narration. Invisible Invaders is indeed a cheese classic by director Edward L. Cahn (It! The Terror from Beyond Space, The She Creature and another living dead classic Zombies of Mora Tau) but it is also a fairly well made low budget sc-fi film with great b/w photography by Maury Gertsman and for the most part a thoroughly enjoyable little sci-fi flick.

SEE MORE INVISBLE INVADERS RIGHT HERE >>

I have only received a couple comments from the actual people who make some of the uranium packed motion pictures I review here at the Cafe. One memorable one was a nice comment by Marco Werba who did the score for Dario Argento’s Giallo (a film I liked actually) and just the other day I got two comments from some of the people involved with the Ron Ormond film The Monster and the Stripper (aka The Exotic Ones)which I reviewed here last summer. Not only are the comments from people directly involved in the project but Ron Ormond’s son Tim, who played Timmy in the film, supplied us with loads of great trivia around the film and its makers. He seems like a real nice guy with a sense of old fashioned southern hospitality that the world needs more of. Thanks Tim for these great anecdotes. Also is a short comment from Diane Jordon who played one of the dancer’s in the film. I actually caught her in a screen capture for my post. It is posted here and she is the dancer to the left. Ormond’s films are not for everybody but I liked Monster and the Stripper. Good campy fun and you can tell the people are having fun making it. Posts coming eventually on Please Don’t Touch me and If Footmen Tire You What Will Horses Do. Both Diane and Tim are looking for their friend and co-star in the film Georgette Dante. I posted a picture of Georgette, who did great inb the film, next to the one of Diane. If you have any clue I will try to forward a message to Tim or Diane though I do not have their email. I will figure it out.  For now lets check out their comments and some new screen captures. Thanks Tim and Diane.

See the rest of The Monster and the Stripper with comments from Tim Ormond himself right here >>

THE ALLIGATOR PEOPLE

1959/Director: Roy Del Ruth/Writer: Orville H. Hampton

Cast: Beverly Garland, Bruce Bennett, Lon Chaney Jr., George Macready

Lately I have been getting in lots of old horror and sci-fi films I have always heard about but have never seen. I grew up with images in magazines like Famous Monsters of Filmland of films like Invisible Invaders, Gorgo, Not of this Earth (the original) and many others but never caught them on any creature feature shows while growing up. By the time VHS came out I seemed to have lost some interest in these old films and followed a different and often darker path for many years. Now suddenly I find myself drawn back to these often harmless and quaint little gems and recall how Forrest J. Ackerman handled them with such care despite their often corny stories and shabby production values. One film I finally got around to seeing for the first time at the ripe old age of fifty one is 1959’s The Alligator People. Of course before I ever see a film I have an image of the film in my mind and in the case of The Alligator People the actual movie just did not come close. Not for better or worse but the movie was not what I had conjured up in my mind based on old pictures I had seen in horror magazines. For one thing the film should probably be called The Alligator Person since that is about the total number of alligator people we deal with for the most part. There are people covered in odd shaped shrouds that we assume are also alligator people in some state of mutation but nothing much ever happens with them though the images of them being herded about are a bit creepy.

MORE OF THE ALLIGATOR PEOPLE HERE >>

THE LAST HORROR FILM aka FANATIC

1982/Director: David Winters/Writers: Judd Hamilton, Tom Klassen

Cast: Caroline Munro, Joe Spinell,  Judd Hamilton, Devin Goldenberg, David Winters, Susanne Benton, Filomena Spagnuolo( Mary Spinell)

I am certain even the most modest horror film fan has heard of Hammer and Bond girl Caroline Munro. Her long brunette hair and statuesque features are simply stunning and she has starred in some fairly memorable horror flicks like The Abominable Dr. Phibes Rises Again, Slaughter High and the shlocky Italian sci-fi film Starcrush. One of her co-stars in Starcrush was New York City veteran character actor Joe Spinell. Spinell’s name may be less familiar to many except for the cognoscenti of b-films. He is more known as a supporting actor and had small roles in The Godfather, The Seven-Ups, Rocky and Taxi Driver before he had his first starring role in the 1980 William Lustig splatter film Maniac. We will get to Maniac in the second part of this double feature and instead will start off with what is sort of a follow up to Maniac pairing Munro and Spinell up again. That film is 1982’s The Last Horror Movie or Fanatic was it was originally released as on DVD. I got a hold of the Fanatic version of the film and not the new Troma release of the movie that is supposed to include a few extra minutes of scenes and some extras including commentaries and interviews. I have to be honest I never listen to DVD commentaries. Simply never. So I do not know if I going to go out of my way to find the Troma release but we will see. I would be interested in the interviews with Spinell’s buddy Luke Walter and Maniac director William Lustig who seems to have stopped directing films (his last being Uncle Sam, which I liked, in 1997) and now produces and is the head honcho at Blue Underground DVD.

MORE OF JOE SPINELL IN THE LAST HORROR MOVIE AND MANIAC HERE >>