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.

QUEEN OF OUTER SPACE

1958/Director: Edward Bernds/Writers: Charles Beaumont, Ben Hecht

Cast: Zsa Zsa Gabor, Eric Fleming, Dave Willock, Laurie Mitchell, Lisa Davis, Paul Birch, Patrick Waltz

Producer of many cheesy sci-fi yarns Walter Wanger had just finished serving a four month prison sentence for shooting his wife’s (Joan Bennet) suspected lover in the leg and crotch – only four months since he successfully pleaded temporary insanity -when he began to put together this project based on a story by Ben Hecht. Hecht’s original story was more of a farce but Wanger wanted it the story to be more serious and turned the production over to Ben Schwalb. Schwalb had worked for Sam Katzman on some Bowry Boy episodes and director Edward Bernds  had done some of those Bowry Boy films and some Three Stooges as well. I guess that is way Queen of Outer Space is sort of an odd little story at best. Many of the props and costumes seem to be left-overs from other sci-fi films – Forbidden Planet, World Without End, Flight to Mars – and the actors are playing it pretty straight but it is a cheese fest from the get go.

The film follows a story line that had already become familiar in previous sci-fi films of  the early 50′s – Cat Women of the Moon, Missile to the Moon (see my reviews at the link), Abbot and Costello Go to Mars, Fire Maidens from Outer Spce and others I will get around to here one day – and that is an adventure built around a group of male astronauts stranded on a planet of beautiful Amazon type women. The women are usually sexually frustrated and really seem to like Earthmen from the USA the best. Crew includes Eric Fleming and Paul Birch and the queen is Laurie Mitchell and her rival is prima donna Zsa Zsa Gabor. Story has it that Gabor was so difficult to work with that Ben Schwalb wound up in the hospital from stress and ulcers. The story’s action takes place on Venus -often the number choice for space amazon adventures – and there is a great spider in the cave sequence that usually accompanies these space maiden films. The color is nice and while the story drags for the most part it is worth the moments when the dialog gets really strange and to see the maidens drooling over the earth guys. The scene at the end where a flock of vivacious and nubile Venusian girls are pawing all over an ecstatic Paul Birch – as egg-head Professor Konrad – sums it all up. Fans of cheesy sci-fi, like myself, will love it. Others may be a bit confused by it all.

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 >>

PANIC IN YEAR ZERO!

1962/Director: Ray Milland/Writers: John Morton, Jay Simms

Cast: Ray Milland, Jean Hagen, Frankie Avalon, Mary Mitchel, Joan Freeman, Richard Bakalyan, Rex Holman

I know I’ve really liked a movie when later I am replaying the film in my head. Sometimes I imagine myself in the film and what I would have done in certain situations. Usually I handle these situations much better than the film’s original characters did of course. Or I may imagine myself overseeing a remake of the film that, while employing modern technologies, remains true to the original concept. Such is the case with the Ray Milland well directed low-budget doomsday film Panic in Year Zero! Certainly there are flaws to the film if you want to sit back and pick it apart but over all the film works well as a cold war period vision of how an everyday suburban family out for a weekend of tranquil fishing and camping has to deal with the sudden reality of a nuclear war in their backyard.

The capable actor Milland, even in schlocky fare like Frogs or The Thing with Two Heads, handles the directing chores well here. The film is a 1962 AIP low budget feature and it could have fared worse. But Milland’s pacing moves the story along with out it ever getting too bogged down. It does get bogged down of course here and there but I feel that is more an issue with the film’s budget than with its direction or acting. All of the devastation is alluded to and we never see any of the brutal horrors of the devastation an atomic bomb being dropped on LA would cause. Milland plays honest, hardworking everyday citizen Harry Baldwin who is heading out for some fishing in the Sierras with his family. His wife Ann (Jean Hagen) rouses their two grumpy teenagers, Karen and Rick (played by a pre-beach party Frankie Avalon) up at the crack of dawn to get the trip under way. In no time the action begins as LA lights up behind them and they stand in disbelief as the hugest mushroom cloud ever forms over what was once Los Angeles.

MORE PANIC IN YEAR ZERO! HERE >>

TODAY’S ELECTRIFYING DOUBLE FEATURE:

THE HIDEOUS SUN DEMON w/

CREATURE WITH THE ATOM BRAIN

SEE TODAY’S STUNNING SCI-FI DOUBLE FEATURE RIGHT HERE FOLKS >>

CAT-WOMEN OF THE MOON

1953/ Director: Arthur Hilton/ Writers: Al Zimbalist, Jack Rabin

Cast: Sonny Tufts, Victor Jory, Marie Windsor, William Phipps, Douglas Fowley, Carol Brewster, Susan Morrow, Suzanne Alexander

For this double feature I decided to write about two pretty good old time sci-fi flicks that are almost identical in their storylines. I even fear I am going to accidentally muddle the two together if I am not careful and wonder now if just one review for both films would suffice. But there are a couple differences that make these two moon mission films unique from one another. The theme is a familiar one for the 50’s and 60’s. A group of men, with maybe one female in the gang, are stranded somewhere, an island, lost civilization on the far side of a secret mountain or a planet like Venus or even the earth’s moon, and there they encounter an all female race of something similar to Amazons. The race may or may not be dying off and what men there are, if any, are kept as slaves and the occasional stud service. Some similar films would be Abbot and Costello Go To Mars (they actually went to Venus in the film) Invasion of the Star Creatures, The wild Women of Wongo, Mesa of Lost Women and quite a few others. The plots are usually the same and some recurring themes would be a young and cocky guy who is fast with the wisecracks who feels he has died and gone to heaven and hits on anything that breathes, a greedy opportunist who wants to pilfer the wealth the Amazon type women horde and a romance between the queen and the group leader. The virility of the male leader awakens feelings in the queen she has not felt in a long time and clouds her better judgment which usually dictates she execute all the outsiders. There is usually a power struggle as well within the female society between the old school led by the queen and a group of usurpers who are simply wanting for the right moment to strike, such as when the queen is weakened by her feelings of love for a big hunk of man. Both Cat-Women of the Moon and Missile to the Moon contains almost all of these essential ingredients and despite being cheese fare they are actually well made and enjoyable movies.

MORE MOON MOVIES HERE >>

THE GENE GENERATION

2007/Director: Pearry Reginald Teo/Writers: Keith Collea, Pearry Reginald Teo

Cast: Ling Bai, Alec Newman, Parry Shen, Faye Dunaway, Ethan Cohn

The Gene Generation with Chinese actress Bai Ling (or Ling Bai as it sometimes appears if you put the family name first) is one of those films that definitely falls into the category of it ‘could have been better’. The movie is not a waste of time and as the Café has evolved from its early posts I have taken a rather neutral position on most of the films I write about and I do not feel I actually recommend or pan films. I will leave that up to the reader to decide. While I cannot say I liked The Gene Generation all that much it seems to earn a post here not so much for the erratic storyline and touch and go production quality of the film itself but for the presence of lanky and luscious Bai Ling. Before talking about, and hopefully defending, the sometimes (actually usually) maligned Bai Ling I think I will say a word about my blogging process and why sometimes it is a drawback for me.

One problem I have is that I watch simply more movies than I can do decent posts on. I am not the type of person who wants to review every movie  right after I watch it, like better reviewers do I suppose. I started the Necrofiles category which is a way to skim over four or so movies at a time with comments of a brief paragraph or two at most. I work as an ESL teacher in China and the job, as well as life here at times, is draining. I may have the time to write but not the mental energy. I think over the last year I have begun to develop a writing style I like a little. I like to create a post that draws information from different sources on the net, as well as my own personal opinion, and brings them together in one place with images I either find online or make myself in the form of vidcaps, some that are pretty decent. The first thing I do when I decide to write about a film is find articles I like and make them into PDFs for future reference, get cast and crew info from IMDB or a similar site and then start collecting images and then they are all brought together in a rough form and stored as a nearly complete draft that I may save for months sometimes before I get around to writing the article. I must have over a dozen drafts now that have are laid out with images and cast/crew info but no written article. During that time of course I am watching more movies of a Uranium nature as well as mainstream films and sometimes doing posts as well on something I just watched.

MORE GENE GENERATION WITH BAI LING HERE >>