 |
 The creature in question is described as being "so terrifying it doesn't even
have a name" and that it is "hell-bent on killing everybody on a mission to
Mars." A crew on a Martian expedition is killed and Commander Carruthers is
the "prime suspect." He gets taken back to Earth for a court-martial and
discovers "the real killer" has also gotten on board the ship. The monster
starts "knocking off members of the crew one by one" and the survivors must
find away to "stop the unstoppable." 1958, 69 minutes, DVD
Well, you probably don't get your low budget 1950s science fiction films any
better than this. It! The Terror From Beyond Space tells what happens when man goes to Mars and leaves with a Martian stowaway on
board. Veterans of this style of film will tell you that no good can ever come
from going to Mars or from being invaded by Mars. In this case, the year is
the far flung future of 1973. It's a bizarre future where people don't have
muttonchop sideburns, drive AMC Gremlins or say stuff like "you dig." In fact,
this future looks like the black and white world of the late 1950s where taking
a trip into space meant smoking Lucky Strikes in the rocket, putting shiny
goop in your hair and having the lady astronauts clear the dinner table and
serve you coffee (Is this a rocket ship or a a Denny's?). The movie is very
entertaining in spite of its outdated conventions and meager budget (everything
seems to take place in the same two or three locations and those are just
places with boxes and cannisters lying around for the most part). The lack of
sets is put to good use here, because what you have here is your basic "Die Hard
on a Rocketship with a Martian Invader" gimmick at work. Colonel Edward
Carruthers is the sole survivor of the first manned expedition to Mars and if
Carruthers had watched any of the recent Martian movies that Hollywood seems
intent on foisting off on us at regular intervals (Give it up! There is
nothing there! Pick a new outer-space boogeyman!) then he would have known
that it was going to be a slightly troubled trip. In fact, it turned out to be
troubled for everyone but him. Somehow, some Martian thing managed to kill
everyone except Carruthers. A rescue ship has been dispatched from Earth and
when they arrive they immediately figure out that this highly trained astronaut
must've started sweating the fact that with all those people there with him,
the food supplies would only last a year, but if he killed them all, they would
last him ten years. This is all very stupid, because I think this ship showed
up within a year of the first expedition and you would think that the scenarios
of what the survivors would do in the event of a "crack-up" (that's what
Carruthers called it) of the rocketship on Mars would have been thought out and
trained for.  Since NASA (or whatever bogus U.S. space agency this movie uses) has lost nine
astronauts, they need a scapegoat. The obvious scapegoat is the Martians, but
since one guy survived and would be easier to transport to Earth and parade
around for the tabloids, Carruthers gets the nod. Never mind what that says
about NASA's psychological screening of folks they send up in really expensive
rockets. Colonel Van Husen is the dude in charge of this space-arrest and
transport and he is determined to get to the bottom of things. He tells
Carruthers that someone will be at his side the entire trip in case he gets
another hankering to wipe out an entire crew. Then he proceeds to engage in
some pretty advanced interrogation techniques where he just sort of tries to
taunt Carruthers into blurting out that yes he did murder nine people that were
his good buddies simply because he thought he would run out of K rations in a
year. The way he tries to bait Carruthers into confessing is to kind of
harrumph
and make faces at him, with the occasional snide comment whenever Carruthers
claims he's innocent and tries to lay the blame on some unseen Martian force.
Eventually one of the two chicks on the flight tells him to lay off because
he's really hunky and sensitive and she wants to hear Carruthers' version of
what went down out there in the Martian desert. Carruthers tells her that they
were out driving around when a sandstorm came up and suddenly people were
being yanked out of jeeps and getting killed and the rest of them were shooting
at the unseen attackers and Carruthers was the only one who got away (and you
can bet he said he "barely" got away!). Since he's about as hunky as you're
going to get on this spaceflight, Ann Anderson (snicker) kind of half-believes
him. Van, fearing his supply of space pootie-tang is going to dry up like a
Martian desert in July, sidles up to Carruthers and tells him that he thinks
he's full of dooty and he's got the proof to back that up! He busts out a
human skull that he claims he picked up from among the dead and points out this
hole in the skull. He says it's a bullet hole and that man was the only
monster that killed like that. Carruthers immediately refers Van back to his
story wherein he said everyone was shooting wildly in a sandstorm and that
somebody (not me though!) probably accidently shot the dude. Whatever sniffs,
Van and oh, by the by, did I mention that some durn fool had left one of the
airlock doors open before they took off?  Not too long into their flight, a dude named Kleinholz comes up missing. The
only guy who thinks anything about that is Carruthers and he probably figures
that they'll just try to pin it on him. Carruthers starts yelling all over the
ship for him and wakes everyone up. Everyone that is except Gino. Seems that
Gino is missing as well. So they go all over the ship (at least all two or
three rooms of it) and someone's hanging out by a grate or vent or something
and notices and arm inside the duct that didn't come factory equipped on the
rocketship. The open it up and by golly if ain't Kleinholz. They get him out
and he's all dead, every bone broken and later we'd find out that all his
juices were sucked dry by whatever creature was on the loose. Gino is located
in a duct as well, but is still alive. Before he can be saved, the monster
slaps whoever was inside trying rescue him, upside the head leaving bloody
wounds and this guy bails out, leaving Gino to die. Gino has a brother named
Bob who just happens to be on the crew as well, so he's kind of perturbed by
this dramatic turn of events, but pretends not to blame the coward of a crew
member. Now, since this is one of those 1950s space flights, they come armed
to the teeth. The first order of business is to get the large wooden crate
marked "Grenades." They decide to wire up about ten of them in sequence to the
grate so that the next time this beast tries to sneak attack them, he'll be
blown
into bite-sized Martian chunks. Naturally all this does when the monster
triggers it is to make a loud boom, generate some smoke, and leave the monster
shaking his head. Everyone scurries up to the next deck and pretty much lives
up there the rest of the movie, while hoping the monster doesn't bust through
the hatch and get them. The rest of the movie plays out as a cat and mouse
game between the astronauts and the Martian monster, with the humans
alternately cowering, wondering what the creature will do next and coming up
with schemes to kill the creature (Shoot it! Blow it up! Irradiate it!).
During one of their encounters with the creature everyone empties their pistols
into the monster, which has no effect, but Van does manage to get grabbed by
the foot by the beast. This leaves him with some kind of bone marrow infection
and the old lady doctor theorizes that this creature must be absorbing people's
water and oxygen right out of their bodies. She does all this medical work and
thinking in between asking the male crew members if they were drinking regular
or decaf.  With Van hurt, Ann turns her hussy attention to Carruthers, leaving Van with
that dried up old woman doctor (Hey Van, she's got a good job and you could
always adopt.) Ann's all about cleaning off a smudge masquerading as a
head wound on Carruthers, while Van is lapsing in and out of consciousness,
talking nonsense and generally being really pathetic. Periodically the monster
tries to bust through the hatch and we hear him growl over the intercom every
now and again. One of their plans is to sneak up on the monster from behind
and kill him somehow that way. Carruthers and another guy put on their
spacesuits and go outside the ship to surprise him from behind. We they
reenter the ship things go awry when the guy that isn't Carruthers gets his
foot caught in something or other and Carruthers has to leave him to the mercy
of the creature (Hmmm, that seems vaguely familiar Col. Carruthers). Naturally,
when he gets back, Carruthers is the subject of more scorn for his
cockroach-like survival skills. The dude he left behind though is still
alive and fending
off the creature at irregular intervals with a blow torch. And how is Van
holding up? Well, the doctor tells everyone that there isn't any more blood to
give to Van upstairs and that if they want to save their short-tempered and
insecure captain, they'll have to traipse downstairs to where the monster is to
get the blood. Carruthers (who else?) and some of the others take off their
boots so they can sneak downstairs while the creature is distracted by the
blow-torch wielding guy with the broken leg and they try to get the blood that
way. The creature gets bored with blow-torch guy and wanders in the room with
the atomic reactor. They close the door and try to see what the creature will
do once it's trapped like that (umm, try to break out, maybe?), but Van, being
the jackass he is, decides to open up the reactor on the creature in an effort
to give him some cancer that he probably won't die from until he's middle aged,
but at least it will increase the probability that any little Martians he
decides to sire (Hey Ann, you're not married to this Carruthers guy, right?)
will suffer from birth defects (like maybe they won't have the pig-nose this
creature has). What this little stunt does is piss off It! and he busts out of
the reactor room. Now everyone knows that they either have to kill the
creature or the creature will kill them. I'm glad that they've caught up with
the rest of us, because it's about time for the big finish. The question, then, is how do you get rid of an indestructible monster aboard a
spaceship who needs to consume large amounts of oxygen to stay alive? Well,
gee, when I put it that way, the answer seems obvious. You ask him to leave
nicely. And if that doesn't work, you put your spacesuits on, grab hold of
something real tight, and open up the friggin' airlock so that the oxygen is
sucked out into space, leaving Big Nasty gasping for breath like he was Kevin
Nash about two minutes into a main event. They do this and creature busts
through the hatch and croaks after all the oxygen is depleted. By now, I'm
sure that everyone knows that the movie Alien borrowed heavily from this movie in terms of story, and not without good
reason. I would also be remiss if I didn't note the similarities this movie has
with the A.E. Van Vogt story "Black Destroyer" published way back in 1939 (in
fact Van Vogt got a $50,000 settlement from Twentieth Century Fox in 1980 due
to Alien's similarity.) It! The Terror From Beyond Space never fails to entertain in spite of its many flaws. You can criticize it
because the characters don't really distinguish themselves from one another and
that the movie is so short, you never learn to tell them apart (um, Carruthers
was one of the men and Ann was one of the women). You could also quibble with
the fact that they shot firearms off in that rocket ship, detonate grenades,
and even used a bazooka like it was the trailer court parking lot on a Saturday
night. You might even whine that this thing is too low budget and their ship
looks like a packing warehouse, but you're missing the point. The point is man
against the vast and terrifying unknown of space. These characters aren't dirt
stupid like the ones in something like Cat-Women Of The Moon. They've got a problem and their trying to solve it. They're in a ship
millions of miles from Earth and they've got a monster on board trying to pick
them off one by one. There isn't anywhere to hide and the situation isn't
going to go away. So you've got this claustrophobic suspense vibe going that
keeps you interested in spite of some its shortcomings. Every scene seems to
be one where death and destruction could be right around the corner. I give
the crew (whoever they are) points because they're pro-active in their measures
and are always grasping at some possible solution. I didn't recall much
dialogue that made me gag and the acting didn't make me wince that much.
For connoisseurs of science fiction movies of the period, this has got to be
one of the better of the low-budget offerings and is a fun way to spend a
little over an hour.
Reviews © 2004
MonsterHunter
|
|
