Son of the Revenge of the 31 Days of Cheese - Day 12 - IT! The Terror From Beyond Space

Today’s little slice of cheese from 1958 is cited sometimes as being the Ur- Alien – but I’m not that sure of that but anyway.

It’s 1973 in our old future – the second Mars Expedition has arrived to see what happened to the first mars landing. Turns out that they are all dead except for one man  Colonel Ed – the new crew finds one of the bodies with a bullet hole in its head so of course they decided that Col. Ed killed the rest of the crew. The idea being as they had crashed on Mars and when and if rescue was coming was uncertain, Ed killed the rest of the crew so he would have all the supplies and tasty space food. Killed for tang I guess.

This being our old future the space ship is a) huge and filled with dead meat for the monster I mean crewmen – Colonel Van,  head of the rescue ship is as one might suspect hostile to Ed – and he before the killings get started in earnest on the ship tries to get Ed to confess, also there is a lady scientist – they are always lady scientists in this they are always chosen it seems for their looks – I remember reading one of the reviews of The Andromeda Strain and the reviewer saying one of the things he liked most about the film was that the lady scientist in the film was not Raquel Welch (for once). Anyway Lady Ann is currently with Col. Van but it’s clear from the beginning that Col. Ed interests her. There is another lady scientist but she’s not much involved in the plot.  Both of them spend a lot of their time serving coffee to the men (this film was made in the 50’s)

Anyway – as they are getting ready to leave Mars one of the crew leaves the airlock open for a bit and well this is like leaving a door open, going down to the basement, leaving the huge egg unattended, putting an electric blanket on the block of ice holding what looks to be a humanoid being of huge size, opening the sealed tomb protected by an ancient curse, saying candy man three times, reading the spell that brings mummies to life out loud, seeing what happens is one pushes that button, staying overnight in a haunted house for money – you now this isn’t going to end well. And it doesn’t – something shambles in – we only see the shadow  but it’s in the ship now – which turns out to have all sorts of areas that are hard to get to – to quote Galaxy quest – who put this here who designed this – and why are the air vents that big it’s a space ship. 

The shadow – actually it is played by on Ray Crash Corrigan (apparently his last film role) who played apes late in his career after having been a b-movie stalwart in the late 30’s to early 40s – including  a guilty serial pleasure of mine – The Undersea Kingdom – where the actor took his stage name from that serial – and per the ever infallible IMDB had played apes early in his career as well in for example Tarzan.

I digress – back to the film - 

And thus after liftoff and Van getting on Ed’s case and Ed telling the story of how a monster killed his crew in a sandstorm -  the monster goes to work.

Guy hearing the monster in the bay goes to look – he gets killed right away – very loud – folks notice something is wrong go looking for the lost crewman – one of them is grabbed by the monster and is later found – badly mauled in shoved in the big air vent – note to space ship designers no big air vents. That goes for the designers of military bases of evil masterminds as well – whole armies have crawled through air vents in movies like this .

Anyway the folks get the idea finally that something really really big strong and alien is aboard ship and is out the kill them the way it killed the original crew. (Ed is cleared of murder charges it seems and he resists a temptation to spend the rest of the film saying I told you so – still he snatches the other Colonel’s girl (Ann) which does seem a bit déclassé.

Their first attempt to kill the beast is with grenades – lots of them rigged as booby traps on the grids of the big ass air vents this ship has. They then retreat up one floor and listen – the alien

 trips the grenades and well gets angry is what he does. Apparently the ship’s skin is several inches thick to withstand the grenades without blasting a hole in the ship – its’ like setting off grenades is a submarine under several thousand feet of water – this you do not want to do but it’s a movie and its’ the fifties.

After rigging the air vents the folks arm themselves with a huge number of guns – these guns don’t much better against the alien (now well into bullet’s can’t stop it, rockets cant spot it mode)

The movie from this point is the monster is forcing his way up each of the levels of the ship banding his way through the hatch – on each level they try to stop it – they don’t and usually somebody gets killed or mauled or something.

Finally they do mange to kill the beast by draining all the air out the ship while they wear their space suits – the way the alien dies in alien so I guess this is the link. Col Van also dies in the end so Ann and Ed don’t have to feel like total rotters because Ann ditched Van for Ed – who has a much more American name now that you think on it.

The movie is well paced the beast is a bit much – it’s supposed be able to sneak up on people but  it also seems very clumsy – also here’s the thing – Mar’s gravity is something like a little over a third of that of earths that means (as Jon Carter of Mars found out ) a human is going to be probably twice as strong as anything that shows up on the Martian surface – also a Martian working in earths gravity would feel like it weight twice as much. The dam thing would be barely able to shuffle about (see H.G.. Wells war of the worlds) never mind stuff folks up air vents.

That said this is an entertaining if quick film – flashes of the 1950’s social norms amuse and the beast is a bit silly looking but it’s fun and over quick (b pictures)

Enjoy with Tang