Okay,
everybody, curl up on the old Barco
Lounger and grab a can of your favorite
brew, and then settle in for a nice and creepy
little feature that some claim helped
inspire Dan O’Bannon while writing Alien.
If
nothing else, it’s the poster child for
the dire consequences of littering on a
galactic scale. Let's get to it...
Our
movie begins with a slow pan over the
wreckage of The Challenge-141. and
a solemn prologue by
Colonel Carruthers (Marshall
Thompson),
the only surviving member out of a crew of
nine from the ill-fated rocket-ship that cracked up as it attempted
to land on Mars.
But
the crash didn’t kill the crew. Carruthers
claims that some kind of a monster wiped
them out. (Cue
ominous music.) And
as the
movie proper begins with the impending
departure of the rescue rocket-ship, aptly
named The Challenge-142 (very
clever...), Colonel
Van Huesen (Kim Spalding), the
ship's commander, expresses his belief that
it was Carruthers -- not some
monster, who killed the crew of the
141, to hoard the
meager supplies while waiting for the
rescue ship, and he intends to have a full confession by the time
they reach Earth for a general court-martial
and summary execution.
As
the 142 count-downs to blast off, Huesen is alerted that one of the lower
level cargo-hatches is still open. Lt.
Calder (Paul Langton) apologizes that he
accidentally left it open after dumping
some garbage over the side, and after he closes the
hatch, the camera pans away revealing
the shadow of something monstrous lurking
just out of sight inside the ship's hold.
And then the sparkler's lit, and The
Challenge-142 heads back to Earth.
Along
the way, Carruthers
pleads his case about the monster, but
then Huesen shows
him some of the remains they found of the
original crew: One of the skulls has a
bullet hole in it. Carruthers explains
that the
monster attacked during a sandstorm, and
says the bullet wound was an accident
and it's owner was already dead anyway. Huesen doesn't buy it because there is
only one kind of monster that uses bullets
-- and that clinches Carruthers' guilt as far
as he’s concerned.
The
rest of the crew pretty much feels the
same way, and is a standard
representation of 1950’s-era space-pioneers (and
everyone last one of them chain-smokers.) Calder
is from Texas, and we have the requisite
brothers from Brooklyn, Gino and Bob
Finelli (Richard Harvey and Richard
Benedict). Dr. Mary Royce (Ann
Doran), and
her husband, Eric (Dabs Greer), and, of
course, the obligatory love interest -- biologist Ann Anderson (Shirley
Patterson. And I find it funny that
they made the ship's medical doctor and biologist women,
yet they're still in charge of making
dinner and doing the dishes!) There
are a couple of others at the bottom of
the cast list, and you know they’re
toast, so
we’ll introduce these poor souls as
they’re knocked off. Starting right
about now...
Keinholz
(Thom Carrey), our first red-shirted
ensign, hears some strange noises coming
from the lower decks. (The
layout of the rocket is vertical. Five
decks in all, with one central stairway
and a sealable hatch on each floor.) Heading down to the lowest
level to investigate, after a few suspenseful
turns, he is attacked by the ferocious
stowaway. Carruthers
is the only one who hears the attack, so
of course, no one believes him until they
can’t find Keinholz anywhere. They split
up and search the ship. While searching,
Gino raids a vital storage bin -- the
one with all the cigarettes, but before he
can even light up, the monster attacks
him. Now
two crewmembers are missing. They
finally find Keinholz's body stuffed
up an air vent, and Major Purdue (Robert
Bice),
the second red-shirt, volunteers to search
the airshafts. He finds Gino barely alive,
but the monster's alive and kicking. When
it attacks, Purdue escapes but not before the
monster savages his face.
Vindicated,
as his story proves true, it means
little to Carruthers with all their lives in immediate
danger. Retreating to a higher deck, they rig an explosive trap for the monster.
But when the creature detonates the grenades,
they
don’t even slow it down. Next, they try
some gas bombs that Gino had rigged up in
case
they ran into some
dinosaurs on Mars. (Remember this
is the '50s, new planets were either
inhabited by Iguana shaped dinosaurs or
tribes of buxom Amazon women.) When
they
don’t work either, Huesen is
severely mauled in the resulting mêlée.
After
the crew
retreats up to another deck -- and there
ain't that many left, Eric
comes up with a plan to try and
electrocute the monster. Donning their
spacesuits, Carruthers and Calder use the
airlocks to go outside and circle down
below the monster. They connect a high
voltage wire to the stairway, and then make
some noise to attract the monster. The
creature hears them and gets the juice,
but again, this has no visible effect. Carruthers
makes it back to the airlock, but Calder takes a
beating from the monster, getting his
leg, but worse yet, the monster cracks the
faceplate on his suit so he can’t
escape out the airlock. Managing to
squeeze into a corner, he orders Carruthers to go on
without him and then uses a handy acetylene
torch to fight
the creature off.
While
Carruthers makes his way back up, Dr.
Royce performs an autopsy on Keinholz
where she
discovers that the monster sucked all the
oxygen and water from the victim through
some kind of osmosis. She also warns that
the other wounded are infected with an alien
bacteria, and without more whole blood, they
will die. And, of course, all the medical supplies are
right where the monster is. Still kicking,
Calder radios over the intercom that the
monster has gone into the reactor room.
Using the ships controls they seal it
inside, and then Carruthers, Bob and Eric head
down to retrieve Calder and the medical
supplies.
In
a bacterial-charged delirium, Huesen then opens the reactor
core, exposing the monster to the radiation
in an attempt to poison it. This only
makes the monster mad, and it tears through
the metal door and mangles Bob. Carruthers
and Eric retreat with the medical supplies
while Calder, left behind again, fights
the monster off with his torch. Unable
to get at him, the monster flies into a
rampage and busts it’s way up through the
decks to get to the others. Retreating to the upper-most level of the
ship, as they prepare for a final stand,
Carruthers notices that the oxygen
consumption levels on the read-outs are
way up. Way-way up. They deduce that the monster is
the cause and hit upon a plan to blow the
airlock, which should suffocate the creature.
Radioing their intentions to Calder, they
tell him to seal himself in the lower airlock. He makes it.
While
the others frantically don their space
suits, the monster bursts through the last
hatch before Carruthers can get to the airlock controls.
Huesen sacrifices
himself to blow the hatch, and the
resulting explosive decompression sucks all the air
out and the creature finally dies.
Back
on Earth it’s reported that Carruthers
is cleared of all charges, and that further
space-exploration efforts should bypass the
hostile planet Mars. For Mars is another
name for DEATH.
The
End
IT!
The Terror from Beyond Space is somewhere
between The
Thing from Another World -- sci-fi
at it’s best, and Robot
Monster -- sci-fi at it’s
goofiest. Notice I didn’t say worst. For
that try and sit through Battle
of the Worlds.
It’s more toward the former than the
latter, and the only real problem I had with the film is
the obligatory romantic subplot. Every
one of these films had one, no matter how
maddening they can be, but here,
Ann dumps Huesen and falls for
Carruthers faster than any other film I
can think of -- with no real explanation as
to why except for the script requirement. I also think my hearing is going
because she kept calling Carruthers Eric,
when his first name is Ed.
That’s
the only problem, though. Veteran director
Eddie Cahn keeps things suspenseful enough,
and writer Jerome Bixby provides plenty of rising
tension -- will
anything kill that #@%&ing thing. The
sets aren’t that great, but Cahn was smart enough to turn the lights way
down making things nice and murky. That
works two ways: it adds to the suspense,
and hides the dime-store origins of your
set and monster. Either that or I've got a
really horrible print on video -- and
that's why the vidcaps are so terrible this
week.
The
monster is another Paul
Blaisdell creation. (He
also did the killer turnip in It
Conquered the World and a score
of other A.I.P.
monsters.) Ray
"Crash" Corrigan did the honors
of wearing it, but could barely fit in it. Once
again, the monster looks pretty good in
the shadows, but is a little disappointing
when it comes into the light. And if you
look closely, you can easily spot the
notorious scene of the monstrous silhouette
where Corrigan refused to put the mask on.
The
biggest kick I got out of the film was all the smoking these
astronauts do in the controlled
environment of the spaceship. I also
chuckled at the lack of concern over the firing
of weapons and detonating explosives inside
the ship. Hull integrity -- schmull
integrity, and
in the future, we will still be using M-1
rifles and the standard GI frag-grenade. You
definitely lose something with repeated
viewings, but the film is well worth the
watch. Enjoy.
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