Main Cast: Marshall Thompson, Shawn Smith, Kim Spalding, Ann Doran, Richard Benedict, Dabbs Greer
Release Year: 1958
Country: US
Run Time: 68 minutes
Plot
One of the best of the medium-budgeted science fiction flicks of the 1950s, It! The Terror from Beyond Space is set in "the future" (1973, to be exact). An rescue ship travels out to Mars to retrieve the only survivor of a space probe that has experienced some sort of cataclysm. That survivor, Col Ed Carruthers (Marshall Thompson) is accused of murdering his fellow crewmen. But Ed claims that the killer was a Martian monster, and hopes to prove his assertions by signing up for a second journey to the Red Planet. Before long, the crew members of this second expedition are being systematically killed off, and it looks as though Ed is up to his old tricks. As it turns out, however, Ed was telling the truth: there is a monster on board, the savage descendant of the once-mighty Martian civilization, who snuck on board when an irresponsible crew member left the door open. The monster stays alive by absorbing the vital body fluids of its victims-and there seems to be no way to stop this parasitic creature! If the plot of It! The Terror from Beyond Space seems vaguely familiar, it is because it was one of the primary inspirations for the 1979 sci-fi classic Alien. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
Review
The monster in It! The Terror From Beyond Space was actually former serial king Ray "Crash" Corrigan in his well-worn gorilla suit, slightly altered for the occasion by famed monster maker Paul Blaisdell. And therein lies the rub. We see all too much of It!, to the point, in fact, where a zipper is clearly visible in one shot. By the end of the film, It! is less scary than ludicrous, never mind the good performances from the rest of the small cast. Not that the much-vaunted remake Alien (1979) did all that much better with a larger budget and supposedly more sophisticated special effects. A hand puppet, after all, is still a hand puppet. It!, in contrast, relied on a spaceship typical of the 1950s, a straightforward vessel with a straightforward crew performing in typical Jack Webb "just the facts, ma'am" style. Marshall Thompson, formerly of MGM, makes a stalwart hero, and Shawn Smith, formerly Shirley Patterson, a pleasant enough heroine. But where Sigourney Weaver's Ripley in Alien is decidedly a child of equality between the sexes, the otherwise competent female scientists in It! are compelled to serve coffee for their male colleagues. ~ Hans J. Wollstein, All Movie Guide
William Glasgow - Art Director, Paul Blaisdell - Costume Designer, Jack Masters - Costume Designer, Edward L. Cahn - Director, Grant Whytock - Editor, Paul Sawtell - Composer (Music Score), Bert Shefter - Composer (Music Score), Kenneth Peach - Cinematographer, Robert Kent - Producer, Herman Schoenbrun - Set Designer, Jerome Bixby - Screenwriter
The film opens with a classic 1950s version of a spaceship (three tail fins, long, pointed body) perched on the cratered surface of an alien world. A voice-over tells us that the year is 1973 (voice at the beginning of the film says that it's six months after the initial crash, which was listed as January, 1973) and this is the planet Mars. It transpires that this vessel has been sent to rescue the crew of a previous exploration mission. They have found only one survivor, Col. Edward Carruthers (Marshall Thompson), and suspect him of having murdered the others to save rations for himself. Carruthers pleads his innocence, blaming the deaths of his colleagues on an unknown creature they encountered on the planet.
The commander is unsympathetic and orders the ship to return to Earth. However, before blasting off, a junior crew-member unwisely leaves a door to the spaceship open for a long time...
After lift-off, the crew settle down for the long trip back to Earth. It is not long before things start to go amiss: In (now) typical horror-movie fashion, unimportant crew-members wander off to isolated parts of the ship and are dispatched by It. Usually, we see only a character's reaction shot and, perhaps, a looming shadow - the creature, at this point, is not clearly seen.
As the trip progresses, the crew are at first skeptical that something is aboard, but soon have to accept the fact as the body-count mounts. At this point they decide to tool-up - the ship is equipped with an impressive amount of weaponry, including handguns, machine-guns, hand-grenades and even a bazooka.
The intruder is largely immune to all this hardware however, and at one point the crew manage to trap It in the "reactor room" (the ship is nuclear-powered) and expose it to the reactor by raising a shutter (apparently the nuclear pile is like the furnace in a steam-ship).
As the crew dwindle, they retreat up the ship until finally they are in control only of the top-most chamber. In a final stand-off, in which all manner of anti-armour weapons are unleashed in a confined space to no great effect, they hit on the excellent idea of blowing the hatch. The explosive decompression does the rest and the creature is no more.
