It! The Terror from Beyond Space (1958) – Review

If a plot consisting of a group of astronauts landing on an alien world that soon find themselves being stalked through their ship by a strange creature sounds a little familiar it’s because Dan O’Bannon, the screenwriter of the Ridley Scott science fiction classic Alien, was clearly a fan of this low-budget 50s entry in the genre of space adventures, and while the monster doing the stalking in this picture isn’t quite on par with H.R. Giger’s xenomorph we must take one thing into account, you can’t choose your own parents. So join me now on a perilous journey beyond space and into the far-off future of 1973.

• As mentioned, the plot of this particular space adventure film is very similar to that of Ridley Scott’s Alien only instead of a crew of space truckers being sent to investigate what appears to be an S.O.S. in this movie we have the crew of rocketship Challenge 142 being sent to Mars to discover what happened to the previous doomed crew that had undertaken a trip to the Red Planet and to bring back with them the sole survivor of that first mission, Col. Edward Carruthers (Marshall Thompson). The wrinkle here is that Commander Col. Van Heusen (Kim Spalding) is unconvinced that Carruthers murdered his fellow crewmates after their ship crashed so that he could expand the rations to last him ten years.
  
  Note: What is never addressed is the question of why would Carruthers need to kill his shipmates to conserve rations if Space Command, as we are told, can launch a rocket to Mars every four months. The original screenplay had Carruthers stranded for years, which makes more sense.
  
  The mystery element of It! The Terror from Beyond Space holds very little water, the poster showing a monster is a bit of a tip-off for the audience, but Van Heusen insistence that Carruthers is a murderer and that before they reach Earth he will wring a confession out of him is fairly ludicrous as all the evidence he has against him is that he’s the sole survivor and that they found the skull of one of his crewmates with a bullet hole in it. I’m not sure what jury would convict a person on so little evidence, they don’t even have the gun that fired the shot, and the idea that Carruthers would not only face Court Martial but a firing squad is patently ridiculous. This, of course, is soon all made irrelevant when it’s discovered that some creature has managed to sneak aboard their rocket and is now proceeding to kill the crew one by one. It should be noted that this doesn’t stop Van Heusen from being a complete dick, he accuses Carruthers of using his crew-mates as bait so he could survive against the creature, but that could be more a factor of jealousy than rational thinking as the beautiful Ann Anderson (Shirley Patterson), one of the two females that make up his crew, seems to have eyes for Carruthers.
  
  Note: The crew of Challenge 142 has two female crew members, which is certainly not the norm for the genre, but they are relegated to pouring coffee and working as nursemaids for the menfolk, so chalk up another strike against feminism in space.
  
  Stray Observations:
  
  
  • Who knew that “Beyond Space” was as close as the planet Mars, I’d always assumed you’d at least have to leave our solar system to qualify for that moniker.
  • Why didn’t the creature ever get around to killing Carruthers after it had so easily dispatched all his crew mates? This thing is shown as relentless in its pursuit of food but for some reason, it left Carruthers alone for months. Was it using Carruthers as bait, hoping a rescue ship would come for him?
  • Key evidence against Carruthers is a skull found with a bullet hole in it but the skull is completely devoid of flesh, do they also assume that Carruthers turned to cannibalism?
  •  When they can’t find two missing crew members Van Heusen states “This is ridiculous, there just no place on this ship for a man to hide” which is obviously wrong as there are enough places for a seven-foot-tall monster to hide in.
  • While Ridley Scott’s Alien resembles the plot of this film, screenwriter Jerome Bixby himself was inspired by the Howard Hawks classic The Thing from Another World when he penned the screenplay for It! The Terror from Beyond Space.  I guess some premises are timeless.
  • They set up a half-dozen grenades as booby traps on a couple of hatch coverings, but is rigging explosives such a good idea aboard a spacecraft in flight?
  • Ann suggests using gas grenades against the monster and Royce states “We’ll use them as a last resort” but mere seconds later they are all wearing gas masks and chucking the grenades down a hatch.  Way to jump the gun, Royce.
  • This ship has a veritable arsenal on board, one that includes handguns, rifles, gas and fragmentation grenades and a bloody bazooka.

Just what did they expect to find on Mars?

As space adventure films go this entry is a rather fun and exciting one with a cool monster and a stalwart group of heroes, well, maybe not Van Heusen who was a bit of an asshat throughout the film, but everyone else was pretty great and when the monster (Ray Corrigan) starts bashing its way deck back deck in search of more tasty crew-members director Edward L. Cahn expertly builds up the tension, and that he had a running time of 69-minutes to achieve all this is a rather impressive feat. The only real issue I have with this particular space monster is its ability to brush grenades, bullets, gas and even radiation from the ship’s atomic pile but then is taken out by suffocation when our heroes perform a violent decompression of the rocket. Royce comes up with this brilliant plan when he realizes the creature is consuming the ship’s oxygen at a higher-than-normal oxygen consumption rate, concluding that the monster must have massive lungs to survive on the thin atmosphere of Mars, but how does that help them? If this creature can survive on a planet with an atmosphere of about 1% oxygen it would probably survive quite a while without before perishing. This film has some exciting and tense moments but logic and reason were clearly not all that important.

Note: Suit actor Ray “Crash” Corrigan didn’t bother to show up for fittings when suit designer Paul Blaisdell built the creature, unfortunately, this resulted in the head not fitting on properly with Corrigan’s big cleft chin sticking out through the opening made in the mask. Blaisdell was forced to make-up his chin to look like the monster’s tongue.

It! The Terror from Beyond Space may mostly be known for being an inspiration for Ridley Scott’s Alien but that doesn’t stop it from being a rather important instalment in the genre of science fiction and space adventures all on its own, and sure, the heroes may act like cardboard idiots at times and the women were nothing more than pretty pieces of furniture that dispense coffee and give the hero an occasional doe-eyed look, but what this film does do well is in the venturing off into the subgenre of science fiction and horror as this movie was clearly more about man against monster than it was in its science fiction trappings. The plot of It! The Terror from Beyond Space may not stand up to much scrutiny but regardless of its failings, it is still incredibly entertaining.

In space, no one can hear your plot holes.