Since H.G. Wells penned the classic tale of the War of the Worlds back in 1897 the planet Mars has continually been seen as a threat to the planet Earth, either by launching invasions or attacking astronaut interlopers, and this idea had really come to the fore by the end of the 1950s with a…
Tag: Mars
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…
Conquest of Space (1955) – Review
With the success of Destination Moon producer George Pal decided to take that same “realistic” approached they used for their trip to the Moon for this depiction of the first voyage to Mars. Based on the popular non-fiction book Conquest of Space by author Will Ley, which was illustrated by Chesley Bonestell the man who…
Flight to Mars (1951) – Review
After Rocketship X-M’s accidental and eventually doomed trip to the Red Planet it was up to producer Walter Mirisch over at Monogram Productions to give the public a true “Martian Experience” and with his film Flight to Mars that is just what the public got, right? Well, not quite, what the public actually received was…
Rocketship X-M (1950) – Review
In 1950 two science fiction films sent cinemagoers venturing off into space, one was George Pal’s seminal classic Destination Moon and the other being Kurt Neumann’s Rocketship X-M, but where George Pal’s film was attempting to depict a nuts and bolts representation of a trip to the Moon, with at least some attempt at scientific…