Remembering It!, the Alien Schlocker That Taught Pandorum Everything it Knows

On it goes, until you wonder why Mystery Science Theater 3000 didn't step in. Maybe they realized they didn't have to. The line "Mars is almost as big as Texas" isn't delivered with any sort of wink to let you know the character may be joking. "There's just no place on this ship for a man to hide!" we're told, although it's seemingly big enough to hide stuntman Ray Corrigan lumbering around in an ill-fitting, pig-faced crocodile suit with a seam up its back. When the plot requires a couple heroes to do a spacewalk outside the ship to get to a lower level, those left topside the craft are instructed to talk loudly to keep It! occupied. Rather than improvise "conversational" dialogue, all the actors recite earlier scripted lines, so we get that bit about Van floating over Ann again -- this, despite the alien bacterial infection that's sucking Van's bone marrow dry. And let's not even get started on the weapons used against the beast -- grenades, gas grenades, pistols, a bazooka in a control room and a blast of atomic-furnace radiation -- without the slightest concern for themselves or the ship's structural integrity.

The trailer for It! tried to take advantage of the hype surrounding James Vickary's 1957 subliminal advertising cinema experiments (admitted a hoax in 1962) by flashing "Don't Miss It!" and "See It!" messages for a split-second over choice cuts of footage that give just about everything away. The voiceover's awesome: "In the silent void of outer space, puny man matches his cunning against a monster from Mars, running rampant, howling for all the flesh and blood on Earth." (Twenty years later it'd be whittled down to Alien's more memorable, "In space, no one can hear you scream.") The film's other ace promo gimmick was a $50,000 reward payable to anyone who could prove that It! wasn't alive on Mars at that very moment. I believe NASA's Viking program was set up to collect.

It! played with the co-feature Curse Of The Faceless Man -- also made that year by director Cahn, from a Bixby script -- and reached California in October 1958. The Los Angeles Times critic Charles Stinson's review -- describing the double-bill as sci-fi that's "all tired out" -- remains amusing reading; Stinson recommends a cast member contact the Actors Studio as soon as possible and notes that the ill-humored Martian tears up the rocket ship "as if it were made of the tin foil and papier-mâché it is made up of." His Faceless Man critique is no kinder. Overall, the films rate a blurb: "Just keeping awake through them may be highest tribute payable to either one."

Such a twofer makes me wish that Pandorum had been released on a double bill with Case 39, also from director Christian Alvart, also with a top-flight cast, also unpreviewed and so far unreleased in the US. No doubt in 50 years, we'll be celebrating them, too, as Bad Movies We Love.

Michael Adams is the author of the upcoming comic memoir Showgirls, Teen Wolves, And Astro Zombies: A Film Critic's Year-Long Quest To Find And Watch The Worst Movie Ever Made (HarperCollins)

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