Despite having a miraculous 8.8/10 user rating on IMDb, this week's Pandorum has been hidden away from critics more efficiently, say, than an alien egg in the chest cavity of a British character actor. Which led me to prowling the archive's ventilation shafts in dismay until I kicked across a copy of It! Terror From Beyond Space, the schlocker that inspired the whole stalked-on-the-spaceship genre, leading to Alien and countless imitators -- from Horror Planet and Event Horizon to this week's creature feature in which Dennis Quaid, Ben Foster and Cam Gigandet perhaps stir themselves from cryosleep to face the horror of mutants aboard!
Released in 1958, director Edward L. Cahn's flick is set in that distant year of 1973, in which voiceover from hero Col. Edward Carruthers tells that something picked off his nine fellow space explorers after they all crash-landed on Mars. The Red Planet is "alive with something we came to know as Death." Rescue by a follow-up ship just means he's to be transported back to Earth to stand trial for the murders of his spacemates; as he puts it, back home he'll "find another kind of Death."
Saving him from capital fate is It!, which has crept aboard the rescue ship through the emergency hatch, oddly left open during blast-off from the Martian surface. This hulking creature -- whose foot we see at the five-minute mark, sadly dispelling any suspense as to whether Carruthers is a lying nutjob -- kills off a few lower-ranking cast members before it's finally asphyxiated when the B-list hierarchy open an air lock to suck all the oxygen out of the rocketship. Apparently, their precious air supply will somehow replenish.
Also worth noting, It! is no classic, though it is fun. Character introduction is achieved with each crew member holding up a radio mic and saying "Secure." Every long shot of the finned rocket rising through space is accompanied with a weee-aaa of a theremin -- or at least the distant recording of one. And why has the spaceship been devised so it's always on the vertical? Our astronauts spend most of their time climbing up and down ladders that, while good for the calf muscles, ain't good for evading the alien or for horizontal room-to-room spatial suspense.
More enduringly, Cahn's movie, while well put together for the budget, doesn't ever make sense -- starting with the title, given that Mars is visible from Earth with the naked eye. While Bixby said his script was meddled with, that hardly discounts the dialogue's reliance on quintessentially 1950s-style expository chauvinism. "Every time Van sees you he floats, even though the ship's equipped with artificial gravity!" says one space monkey. That he says it of comely Ann, who's along for the ride to serve coffee to the guys (just like Dr. Mary, the ship's surgeon) completes the picture of a future in which women have advanced to remain subservient.
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)