What is the trick to watching five Sy Fy films in one night? Simple. Do some time travelling with the remoter to select another, and another, etc. I confess to watching none of them from beginning to end, and that was a judgement.
They came to a screen near me in this order.
(1) ’Teenagers from Outer Space’ (1959) 1 hour and 26 catatonic minutes, 3.6 on the IMDB scale from 2637 tweenagers.
Acne attack!
I started with this deadly earnest movie in restful black and white. To sum it up, alien boy meets Earth girl and decides not to eradicate all life on her planet. But then he has to decide what to do with the giant lobsters he brought along to devour all life on her planet. The fraternity brothers shouted, ‘Built a barbecue and get cooking!’
While the boy is very boyish, this Jocasta looks forty. Certain lack of verisimilitude there. This viewer lasted for about twenty minutes punctuated with fast forwards, and then the urge to flip over-powered him.
(2) ’It Came from Somewhere Else’ (1988) 1 hour and 29 minutes of Dali time. An astounding 5.7 on the IMDB scale from 100 casters. The producer must have an extended family.
Since ‘It Came from Outer Space’ (1953) is one the hallmarks of the Fifties surge in Sy Fy, I hoped this would be a tribute in some way. Best part was….. [being elsewhere].
It never made it. This viewer lasted ten minutes or so. In the words of one critic: ‘illogical, dopey, stupid, sloppy, strange and incredibly amateurish.’ Too kind, perhaps, but enuf said.
(3) ’Plan 10 from Outer Space’ (1995), 1 hour and 20 minutes at 5.9 on the IMDB scale from 218 ratings.
The title is a reference to Ed Wood, Junior’s infamous ‘Plan Nine from Outer Space’ (1959) and it opens with a copywrite infringing excerpt from that schlock, which, all things considered, proved to be more interesting than the student revue that followed. Get it? Ed Wood did it better.
(4) ‘Through the Thorns to the Stars’ (1981) 2 hours and 29 minutes of Dali time. Rated 5.1 from 932 on the IMDB scale. The original title was ‘Cherez ternii k zvyozdam,’ a Russian proverb I am told.
The version I saw had subtitles and I missed quite a bit, what with doing the New York Times crossword and going out to walk the dog for half an hour in the middle. Yet I did not feel like I had missed anything I wanted to see.
The special effects of spaceflight are very good: weightlessness, movement between space craft, the starry void, and the planet Dessa. The story has two threads. One is the strange humanoid creature found on a derelict space ship. She is weird. Looks like someone from an Eastern European death camp of the 1980s with eyes so big I began to suspect some sort of prosthesis. She is enigmatic and perhaps amnesiac.
For a good hour everyone wondered if she was human or android. The fraternity brothers offered to give her a physical examination, but to date that offer was not accepted.
She traces back to Dessa, a planet completely despoiled by the pollution of the evil industrialists, read capitalist, to the extent that Russians are called in to help clean it up, now that they have paved over Lake Baikal. On Dessa, because all resources have been depleted, the industrialists sell citizens bottled air, while making plans to take rocket to a brave new world to exploit. Just to make things clear for dim wits like the fraternity brothers, the chief industrialist is played by a dwarf.
When I returned from my outing with Majic, the credits were rolling. The end.
Why did I think of Mikhail Kutuzov. Do little and wait was his motto.
(5) ’The Tower’ (1993) 2 hours of eternity. Over-rated at 4.6 form 467 on the IMDB. N.B. there are several films of this title.
A smart building turns on Paul Reiser and tries to kill him. The fraternity brothers rooted for the building. Paul is immature, slovenly, rude, ungrateful, disorganised, and so a hero who can outwit a door.
Toward the end of this long night of investigation, I began to think of mashing all five of these films together into one.
The Russians land on the Tower where they are seized by It Came From Elsewhere and made to watch Plan 10, repeatedly, in the company of Teenagers from Outer Space and their zits.
Skip to content