Author: Michael W Jackson

Fresh from ‘Cat-Women of the Moon,’ Al Zimbalist cranked this one out. Some facts first, it runs for 66 minutes and scores 2.9 from 3,772 rankings on the IMDB. It is often cited as a leader in the category of It’s-so-bad-it-is-good. It certainly is bad. By comparison ‘Cat-Women of the Moon’ is sophisticated cinematography.

Yet ‘Robot Monster’ is distinctive in the creature feature annuals for one very important reason. The creature – Ro-Man, as he sometimes styles himself – has a soul and it shows. Keep that in mind for later. Did The Blob have a soul? No! Did the Creature from the Black Lagoon have a soul? No! Do Republicans have a soul? But Ro-Man does! Compared to these other creatures he has a spiritual quality.
The set-up is loopy to be sure. Bang. The Robot Monsters have killed all Earthlings but seven or is it eight. The count changes through the movie. (In addition, in one scene a passer-by strolls along the back of a shot. Is she in the count or not?) At least two of the survivors mentioned are never seen. Then there is a garrison in the space station who seem to be sitting out the apocalypse and do not figure in the count.
A Robot Monster has been sent to find and kill the last remaining aboriginals so that the Earth can be colonised as Terra nullius. Take that, White Man! With that Key Performance Indicator in mind Ro-Man gets right to work with a billion bubble blowing machine and television screen transmitter. These survivors are a family of two adults, three children, and the elder daughter’s boyfriend, played by George Nader on whom more in a minute. The budget is so small it does not run to a shirt for Nader in most scenes.
The players try to make something of the script, and fail. The two younger children are annoying enough to invoke the curse of W. C. Fields. It was a relief when the heartless Ro-Man killed them. Yes, for despite the unofficial and all the more stultifying Hollywood code at the time, Ro-Man strangles the children, to the cheers of the fraternity brothers.

The code did not allow for children to be murdered. They could die, disease, war, accidents, but not be murdered, kind a reverse spin on the current NRA approach. The code was not rigorously imposed on B pictures which is why they are often racier than their A picture peers, as known to all fraternity brothers.
Ro-Man’s HQ is a cave in a rocky desert with the bubble blowing machine and the intergalatic portable TV. This is the best he could do for real estate, this superior alien being? A cave? Take about low rent!

What a dump!
What makes ‘Robert Monster’ singular is that Ro-Man goes all Frankenstein’s monster and wants Alice, the older daughter, to love him, after he has murdered her husband, and her siblings and is about to murder her parents. In fact, he seems to ask her to sit tight while he goes off to murder her parents. Is this a sensitive New Age alien in the making? He refuses to murder her, and goes into a Hamlet soliloquy:
‘We are not built to feel emotion. Please do not hate me. Yes! To be like the Hu-man! To laugh! Feel! Want! Why are these things not in the plan? I must, yet I cannot! How do you calculate that?! At what point on the graph do ‘must’ and ‘cannot’ meet? Yet I cannot … but I must!’
Move over Shakespeare! Here are words.
This is deep thinking for a man in an ape suit with a fish bowl on his head. That is Ro-Man. The back story goes that the producer had a robot in mind but could not find one available at his price, and found the expense of having one made beyond the small-change budget, but he knew a fellow who once worked vaudeville in an ape suit! Voilà! But the titles had all ready been run and there was no budget to do them again, so… The fish tank went on to complete the ensemble.
Nader was her boyfriend but somewhere along the way, they got married, and went off on their own for honeymoon during the apocalypse. Believe it or not. While canoodling away from the protective shield of the family home (which does not seem to have a roof but has some kind of electronic barrier), Ro-Man finds them, throws Nader off a cliff to his death and ravishes Alice. It is all very Channel 7Mate.
Robot Man is the furriest robot ever filmed, and could be mistaken for Yeti except for the Newtown fashion accessory of the fish bowl. He plays a double part as himself and as his merciless control back home on Robo-World who is called Great Guidance. This is someone that no one would dare call GG. Despite the lobby poster shown above, neither of the Robot Monsters has a face. That must have made talking hard.
Great Guidance tires of hearing Ro-man going on about his existential crisis of conscience rather than the KPI. This crisis cuts in when Ro-Man seems to have started to rape Alice, by tearing her dress off, again crossing the prevailing code line. Fraternity brothers supposed that the sight of her wherewithal gave him a reaction.
Anyway, Great Guidance zaps Ro-Man from afar, and he dies. Such is corporate power when one misses the KPI targets.
The end! The end. The end? Not quite. Whereupon the annoying little boy wakes up and evidently it was all a dream. Maybe that it was all a dream, like life, excused the code violations, though it is hard to believe this title had much distribution to theatres.
George Nader is quite specimen here, seldom with his shirt on.
He played G-Man Jerry Cotton in more than a dozen West German films.
He left Hollywood and went on to a film career in West Germany. Like Eddy Constantine, Jess Hamm, and Lex Baxter he became the American in European movies. The word on the web is that Nader was a homosexual who found it increasingly difficult to get parts in Hollywood, at least parts that he liked, and Baxter was an old friend who suggested he try Europe. Some years later he returned Stateside to work in television.

It says it all when the distributors do not know the name of the movie. In England where it was made, it was released as ‘Fire Maidens from Outer Space’ while Stateside it went out as ‘Fire Maidens of Outer Space,’ giving members of the commentariat endless fun in a pointless discussion of the difference. Still it is not often that ‘Fowler’s Guide’ is brought into B-film reviews.

If that was not enough to signal the fun ahead, then there are the credits in which the name Cy Roth figures, repeatedly: A Cy Roth presentation, produced by Cy Roth, directed by Cy Roth, story by Cy Roth, screen play by Cy Roth, tea service by Cy Roth. See. For someone in love with the sight of his own name, Mr Roth is quite shy on the internet. I could find nothing but the scant entry on the IMDB. Not even a photograph. His other credits are few. Very. Conclusions to follow: Cy cannot present, produce, direct, write, stage, or pour.
The conceit of the movie is that the two great postwar powers, the United States and Great Britain combine to launch a manned space flight. Ah, the James Bond illusion that in 1956 Britain was a great power. As if. England was still rationing food and petrol. The war debt remained crushing. Victory had nearly destroyed England, just as victory had nearly destroyed France in 1918.
The early going is treacle. We see people walk down stairs, slowly, and then back up the same stairs, slowly. The action stops while the men light pipes. ‘Action?’ Well in fact, the only action is lighting the pipes.
Then with no further preliminaries than a voice over, the six spacemen strap into their office chairs (with rollers) for blast off. Stock footage of V-2 rockets and such follows. The wires are visible in some of the later effects. This must have been a quota quickie to supply British content, as legally required, for theatres. What other explanation could there be, Erich? Quota quickies are explained elsewhere on the his blog. To find out about them do the homework.
Their flight is interminable, or so it seemed. The goal? The thirteenth moon of Jupiter. Huh? Jupiter has dozens of moons and there is no saying which one is the thirteenth. The thirteenth in size, the thirteenth from Jupiter but that varies as some of the orbits are irregular, the thirteenth discovered, thirteenth from the left or from the right, the thirteenth in Republican voters. The scientists Roth consulted found that this moon is like Earth, so off they go. Vroom. In their V-2.
They pass flight time smoking. The number two never takes his naval hat off. That always makes me think the head in it is bald. Keep that hat in mind.
They land in Sussex, a long trip to end up there, and then go outside for more cigarettes. It’s all good. Someone throws rocks at them. (The audience?) They see an object and hear voices. They divide. One group stays with the rocket ship and calls home, repeatedly. Repeatedly. Those they call intermittently never move from their floor marks. It is one shot repeatedly shown to save costs.
The other three go to find the voice(s). On the way they cross three fields, repeatedly. By this time, the fraternity brothers were desperate for the Fire Maidens.
The three explorers show no interest in anything. Oh hum. Another day in space on a distant world for the first time! ‘Got a cigarette?’ They are as bored by it all as the audience, like one of those works of modern art that is intended to be boring. That is, until they find the Fire Maidens when they perk up a little. Not much.
They find a walled garden and enter it to find it is the Fire Maidens’ dormitory. What luck! There are scores of the women twirling around in short skirts no one wore on the street in 1955, except men in Scotland. The fraternity brothers came to attention.
They meet the top man, whom we shall style the Professor. Yes, it is a man. An old one. He tells the travellers that these are the last of the Atlanteans, as in ‘from’ or is that ‘of’ Atlantis. That explains why they speak English. (!) When the waters rose, the Atlanteans took to the skies, assuming the water would engulf all. That was a blunder, but once airborne they could not cash in their non-refundable Virgin Spaceways tickets so they went to the end of the line. Since then, as the millennia passed, the men have died out — why they died is never mentioned and the explorers, men themselves, have no interest in such incidental matters — but somehow new beautiful woman keep coming along. Maybe Prof is not as old as he looks?
When the conversation lags, which is often, Prof venerates a cheesecake picture on the wall, as his grandmother, as his daughter, as Aphrodite, as Hestia, as his mother, as whatever comes to mind. Not the sharpest laser in the block is the old Prof. Definitely emeritus material.
Here is the tricky part. Prof wants the travellers to stay, what with all these nubile girls around….and the need for more Atlanteans. The travellers don’t get it. Why does he want us to stay? It takes them a long time to get his drift. Whatever fraternity they were in must have been a sorry lot. Prof drugs them so they will not fly away and they sleep a lot. Great footage of the navy man sleeping with his hat on.
They sleep some more. (So did I.) Meanwhile one of maidens loves the leader of the spacemen. He may be a distant, cold, and arrogant fool but she loves him anyway.

He is one Anthony Dexter who once played Valentino and never got over it. His subsequent credits include some other Sy Fy entries, before he saw the light to became a high school teacher. Think about that. Valentino at the chalk board.
The three stay-behinds keep calling home. The team at home never moves between calls. The three in the dormitory sleep some more. Oh, and the Fire Maidens dance. Not once, not twice, not three times, but four. Music and choreography by Cy Roth? The men sleep; the maidens dance. Is this edgy or what? Or what.
The stay-at-homes finally come looking for the three wanderers because it is time to return the V-2 or they will lose the deposit on it. They encounter the rock-throwing creature of the feature who is impervious to their pistols, though since they fired from the hip, having seen too many westerns, it is doubtful they hit the barn door, so they subdue him with a gas grenade. It was a well equiped mission, cigarettes, pistols, and gas grenades. Check, check, check.
Meanwhile, the sleepers awake and make trouble. The Fire Maidens dance. The creature breaks in on a dance routine and the spacemen throw a gas grenade at him, while he is cutting in on the Fire Maidens dance, near an open flame amid them all.

Thanks to some quick typewriting by Cy Roth, only the creature is killed.
Oh, earlier Prof was walking in the garden and the creature killed him. That was an afterthought.
Freed of the tyranny of the old doddering Prof emeritus the Fire Maidens…yep, they dance. Six of them pair off with the visitors, but Valentino assures the others more Earthmen will come. When last seen the fraternity brothers were booking their tickets.
It is a well used trope in B movies, the island, mesa, cave, moon, valley, planet, swamp, town, castle, world, office building of women without men, who do not know what they are missing until the men arrive. Then they find out. Housework. Ironing. Babies. Shopping. Drunken husbands. Sweeping. Dusting. Putting out the rubbish. Moping the floor. Cleaning the toilet. It is an adolescent fantasy. Somewhere are women so desperate that they will want even…..spacemen.
Scifist, a blog on the history of science fiction films that is meticulous and amusing, does not deign to review this length of film, and it stoops to review quite a lot like it. The line had to be drawn somewhere and this title ended up on the far side. At 78 minutes it seemed longer and less than the IMDB score of 2.1 from 1,277 votes. To date it is the lowest scoring film I have watched to the end.
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Cashing in on the rash of Sy Fy movies in the 1950s the dreaded production team of Al Zimbalist and Jack Rabin rented a studio for a week and produced from blank paper this celluloid story. The mob at the IMDB score it at 3.6. It is definitely below the Mendoza Line. (You either get it, or you don’t.)
The lobby poster says it all. But note that Marie Windsor gets top billing but that is not her on the lobby card below. Figure the out. On her more later.

In the first manned, emphasis on ‘manned,’ space flight a crew of five sets off for the Moon. On the way it is struck by the de rigueur meteorites. How is it, in the vastness of space, every Earth ship is struck by 1950s meteors that is one the mysteries of the genre.
The crew is led by Sonny Tufts, and consists of Victor Jory, William Phipps, and Douglas Fowley, and Marie Windsor. The last four are reliable B picture regulars. Jory, perhaps for the only time in his fifty-year career, plays the romantic lead, sort of. An eternally young Phipps is the ingenue, and Fowley the greedy bastard that each crew must carry. Marie is the navigator and that is a refreshing change.
Knowing its reputation, when I started watching it, I was surprised to find I liked it at the outset.
Why? A woman has to be in the crew so that the man can fight over her, that is understood. In this case she is navigating rather than serving coffee. Excellent.
Moreover, in the opening scenes as the meteor damaged rocket approaches the Moon she is sassy and demanding. The men want to turn back without landing now that the rocket has a scratch on the paintwork. Not Marie. She came for the landing, not the ride, and she has her way with Sonny Tufts who then orders a landing. That is so different from the usual role for women in the genre.

Marie Windsor takes charge, as Jory stares with incredulity, and Sonny looks for his flask.
There is mystery since she seems to know where to land, how to get there, and what to do next. She seems to be in charge while Sonny tries to remember his lines. Again so unusual, so excellent.
They don the spacesuits, rented from a novelty shop, and trudge in front of a matte painting of the moon done by one of the producer’s nephews, or so it seems. Along the way there is the only science in this science fiction film, and it is the science of Anti-Vaxxers. Even by the standards of the redoubtable Ed Wood, it is silly. No fifth grader would swallow it. Oh, wait, anti-Vaxxers would.
Some features of the Moon are demonstrated using cigarettes which the crew brings along on the flight and on the journey they make.
Journey? Once they land, Marie once again suborns Sonny into a walking tour to collect samples. Once again the men want to go home. Once again Marie prevails and Sonny gives the order.
See, she is in charge, though Sonny is the captain and Jory has a hard pistol at the ready.
A word on Sonny Tufts for those who don’t know him. He was a journeyman in Hollywood who got some lead roles in the 1940s when others were away on war service, then receded to this, and this, I am afraid, was not as low as he could go. In this picture, for those that pay attention, there are at least two occasions when all eyes turn to him for the next line and he stands mute. He forgot his line. Missed the cue. Was checking his hip flask. Or all the above. Fowley fills in for him once and Phipps the second time, as would happen in a stage play. More on old Sonney at the end.
The production is so cheap there were no re-takes. Indeed, so cheap that the end was truncated when they were told to vacate the studio and so some sources say six-pages of script were skipped, and they blast off.
Marie Windsor was the frail and sometimes the femme fatale in a number of excellent B noirs, like these crackling films: ‘The Killing’ (1956), ‘The Narrow Margin’ (1952), and ‘Hellfire’ (1949). She often played women of whom her Mormon relatives in Utah would not approve. She did everything on television, including ‘Murder, She Wrote.’ A real trouper. Ditto Jory, Phipps, and Fowley.
On the Moon she leads the party into a cave that has an atmosphere and Earth gravity, such is their science. They doff the rented spacesuits which had to be returned for the deposit and encounter the inhabitants.
In a creature feature a creature is necessary and they encounter several large rubber spiders like the one the fraternity brothers put into each others clothing. Yuk.
While quick draw Jory blasts away at these creatures, they are observed by shadows with up-do hair buns. Yes, these are the cat women. And about time.
These Earthlings are scientists, the first on the Moon, who show no interest whatever in anything they find. Despite Marie’s urging, they collect no samples, but once the spacesuits are off, they light up those fags. For her part, she plunges on ahead, annoying the men who still want to go home.
Though it is only sixty-four minutes long, it seems longer, and they eventually met the cat women who are described in the credits as the Hollywood Cover Girls, eight in number, in black leotards. These are the only survivors of a once thriving race in the Moon caves, with the spiders. No cats are present. No cats are mentioned. No cats are shown. There are no cats. But then the Hollywood Cover Girls had no existence outside this movie either.
Here is the back story of the Moon. The women grew to dominate the society and the men died out. Without the men there were no more women. So far, so biology.
This is what happens when women get bossy. They take over. The poor hapless men lose their manly vigour and MPG – Minus Population Growth.
In fact, this tale has been acted out on the flight to the Moon, where Marie bosses them around and then leads the men into this trap. Their vigour, however, remains in tact.
Trap? Yes, trap. The cat women want that ship to travel to Earth and boss the men around there, too! First an inch, then 250,000 miles.
And this nefarious plot explains everything. They used their telepathic powers to identify Marie years ago, and to impart to her knowledge of solar navigation. How else could a woman find the Moon? The cat women had learned all this from their last men before they went emeritus. With this knowledge Marie became the navigator. As the ship approached they telepath-messaged her again and she then landed the ship on the spot, and led the ground party to the cave, and while the crew was having a smoko, the cat women swiped the rented spacesuits and returned them to the novelty shop, thus capturing the crew for their purposes. Note, the women get all the knowledge from men and past it on.
Maire is but a puppet controlled by mental telepathy. Jory has been irritated all along what with Sonny missing his cues, and Marie ignoring his charming smallpox scars, so he brandishes his six-gun now and then, disrupting the catty plan. At one moment, he grabs Marie for some within-code manhandling, and in the clinch the telepathic hold on her is broken by his manly grip and smell, and she blurts out the secret femme fatale plan!
Jory likes that and continues the manhandling so that Marie will tell the others. Sonny gets confused and forgets the name of Fowley who has wondered off to get killed. Remember the spiders? No one seems to miss him.
Phipps has found true love among the cat women and his squeeze confirms Marie’s warning. Gadzooks, as we say on Tuesdays.
Then Jory starts shooting. End of cat women, including Phipps’s true love. Maire, Jory, and Phipps skedaddle for the rocket ship. Sonny stayed in the bar. THE END.
Technical notes. While the space ship has a lot of dials and levers, it also has a lawn lounging chair where Tufts lies recumbent much of the time.

Sonny strapped into his lounger from whence he commands.
Indeed, throughout the picture a lot of people are shown sleeping, not all of them are in the audience but many must have been. Maybe these were candid shots because the cast found the whole thing a bore. The cat women dance…. for themselves. Their guests are…sleeping. Once the guests are gone, the cat women can no longer resist the impulse to put those leotards to good use.

They dance for a while. Looks like a 1950s Beatnik number.
I made light of finding the Moon above, but in ‘Rocketship X-M’ (1950) the crew missed the Moon and hit Mars by mistake. Maybe solar navigation is harder than it looks from the ground.
Sonny Tufts was a high diver. The scion of a Boston banking family, he made the Back Bay mistake of graduating from Yale University and pursued a career as an opera singer in New York City, until it was discovered he could not sing. He was forty-one when Cat-Women was made and looks more than ten years older and the paunch is clearly visible in standing profiles. That is why actors befriend cameramen, to avoid such shots. He was big and lettered in football among the Elis, playing against the Crimson. This was a sin never forgiven in Boston. By the time this film was cast, his name was a joke in show business. He had fallen head over heels in love with alcohol. His wife frequently had him jailed. Several women sicced the police on him for his unwanted attentions. He was to be found wondering the streets in the wee hours looking for another bar. He is parodied in Humphrey Bogart’s ‘In a Lonely Place’ (1950) as the drunken and permanently between engagements thespian next door. ‘Cat-Women of the Moon’ may have been the highpoint of his career.

Everyman Richard Carlson leads a handsome cast in this Gothic thriller made for the Fright Night drive-in market.

Carlson is dancing the night away to celebrate engagement to Beauty, when he receives a telegram. The news is bad but not that bad. His Scots uncle has died and he is the new baron, required to go to the distant, remote, and forbidding castle…in studio 13 of Roach Pictures. Few who go there, return…to A pictures.
Richard takes leave from his fiancée with many endearments and promises a speedy return after completing the formalities.
Guess what happens next?
The movie opened with a cryptic conversation between Australian Michael Pate and another retainer in the dank, dark castle when his Lairdship cacked it. An air of menace hangs over them. Carlson’s inheritance seems tainted even before new reaches him.
Some days later Beauty gets a letter from Carlson blowing her off, for good, for ever. for good-bye.

She and her aunt study the letter for its subtleties.
It is a ‘Dear Joan’ letter to end ‘Dean Joan’ letters. It stings but she is one bracing woman and with her aunt in tow sets out to Studio 13, that is, Scotland, to straighten out Richard. Could not quite see why she was so determined to land him, but she is.
It takes some will power to get there, first the Atlantic, and then across the moors (of course), and even more to get into the door of the castle. Michael Pate is one polite but reluctant doorman. Once admitted she meets again her beloved and finds him a changed man.

Once young, now old. Once affable, now grim. Once in dinner suits, now in tweeds and argyle socks. Changed. (The fraternity brothers were betting on a kilt.)
Yes, about a pound of make-up has been pasted onto him along with much grey hair spray to age him and make him look haggard, like a man with a credit card debit he cannot pay and a pile of unmarked examination papers waiting for him.
This shock redoubles her determination to get to the bottom of this mess. A sensible woman, her aunt wants to go home. So did I by then. Various hijinks and confrontations follow. To continue the narrative I have to spoil the denouement and I want to, because it is so Abbott and Costello. To ask an audience to suspend disbelief is one thing, this is another.
As Richard explains in the wrap-up at the end, when he arrived at the castle he discovered that his great grandfather was a frog. That was bad. Worse was that frog great gramps still lived, because some frogs are long lived. The slithering in the hallways at night, the midnight splashing in the pond at the middle of eponymous maze, Carlson’s make-up, these all trace back to great gramps, who still runs the place, frog though he be. The succession of Barons, Carlson being the latest, have been fronts for great gramps, tenderly cared for by Michael Pate and his Igor, who runs the show as Frog in Charge. Everyone addresses this frog as ‘Sir.’ Sure. I kept thinking of Elmo.

Carlson reading up on teratology in the amphibian section.
The Castle of Otranto atmosphere is thick and entertaining. There are lots of cobwebs. The mystery of Carlson’s transformation is intriguing. The confrontation in the maze is creepy. The players are fine, and the pace is measured. Pate is so ominous no denouement could live up to the foreboding he inspires.

Carlson and Pate trying to look the parts.
In short, the set up and the build up are good, but the result in Act III is a fizzle. Like those storms that crack and whirl and then dissipate with a drop or two of rain. The screenplay had no finish. ‘The Creature from the Black Lagoon’ (1954) or ‘The Fly’ (1958) made more sense.
How uncle combined the mind of laird and the body of a frog is Ed Wood science. Moreover, with that family tree, why would Beauty want to marry Carlson? Newts, efts, and toads to come are there? Or did she trust that her kiss would transform?
The novelty of 3D at the time was such that even this schlock-fest was given the treatment. But 3D never worked in drive-ins anyway.

Who could resist such a title? Not me.

On the IMDB it is described as a comedy. I hoped it would equal, nothing could surpass, ‘Spaced Invaders’ (reviewed elsewhere on this blog). Not so. At first I thought it was a documentary about the Republican Party. Mea culpa.
The set-up is priceless and the execution is consistent, but it is not comedy as we know it. The genre would have to be Horror, sub-species ‘coulrophobia.’ Look it up, Mortimer and be enlightened, for once.
A circus tent complete with an ensemble of grotesque clowns, oops, klowns, lands in Royal Dano’s (who else!) pasture outside Hicksville USA. The Klowns set about harvesting climate change deniers, wrapping them in cotton candy to ferment, and when just right…..
When interrupted by teenagers doing extracurricular biology lessons, the alien klowns call out the dogs. That was a cackle and a half.
There is a phylum of Horror movies where teens discover the evil and try to report it to authorities, who stupidly reject the reports until it is too late. ‘The Blob’ (1958) was the landmark in this category, though not the first and certainly not the last. In this instance authority is played brilliantly by Sheriff John Vernon, and we waited for his comeuppance which came on cue.
Comeuppance delivered.
We also like the shadow play on the wall, and then wooshka!
There is an ice cream truck, lots of red noses, and a Willy Wonka interior of the Tardis space tent.
There is one scene of tension with a little girl and a wooden mallet.

And a long, boring, and pointless scene in a pharmacy.
The Klowns are frustrated by the teens and blast off in their tent spaceship before hundreds of eye witnesses who use alternative facts to explain the destruction left behind. These are people are known as the Klown deniers. But more importantly, what did happen to Royal, his dog, and the others? Who knows. What were the Klowns doing? We’ll never know, until we watch the sequel.
IMDB has it at 6.1, which way to high to me, though I admired the artistry in the effects when it was clear the budget was … well, what budget? The cast, apart from Mr Dano, were unknown to me as no doubt I am to them.

A much better movie than its paltry IMDB rating of 5.3 indicates. What I liked was the message that we are destroying ourselves. Who needs aliens when we are so good at it. I also liked the integrated set design and the ambiguous ending. Altogether it is more thoughtful and well realised than the score which puts it a mere 0.2 points ahead of the turgid and indigestible lump that is the big budget ‘Saturn 3’ (1980) at 5.1 with its all star cast.

Lobby card.
Chuck Yeager had the day off and in 1960 test pilot Robert Clarke (remember him from ‘The Hideous Sun Demon’ [1959], probably not under all that make-up of sun skin cancers) flies his X-Plane into the year 2024. High octane, indeed! Whoops!
He seems to land back at the airbase he left, unaware of the elapsed time and finds it an abandoned ruin. Empty. Spooky. Eerie. Nice. There is no one and nothing among the ruins. Not even a calendar. Little does he realise he is beyond the Time Barrier! (Most airlines charge extra for that.)
He heads toward a distant light, wearing his flight suit and helmet. He does that a lot. Not the most comfortable of gear, but it does make him stand out.
He stumbles on to an underground civilisation where, after assaulting the first natives he meets, as per his survival training, he is perceived to be an enemy, a spy, a threat. Dunno why. I suppose the flight gear partly explains that reaction but it is not made explicit. He is imprisoned and in time finds there are three other prisoners, Russians who, thanks to the miracle of Hollywood, speak perfect English. Russians. 1960. Oh oh.
There follows much Geordie-speak about the time barrier. Oh hum. When they show him the current Dilbert desk calendar Clarke finally gets it: 2024. (He goes all able when he thinks of how many IRS returns he has missed!) While these four realise they are time travellers, the Mole people do not believe such a thing is possible and deny reality. Now who does that remind me of….
The four scapes decide to use Clarke’s plane to go back in time to warn humanity of the plague and so prevent its occurrence. ‘Scapes’ are those who escaped the plague. (What a struggle to quell automatic correction to ‘scares.’)
Plague? Yes, as one of the Moles explains to Clarke, the accumulated pollution of earlier times had depleted the ozone layer and harmful radiation bombarded the Earth in 1994 creating a plague. There were three results: most people died, others mutated into beasts called GOP, and a few fled underground but are now sterile moles.
To review, class, the dead are gone. Forget ’em.
The mutant beasts roam around the surface making it unsafe for the Moles, though Clarke encountered no beasts on his wanderings thanks to the low budget for wandering beasts. When we see some of these beasts in The Pit where Clarke is briefly incarcerated they are straight out of a Weimar expressionist horror movies like ‘Nosferatu’ (1922), white as Dracula, bulbous shaved heads, and slavering creatures. Yuck. They are certainly Republicans. We never see any of their brethren or sistren in the out of doors, nor is there ever any explanation of why these several have been imprisoned in The Pit except as a forthcoming plot device.
The Moles are a classy lot with swanky gear and funky art deco furniture but their kind is dying from sterility caused by the plague. Only Eve is not sterile and from the get-go she fancies Clarke as her Adam. Must be the sexy flight pressure suit codpiece. Ahem. He is slow on the uptake and who can blame him since Eve says not a word, giving him the silent treatment. She is a deaf mute but the Mole scientists are sure she is not sterile. And ready for …. Uh huh, but how do they know that?
She communicates by sign language. ‘One is for….’ She is also a telepath who reads minds and finds that Clarke is harmless and protects him with vigorous sign language like a third base coach on speed.

Triangle on the wall, who is the fairest empath of all?
A silent role is not a good foundation for a Hollywood career and she has few other credits and some are hard to forgive, like ‘The Dukes of Hazard.’
There is also one reference to other survivors but that is left a loose end for those of us who were paying attention.

Clarke and the Russians hatch a plan. However, well, it is 1960 and the Russians are not to be trusted now are they.
Still, Clarke, a changed man, is intrepid and makes it back to 1960 to warn the climate change deniers, the anti-vaxxers, and the Tweet-in-Chief of the coming plague. Yeah, right, that’ll do a lot of good.
Edgar Ulmer (he of ‘The Man from Planet X‘ reviewed elsewhere on this blog) was the director and once again he showed Roger Corman how to do a lot with a little.

It was filmed in five days funded from the tip jar. The set design of triangles is brilliant and consistently carried through in the camera dissolves and fades.

There are also automatic doors, and sometimes the triangles are askew, giving the effect of a world gone Escher.
Some of the comments among the self-appointed reviewers are a cackle. One shouts ‘time travel does not work like that!’ Evidently there are daughters among us those who know how time travel works. Keep that in mind.

A late entry in British 1950s science fiction on a par with Gerry Anderson productions. (Mortimer, you either get or you don’t.)

A misleading lobby card.
Meteors land all in a row in a Sussex field and bright lights take over the minds of the scientists sent to investigate. Only the Top Scientist is immune, because he is numbskull.
Spoiler! The Anti-Vaxxers are right! Colanders with tin foil do offer protection.

These guys are ready for ‘They Came from Beyond Space.’
The Top Scientist finds that his squeeze now rejects him. She must be possessed by an alien. What other explanation could there be, Erich?
Top is multi-skilled in marksmanship, judo, lock picking, all skills the essential for a PhD in astrophysics. He can also talk opponents to death in the best seminar manner. He is a boring James Bond with a nary a twinkle. He, unlike Bond, is not in on the joke.
He has resisted the mind control of the alien meteors because of the tin plate in his head, the result of too much McKinsey speak at the university with the research manager so off to the kitchen for colanders. Thus equipped he and his elite unit tackle the aliens’ HQ on the Moon.

The Moonies hangout.
The Moonies have been alien-napping hordes of rustics, who are never missed, to toil at a Big Dig on the Moon. Top and team liberate them and then they — the freed rustics — spontaneously overthrow the Moonies in their lair.
As if.
Once under the tin hats, the rustic toilers would probably turn on their liberators and blame them for not getting there sooner, for letting them be alien-napped in the first place, file for compensation, whine about Toto, argue with each other about whose feelings were hurt the most, reject the tin hats as not eco-friendly or stylish, go on strike for better conditions before rebelling, and so on.
Why fight enemies when fighting friends is so much easier.
At the denouement the Master of the Moon, Michael Gough in a Carnaby Street robe, explains his innocent motives to Top who then graciously agrees to help. Huh? All the fisticuffs, shoot ‘em up, slavery, and mayhem, and yet they shake on the deal.

‘Groovy robe, man.’
Did Bond make a sweetheart deal with Dr No? No way!
Can anyone come from Beyond Space anyway? That threw me. Beyond Space, where is that? The Moon? New Jersey?
Much of earlier science fiction used the threat of aliens directly or indirectly as a metaphor for the Cold War, communism, and brain-washing as illustrated here. Hence the proliferation of colanders in the 1950s in Middle America. On the whole the production is lifeless. I did not care if the hot rocks zapped them all. No loss.
It is a common motif in sci-fi that the aliens are vastly superior to us primitive Earthlings, yet somehow the puny Earthlings overcome the aliens. Because of their superiority the aliens are able to come to Earth while weak humans remain planet-bound. The aliens’ superiority is usually shown in technology, but mental powers are also invoked, and in some cases there is moral superiority – think of those that are Greener-than-thou (and everyone else).
Yet somehow the runts of the galactic litter that is humanity overcome these leaders of the pack. Often doing so involves judo. Using the strength of the aliens against them. In Captain Kirk’s case it all too often involved talking them to death.
It is also a common motif that the aliens have come to Earth for real estate because they have mucked up their home world by listening to the climate-change deniers. In other cases they come for other resources, including US!

A crew of five sets off for the Moon but takes a wrong turn and hits Mars instead. So much for fancy integrated Solar Positioning System of navigation in the new rocket. The film combines very little technology with some striking photography, and the slow and fast death of one and all, and a message. In ground control is that eternal Sy Fyian Morris Ankrum who tries to make it upbeat in the end. He fails.

Lobby card.
For the first time, say the know-it-all web sites, a movie shows a multi-stage rocket. Indeed Dr Egghead, leader of the eXpedition to the Moon (hence X-M) explains this to the assembled media, who are sworn to secrecy. (These are the same hacks who a few years earlier published details about US depth charge tactics in the Pacific Ocean in newspapers. Guess what. The Japanese kept up their subscriptions and in turn changed their own tactics. Loose newsprint sank a good number of ships. The Newseum in D.C. strangely does not feature this episode in its trumpeting of the free press.)
That verisimilitude is quickly lost when the intrepid crew undergoes rigorous physical examinations fifteen minutes before launch. Blood pressure tests are administered: Readings are elevated as is to be expected. End of physical. They are also wearing buttoned collars and neckties like RAF pilots.
In addition to Egghead, there is Hotshot pilot, moody Stargazer, and Comic Relief. Wait, that is only four. Who is the fifth? The frail. A lady scientist. Egghead says her discoveries made the propulsion system of the rocket possible. Atta girl! However, thereafter she serves as the object of Hotshot’s lust, Egghead’s condescension, and Comic Relief’s efforts at humour. Star Gazer has eyes only for the stars. Though in one brief aside it seems her calculations of fuel use were right and Egghead’s were wrong. He is not big about it.
Off they go. Vroom! Things go wrong. That is what happens with the low bid contractors. They miss the Moon. Yes, They miss the Moon and find themselves Lost in Space, closer to Mars than anything else. They talk. The talk some more. [I left the room.] They are still talking. Finally they head for Mars and land. Well, why not. ‘M’ works for Mars, too.
Sidebar: They may have gone to Mars to avoid unpleasant comments about plagiarising the story ‘Destination Moon’ (1950). The same is said of ‘Flight to Mars’ (1950) by the know-it-alls.
On Mars the washed out rust coloured photography as they traipse around in mechanic’s coveralls and war surplus respirators is very striking. (It was filmed in the Mojave Desert.)

Red Mars.
The awe and wonder of the red planet comes across, accompanied by some muted theremin music, an essential for quality Sy Fy. More of the silent majesty of a new world would have been nice.

Note the gear for Martian exploration.
But by this time they are running out of B movie time, and ideas. Albeit, the direction does not feel rushed.
There is movement in the distance among the russet rocks. Natives. Martians who look like injured wrestlers from WWE, limping around with shaved heads, hairy backs, lantern jaws, tiny frontal lobes, big biceps, lots of scars and bruises. The crew stumbles on a sunbathing Martian woman, who does not look anything like something from WWE, and she sets off the alarm with a Hammer horror film scream. Wow! She is blind for reasons to be explained later. Read on.
The cavemen from WWE arrive bearing rocks and hurl them at the crew who conveniently remain within range below the cliff faces. Comic Relief goes first, as we knew he must. He was, by the way, Noah Beery, Junior, who was as ever charming and likeable, if tiresomely predictable. Egghead cracks next. Hmm, these are the best of the best the United States had, sent into space, and they are beaten and battered to death by cavemen. Maybe the physical should have been more rigorous.
The surviving crew shows surprisingly good sense in abandoning these fallen comrades and rush back to the ship and blast off. They have dragged along the square jawed Stargazer who also got clobbered, and is a burden. For some reason the two survivors did not consider lighting the load by jettisoning him. I did, maybe because he is the impossibly handsome Hugh O’Brian. That latter fact might explain both his retention as well as my suggestion to dump him.
Now the Lady Scientist and Hotshot alone together are rocketing back to Earth. She does more calculations with her slide-rule. This is one calculating gal. They have not the fuel for a controlled re-entry! She was indeed right about that as above. Crispy critters are on the menu. Gulp.
But first they have to warn Morris back in control of the dire fate that befell the Martians in the sure and certain hope it can be avoided. Huh?
It seems they made a lot of inferences from their two-minute first and last contact with the Martians, some radiation readings, and an fabricated icon in the red dust. Mars had an advanced civilisation (Exhibit A, the icon) that destroyed itself in a nuclear holocaust (Exhibit B, the geiger counter clicking) and has reverted to the mutant primitives they encountered (Exhibit C, hairy and blind) who walloped them. What other explanation could there be, Erich?
Is this a composition error? They met one blind woman and a few hairy-backs and have concluded all Martians are blind or hairy. Come to Newtown on a Saturday night and meet the local animal life and from that generalise to us all. Gosh, I hope not.
Hotshot and Lady Scientist in a broken transmission to Morris Ankrum back home pass the word: Don’t blow yourselves up! Message received. (Blow up others.) They then plunge to a fiery death while in a fiery embrace. Morris, like some surgeons, declares the operation a success though the careless patients died.
Oracle IMDB weighs at 4.9 opinioniums. That is below some of the effluvia of Adam Sandler.
But wait, there is a serious message buried in the melodrama as Hotshot and Lady Scientist clinch in the barbecue.
Atomic radiation is deadly, long-lasting, unavoidable, and even worse than Faux News. (Yes, that is possible.)
In many Sy Fy films of the era the official line of the US Atomic Energy Commission was followed according to which radiation was a minor nuisance. Wear gloves. Take aspirin. Say the Pledge of Allegiance. No problem. The films from this era are too numerous to list where atomic power is used like overproof diesel to power lawn mowers. It is no solace to know that the same thing happened in the Soviet Union, another example of convergence.
In the early 1950s concern about radiation in the United States was widely disparaged as a communist disinformation plot to inhibit the development of righteous American nuclear weapons and power. If a scientist published data about the ill effects of radiation, it was denounced as Red propaganda by the HUAC and Tail Gunner Joe. These were the climate change deniers of the day. Scientific evidence was dismissed toute suite! Alternative facts were manufactured.
In that context the screenplay’s emphasis on the evil of radiation was a show-stopper. In fact, the screenplay does have a moral within the Tom Swift adventure and the melodrama of the doomed lovers, and that is the evil of nuclear weapons. Subtle huh?
Not subtle enough because the screen writer fell to the HUAC lynch mob for his trouble and spent time in the slammer as a red incubus. That was the very talented and much accomplished Dalton Trumbo, who lives in my affection as the author of ‘The Happy Jack Fish Hatchery Letters.’ All of this cryptic to someone who wasn’t even born then: Tough.

Dalton Trumbo on the way to the slammer.
By the way, 1950 was the very year the lynch mob turned on Robert Oppenheimer, whose leadership led to the atomic bomb, but who had many qualms about nuclear energy, nuclear power, and nuclear weapons. Red qualms said HUAC. What other explanation could there be, Erich?
Morris Ankrum must have had a deal according to which he had to be in in every Sy Fy pot boiler. My man-crush on him is explained in another post. Search for it and be enlightened.
Personal note. I did a brilliant grade school project on Atoms for Peace based on the Atomic Energy Commission’s publicity when I was a cute little boy. It set me on the way for the great career I had in Physics lab in college. Little did I know.
Second personal note. Learning to use a slide-rule was a major accomplishment and I still have it in my desk. (Though I have completely forgotten how to use it.)