In 1958 the Navy Vanguard missiles had gone bust, the Russian Sputnik is in the air, and the Army Explorer satellite had either just gone up or was about to when It! The Terror From Beyond Space was released to the movie going public. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration, shepherded through Congress by Lyndon Johnson and signed into law by President Eisenhower took interservice politics out of the space race though its existence is not acknowledged here despite my title quote. I'm telling the reader all this to put this film in the proper context. The action takes place in 1973 and a second rescue mission is on the way to Mars when in real life we had just reached the Moon four years earlier and the country was dealing with imbecilities of Watergate than a rescue mission to Mars.
What the mission was doing was as it turned rescuing Marshall Thompson who was the commander and sole survivor of the first Mars mission which crash landed on impact and communication was lost. Not only that the commander of the rescue mission thinks it was Thompson who killed all his crew members so he could survive indefinitely on the stored rations. Thompson tries telling Kim Spalding that it was some big furry creature that done it, but he ain't buying it.
Spalding buys it after the big furry guy stows away on board and starts killing and eating the rescue crew. Now how he got on board still amazes me, he's not hard to miss even with all the dark noir type lighting that characterizes It! The Terror From Beyond Space.
This was a low budget science fiction film so a lot couldn't be spent on sets. Even so they're a lot of unanswered questions about Mars, what other kind of life might exist there, where does this one fit into the Mars ecosystem? One thing we know, when these Earth explorers came it was time for this one to chow down.
We don't get a good look at him either. He looks roughly like the Creature From The Black Lagoon with fur and a pair of claw hands. He's an ugly dude in any event.
I got quite a few laughs at this film, especially at how wrong it got progress. In the end the astronauts try a most dangerous solution to get rid of their stowaway which you'll have to see should you care to.
What the mission was doing was as it turned rescuing Marshall Thompson who was the commander and sole survivor of the first Mars mission which crash landed on impact and communication was lost. Not only that the commander of the rescue mission thinks it was Thompson who killed all his crew members so he could survive indefinitely on the stored rations. Thompson tries telling Kim Spalding that it was some big furry creature that done it, but he ain't buying it.
Spalding buys it after the big furry guy stows away on board and starts killing and eating the rescue crew. Now how he got on board still amazes me, he's not hard to miss even with all the dark noir type lighting that characterizes It! The Terror From Beyond Space.
This was a low budget science fiction film so a lot couldn't be spent on sets. Even so they're a lot of unanswered questions about Mars, what other kind of life might exist there, where does this one fit into the Mars ecosystem? One thing we know, when these Earth explorers came it was time for this one to chow down.
We don't get a good look at him either. He looks roughly like the Creature From The Black Lagoon with fur and a pair of claw hands. He's an ugly dude in any event.
I got quite a few laughs at this film, especially at how wrong it got progress. In the end the astronauts try a most dangerous solution to get rid of their stowaway which you'll have to see should you care to.