It! The Terror from Beyond Space Blu-ray Review
Jerome Bixby’s screenplay isn’t lacking for suspenseful potential, but many of the possibilities for thrills and terror are thwarted by substandard special effects and some naïve notions about space travel. The spaceship is lavish in its size and scope (many levels deep and very wide to accommodate the size of its crew), but the members think nothing of firing off many rounds of ammunition inside the hull, setting off a wreath of grenades, and opening the door to an atomic generator without fear of contamination to the humans in the room. When a couple of the crew go outside the ship on a rescue mission to gain outside access to another level, the production doesn’t bother with wire work to simulate a lack of gravity; director Edward L. Cahn simply tips the camera on its side and shoots the men walking upright down the side of the ship in the later style of TV’s Batman. The first real look at the monster comes some twenty-five minutes into the movie, and it’s a disappointing sharp-fanged mask they’ve given their creature without any expression or generating any sense of dread. The movie just never seems to ratchet up the do-or-die aspect of their predicament so that the audience would be on the edges of their seats with suspense, and the solution finally achieved to thwart their adversary doesn’t really make much sense at all.
Two TV veterans give the best performances: Marshall Thompson as the man under suspicion of murder and Dabbs Greer, one of the scientists on board the ship who’s far more open-minded about Carruthers’ guilt or innocence than his commander, Col. Heusen. Kim Spalding underplays the colonel for most of the film but makes a series of bone-headed moves later in the movie that show him to be ill-equipped to be running the ship, never even restrained by the other members of his crew whom he could have killed with his recklessness. Shawn Smith (later billed as Shirley Patterson) is the uninteresting love interest for Heusen and Carruthers while Ann Doran as the ship’s doctor doesn’t get nearly enough opportunities to show what she can do. Richard Benedict as one of the crew whose brother is an early casualty shows some emotional peaks early and then rather fades into the background.
1950s sci-fi ran the gamut from outer space sagas to monstrous aliens and radioactively formed creatures capable of destroying all in their paths. Edward L. Cahn’s It! The Terror from Beyond Space combines the outer space and alien terror plots into a B-movie programmer of not much distinction. (Ridley Scott would decades later milk far more out of the scenario with his masterful Alien.) Competently made on an obviously low budget with a host of familiar faces from television and minor movie roles, It! doesn’t even offer the campy fun of something awful like The Giant Claw, but rather it goes through its predictable paces barely running a bit over an hour.
Studio: MGM
Distributed By: Olive
Video Resolution and Encode: 1080P/AVC
Aspect Ratio: 1.85:1
Audio: English 2.0 DTS-HDMA
Subtitles: None
Rating: Not Rated
Run Time: 1 Hr. 9 Min.
Package Includes: Blu-ray
keep caseDisc Type: BD50 (dual layer)
Region: All
Release Date: 05/19/2015
MSRP: $29.95
The Production Rating: 2/5
Jerome Bixby’s screenplay isn’t lacking for suspenseful potential, but many of the possibilities for thrills and terror are thwarted by substandard special effects and some naïve notions about space travel. The spaceship is lavish in its size and scope (many levels deep and very wide to accommodate the size of its crew), but the members think nothing of firing off many rounds of ammunition inside the hull, setting off a wreath of grenades, and opening the door to an atomic generator without fear of contamination to the humans in the room. When a couple of the crew go outside the ship on a rescue mission to gain outside access to another level, the production doesn’t bother with wire work to simulate a lack of gravity; director Edward L. Cahn simply tips the camera on its side and shoots the men walking upright down the side of the ship in the later style of TV’s Batman. The first real look at the monster comes some twenty-five minutes into the movie, and it’s a disappointing sharp-fanged mask they’ve given their creature without any expression or generating any sense of dread. The movie just never seems to ratchet up the do-or-die aspect of their predicament so that the audience would be on the edges of their seats with suspense, and the solution finally achieved to thwart their adversary doesn’t really make much sense at all.
Two TV veterans give the best performances: Marshall Thompson as the man under suspicion of murder and Dabbs Greer, one of the scientists on board the ship who’s far more open-minded about Carruthers’ guilt or innocence than his commander, Col. Heusen. Kim Spalding underplays the colonel for most of the film but makes a series of bone-headed moves later in the movie that show him to be ill-equipped to be running the ship, never even restrained by the other members of his crew whom he could have killed with his recklessness. Shawn Smith (later billed as Shirley Patterson) is the uninteresting love interest for Heusen and Carruthers while Ann Doran as the ship’s doctor doesn’t get nearly enough opportunities to show what she can do. Richard Benedict as one of the crew whose brother is an early casualty shows some emotional peaks early and then rather fades into the background.
Video Rating: 3.5/5 3D Rating: NA
Audio Rating: 4/5
Special Features Rating: 1/5
Overall Rating: 2/5
Reviewed By: Matt Hough
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