It! The Terror from Beyond Space

Now it's official. It may have taken nearly forty years, but now I've seen every SF movie made in the 1950s.

Those of you in the know will recognize It! The Terror from Beyond Space as the Alien inspiration. Monster gets on board spaceship, spaceship takes off, havoc and mayhem ensue, humans get offed one by one, last ditch stand to kill the monster. But though the flick only preceded Ridley Scott's masterpiece by 21 years (remember, Alien is now 32 years old itself), there's a parsec of AUs difference between the two. (Please pardon my slip into nerdese.)

But these "differences" are what I love - absolutely love! - about 1950s science fiction movies. All the men look and act like they've stepped out of a WWII flick. There's even a character named Gino who can't wait to "see the girls" when he gets back to Oith. They all smoke like chimneys aboard a rocket ship about the size of a water slide. The women - in between administering blood transfusions and performing autopsies - serve the men their coffee and bacon at the ship's sandwich table.

The best part, always noted in any article on the film, is the WWII mindset of the astronauts. Now, I have to note two things. First, the WWII mindset won us a big war and saved about a quarter of the globe from totalitarianism and genocide. I'm not mocking that. Second, the film is supposed to take place in the far-off future of 1973. So we're ostensibly 28 years removed from that conflict, and our astronaut corps has not evolved from the GI Joes who smashed Hitler and Hirohito while dreaming of dames and the Brooklyn Dodgers.

The best part is how our heroes go about trying to kill the invading creature: hand grenades and bazookas! Inside a rocket about the size of a cell phone tower! In outer space!

As for Alien foreshadowings, they're easy and fun to spot. The monster uses the ventilation shafts to hide, travel about, and stash his victims. There's a scene where a (somewhat corpulent) astronaut has to go in to the cylindrical shafts a la Captain Dallas. A crewman fights off the monster with a welding torch, which reminded me of the weapons Parker concocted. One effort to kill the critter involved gassing him, and seeing it flail about in the mists recalled Ripley trying to disgorge the alien in the escape ship with steam. And at the end of It! our heroes let out all the oxygen from the ship via an open airlock to kill the monster. I actually expected It to be sucked out the airlock as Ridley Scott's alien would be two decades later.

Classic, and I sincerely love every single scene.

(Still haven't figured out, though, what the "Beyond Space" in the title means.)