Experiencing chronic deja vu while watching an older movie is nothing new as filmmakers have been borrowing and homaging from older flicks for about as long as cinema has been around. However, it seems that some influences are more obvious than others, and when watching It! The Terror From Beyond Space, its impossible to not see it as an obvious dry run for Ridley Scott’s iconic Alien.
It’s not the first time we’ve had to mention Alien in conjunction with a stylish, cult movie that shares more than a couple of similarities, as Mario Bava’s stylish, 1965, sci-fi chiller, Planet Of The Vampires, essentially was a blueprint for the tone and opening of Scott’s classic as a hapless crew touch down on a hostile, primordial planet in order to answer a distress call. However, while Planet Of The Vampires is suspiciously similar, It! The Terror Beyond Space, is almost a carbon copy as almost everything about it shows up in Dan O’Bannon’s 1979 script.
If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, Alien must be the most sincere film ever made…
Amusingly, the year is 1973 and space travel with nuclear powered spaceships are the norm – however, the voyage we’re currently following has somewhat of a grimmer mission than exploring the stars. The crew are heading to Mars to pick up Col. Edward Carruthers, the sole survivor of the previous mission to the Red Planet, who is under suspicion of murdering the entirety of his crew in order to stretch out the longevity of the rations. Once they get him home, Carruthers will be facing a court martial and a probable firing squad rather than a welcome home parade, but the man continues to insist that his colleagues were actually slaughtered one at a time by some mysterious, indigenous organism that tore through his crew like some interstellar Ted Bundy.
The crew have varying opinions about Carruthers’ outlandish story, with Commander Col. Van Heusen strenuously insisting that he’s guiltier than a nervous looking puppy sitting next to a fresh dog turd, while nurse Ann Anderson giving him the benefit of the doubt. However, his story is given a huge injection of authenticity when the hulking, alien beast that took out the previous crew, sneaks onboard and starts working it’s way through this new group like a space faring buffet.
Hungering for any and all bodily fluids that the crew possesses, the creature strikes again and again, leaving the crew to seal themselves away and frantically figure out how to snuff this murdering space-bastard before it snuffs them – but when grenades, gas and even exposure to radiation fail to slow the beast, what other methods are left to render this E.T. D.O.A, A.S.A.P.?
If it sounded like I was picking on Alien earlier on, please realise that I recognize Scott’s lean, mean space-set scarer as one of the greatest examples of the genre that has ever existed – however that doesn’t mean it isn’t fun to see where it’s more memorable ideas have been lovingly plundered from. Thus, watching It! The Terror From Beyond Space works less as a stand alone creature feature and more as a cinematic history lesson that feels like a very prehistoric ancestor to its later, state of the art, cousin.
The basics are, undeniably, exactly the same, with the majority of the movie seeing a clutch of horribly vunerable humans stuck on a spaceship as the invading alien plucks them out, ome by one, like it’s casually grocery shopping for human bone marrow. Hence we get hatches getting sealed off, various sub-missions as the survivors desperately try to kill the crap out of this thing and there’s even a noticable scene that involves possibly the Alien franchise’s favorite past time: dicking around in claustrophobic air ducts.
However, where Alien revolutionized the entire genre overnight due to Ridley Scott’s visual genius, It! The Terror From Beyond Space is, if I’m being honest, a rather standard monster mash that – aside from a few neat touches – still remains very much a product of it’s time. Most of the cast are virtually interchangeable and the female members seem to be in charge of refilling the mens drinks when they’re not doing their nurse duties or recoiling from the thought of certain death and the sets are somewhat basic considering we’re supposed to be in the super- futuristic era of… 1973.
Elsewhere, while the seemingly unkillable monster is admittedly formidable with its huge, three-fingered claws and a physique that resembles a reptilian gorilla, its rampages often seem less like the actions of a vicious hunter than it is the clumsy staggering of an inebriated suit performer. Of course, to address the xenomorph in the room, that’s exactly what was going on as the man encased in the rubbery costume, Ray Corrigan, reputedly loved booze as much as the alien loves bone marrow. Plus, it’s fairly obvious that the alien suit doesn’t actually fit him very well as eagle-eyed viewers will spot that the creature’s abnormally thick tongue is actually the actor’s dimpled chin jutting from the monster’s maw. Also, while it’s obvious that Alien took a fair few aspects from here, It! itself is guilty of borrowing more than a few details from The Thing From Another World, as the sight of a lumbering, vampiric beast cornering a plucky group of tasty looking humans in a remote location seems more than a little familiar.
However, despite these rather low budget aspects, It! manages to be a rather effective thriller as its cast keep trying to think up rapid fire ideas in order to try and stay afloat in the sea of problems that comes with having an alien stowaway on board your spaceship. Be it the subplot of one of the crew stuck below decks with the beast with only a broken leg and a welding torch to work with, or the fact that a delirious crew member becomes just as dangerous when fear starts overriding his common sense.
It’s also weirdly cool that the film eschews futuristic weaponry like laser guns and instead, has the humans try and fend off their attacker with good old fashioned (and horribly ineffectual) bullets; but I have to say, I’m not entirely sold of the wisdom of setting up hand grenade booby traps for the creature on a sealed spaceship with only four rooms. In space, no one hear you scream, but apparently it’s totally fine to set off localised explosives in a pressurized environment.
Still, it’s short (barely 69 minutes), relatively sweet, the survival aspect is well done and it has one hell of a legacy to back It! up.
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