Where Exactly is "Beyond Space"?

Film: It! The Terror from Beyond Space
Format: Streaming video from Pluto TV on Fire!

I genuinely love 1950s science fiction in general, and space-based science fiction far more. It believed in us, and had hopes and dreams for humanity. In It! The Terror from Beyond Space, we have successfully landed a team on Mars in 1973. In reality, of course, we haven’t been back to the moon in about half a century and Mars is still a pipe dream. Movies like this, though, just knew that we’d be living in a scientific society and that we would be exploring the cosmos and encountering the weird, strange, and deadly.

When the movie begins, a nuclear-powered spaceship lifts off from Mars, headed back toward Earth. On board is the crew, naturally, as well as Edward Carruthers (Marshall Thompson), the lone survivor of the first manned trip to Mars. Carruthers is suspected of murdering the other nine members of his crew. After all, he had no way of knowing that a rescue was coming. With 10 people, there was only one year’s worth of food. With just one, he’d be able to survive a decade.

Carruthers, of course, claims he didn’t do it. He says that there was something on Mars that hunted down the members of his crew and killed them. The folks on the rescue team, especially Col. Van Heusen (Kim Spalding), don’t believe the story, and while Carruthers gets the run of the ship, no one is very comfortable being around him.

This tension isn’t going to last us very long, though. It seems that while on Mars, someone left an emergency hatch open, and the creature that killed off the entire crew of Carruthers managed to sneak on board. Now. While the ship is headed home, an unknown monster starts hunting the crew. What this means is that when one of the crew members vanishes, only to be found later, all of the stories Carruthers has been telling have been shown to be true.

This all happens in essentially the first act of the film. The rest of the film is the crew coming to terms with the fact that Carruthers was telling the truth about the loss of his crew, and the steady depletion of the rescue team to the creature. When found the bodies are stripped of all moisture, which seems to be the style of the monster. The film isn’t going to take a lot of liberties with the standard plot here—the crew is going to be slowly picked off by the monster as they try to figure out how to deal with it.

For a low-budget movie, It! The Terror from Beyond Space is surprisingly influential. It’s not hard to see a good amount of Alien in this film, and doubtless this was one of the films that was watched in preparation of that film. The creature design is clearly from the “dude in a rubber suit” school of monsters, but the actual story feels a lot like Alien. It’s easy to spot some of The Thing here as well, and Aliens clearly copped the ending.

A good portion of the middle of the film is about the surviving members of the crew using trial and error to figure out what will wound or kill the monster. It takes some time, but you know going in that they’re going to find it eventually, and it’s just going to be a case of finding out what might actually work. The creature proves to be impervious to bullets, poison, and heart medications, so the thing that ultimately kills them must be rarer still.

Honestly, It! The Terror from Beyond Space is a difficult movie to dislike. This is despite the fact that the spaceship, an obvious toy when shown in a few scenes, is buried in its provincial attitude where the few women on board do most of the work. It’s also a world where space craft have giant basements and staircases.

So, yes, it’s cheap and gets all of the science wrong that it possibly can. Yes, it drags in the middle third, yes it’s 1950s sexist, yes some of the characters refuse to let the “Carruthers murdered everyone” thing die. Really, if they wanted that, she should have kept things a mystery and him clearly suspicious for a lot longer than about 20 minutes. But, it is what it is and I guess we should be happy that we have it.

Why to watch It! The Terror from Beyond Space : More influence than you might guess.
Why not to watch: It cuts the initial tension far too soon.