Terror from the Year 5000

1950's science fiction films are so earnest and so crummy that it's impossible not to like them. "Terror From The Year 5000" is a prime example of the genre.

On a lonely island in Florida's Everglades, a professor is experimenting with time travel. The project is successful to the extent that Prof Erling and his assistant Victor are able to trade artefacts with people from the year 5,200AD. One of these items finds its way to the desk of Dr. Bob Hodges, a museum curator and all-round good guy, who is amazed to learn that the figurine dates from the future.

Bob Hodges heads for the Everglades, where Prof Erling and his beautiful daughter Claire make him welcome. Victor, meanwhile, has started putting in some unauthorised overtime in the lab, with alarming results...

Robert Gurney wrote, produced and directed this gauche piece of malarkey with its wooden acting, daffy plot and laughable sets. The scientific gadgetry in the lab is particularly amusing.

The howlers come thick and fast. Bob explains to his secretary Miss Blake (boy, if there were only an oscar for stodgy delivery ...) that carbon-14 dating places the statuette in the future. Just how carbon-14 can do that is baffling to ordinary mortals like me! When Bob fires his shotgun, we hear the shot but there is no muzzle flash from the dummy weapon. When a female in a nurse's uniform opens the door, somebody says, "You must be the nurse". The clock on the lab wall shows silly times which don't match the sunlight outside. The prof's gadget disrupts all machinery in the district when it's switched on. We see a TV set in a local bar pack up, but nobody seems to mind.

There are many unintentional laughs ("I'll do my exploring in the laboratory, if you don't mind", "And then the missile centre fired him" etc etc). Every plot point is laboured to death. The non-sequiturs abound. Nobody flinches when it is realised that they are all contaminated with radioactivity, and no-one warns Claire when she walks in. Later, it turns out that the lab has protective suits available. When Victor breaks a pane of glass in the time chamber, he picks up a replacement pane of exactly the right size which happens to be lying beside him. When Bob gets out of bed and follows Victor, he unaccountably has his shoes on. Why would Victor go to the trouble of getting in bed in the same room as Bob, only to sneak out and tamper with the gadget? And why at this stage would Bob want to follow him?

It goes on. The 'monster' speaks perfect Greek and English, even though it comes from five millennia in the future. The men know there's a dangerous creature out there, but they stand back and let Claire answer the door. The monster kills Angelo easily, but Claire is able to unmask it without any trouble. When they find the nurse's body, Hedges and Erling stroll back to the house as if they were picking mushrooms. Nobody calls the police when Angelo is found dead. Bob and the Professor abandon the house, with its two women and sick man, to go searching the island together. Nobody thinks of calling for help. The nurse, in her immaculate uniform, has to walk up to the house through swamp and jungle without a guide. When the alarm is sounded, nobody wonders where Victor is until after it's all over.

The editing is atrocious. We see the Professor waiting for his cue before speaking, and the lumpy back-and-forth dialogue cuts are dreadful. The close-ups of Bob and Claire swimming in the pond are oh-so-obviously filmed in a studio tank. At one point, Victor says "Professor, we're wasting our time." One can't help thinking he's right.

As a child I fell in love with 'monster' movies immediately upon seeing my first (Frankenstein Meets The Wolfman) on television. Fortunately for me I grew up in the fifties, an era prolific with cheapie horror and sci-fi films. A neighborhood theatre ran them almost exclusively at the time and I attended every Saturday (and sometimes a couple more days per week in glorious summer). Just couldn't get enough of this stuff.

I could take all the giant ants, scorpions and spiders, all the ghosts and haunted houses, the numerous editions of frankenstein monsters and invaders from space pretty well. For some reason, though, nothing frightened me more or stayed with me longer than the rare feminine monsters. Perhaps it was because women were always the loving caregivers (Mom, Grandma, my teachers, my sisters). When sick, or waking from a nightmare we always call for Mom. So, I think the idea of a woman being a vicious, scary thing was such a perversion of all I otherwise knew, the effect on me was especially chilling. I had no problem with the mutilated faces of men as in 'Horrors Of The Black Museum', 'The Black Sleep', 'The Unearthly' and so forth. But the visages of the female victims in 'The Hypnotic Eye' and of the niece in 'Frankenstein's Daughter' always made me squeeze shut my eyes.

'The Astounding She Monster' is a prime example of these fears - a malevolent, radioactive female relentlessly stalking me, her touch meaning sure pain and death. From the age of seven until seventeen, that particular luminescent character showed up in my nightmares. But the single most frightening thing I ever saw was the female terror that came shrieking out of the time machine in this movie, arms pumping in a marching style, coming right at me. Peeling off another woman's face to wear as a mask was incredibly disturbing. Yep - this was the single-most terror of my childhood movie-viewing. I couldn't even bring myself to keep my eyes open for more than half a second when the movie closes with a close-up of this hideously deformed feminist with a wicked widow's peak. Even at the age of sixteen, surrounded by buddies watching it on the late show, my body kept freezing with fear, though I didn't mention it to them.

Going by most of the reviews here, today's audiences, accustomed to the most graphic horror, just find this monster boring. But I'm still scared of this terror from the year 5000. Oh yeah, and the four-eyed cat gave me the creeps pretty good too.

As far as I know, this is the first American feature film about time travel via a time machine. A time machine was featured in the American serial BRICK BRADFORD (1947) and in the English comedy TIME FLIES (1944). Film firsts should be noted and applauded even if the films they appear in are otherwise unremarkable. TERROR FROM THE YEAR 5000 is a somewhat lackluster production with uneven performances and direction. I say that this film is shade a better than most other low budget quickies from 1958 in that its story slightly more imaginative. The time machine was something new to films in 1958, the bit with the hypnotic finger nails is certainly unusual and don't forget the four eyed mutant cat from the future. I thought the idea of having the future women at first mistakenly speaking Greek was a clever idea, since the present people had sent the future people with trinkets that had Greek writing on them. The make up for the future woman is quite poor, no wonder the director mostly kept her face hidden throughout. There is one scene where the scientists leave the island and go to a movie on the mainland. AIP studio heads must of come up with this scene to insert a little promotion. The film they go to see is AIP's I WAS A TEENAGE FRANKENSTEIN. Oh, by the way, I like the 1958 Edsel Corsair that Ward Costello drives.

RE: The DVD edition of 1958's "Terror From the Year 5000" recently issued by Incredibly Strange Film Works (ISFW) of Jamestown, MO: Those of you who've been waiting for a pristine-quality DVD edition of this fun Sci-Fi oldie will have to go on waiting. The very fuzzy picture and sound quality (with contrasts so bad that some night scenes are nearly impossible to make out) make this ISFW DVD a big disappointment, especially considering the $24.99 price tag! (The Horror/Sci-Fi fans among you may also remember ISFW's equally unsatisfactory VHS video edition of 1964's "Horror of Party Beach", mastered from a toned-down TV print with all the gore removed!)

I'd say that any DVD or VHS video bearing the ISFW logo should be approached with caution.

In TERROR IN THE YEAR 5000, scientists somehow bring an artifact from the far-flung future into the present. NYC museum curator, Dr. Hedges (Ward Costello) heads for Florida to investigate this anomaly.

Untold horror ensues.

Another of the very talky sci-fi movies of its era, the action level is extremely low. Any real interest comes from the jealous tension between the head scientist's daughter (Joyce Holden), her dad's assistant, Dr. Hedges, and Angelo the caretaker, who happens to have the world's most interesting eyebrows. This soap opera is interrupted only sporadically, up until the "big finale".

Salome Jens plays the visitor from the future who runs around causing havoc. Her shimmery outfit and fingernails, along with her "transformation" scene are semi-interesting. The rest is a bit of a slog to wade through.

POINT OF INTEREST: There's a scene where the characters go to the movies, and the posters of I WAS A TEENAGE FRANKENSTEIN are on display outside the theater. Any collectors will drool over these vintage images!...