Horror Express: It! The Terror From Beyond Space (Edward L. Cahn, 1958)

If the fact that much of the first half of Dan O’Bannon and Ronald Shusett’s original script for Ridley Scott’s ‘Alien’ was borrowed from Mario Bava’s ‘Planet of the Vampires’ (1965) has been widely acknowledged by this point in time, it seems to have been less frequently observed that a significant amount of the material in the second half of Scott’s film (the ‘monster loose on the ship’ stuff) comes to us direct from this little number – an admirably straight-up SF-horror programmer, made for peanuts in 1958, and likely selling a great many more of them as it proceeded to blow the minds of monster kids around the globe in these good ol’ triple feature matinees and suchlike.

In the far-flung future of 1973(!), a moustached official addressing a press conference in a disconcertingly cramped looking White House briefing room sets the scene for us. Earth has lost contact with the first manned mission to Mars shortly after it landed, and a shiny, lava lamp-shaped rescue ship has been dispatched upon its wobbly, sparkler-powered way to see what gives.

We re-join the crew of this rescue ship shortly before they once again depart from the red planet, having picked up the sole survivor of the earlier expedition, Colonel Carruthers (Marshall Thompson), who claims that the rest of his crew were killed by an unseen monster of some kind. Disregarding this fantastic story, the rescue ship guys naturally figure that he must have murdered his crewmates in order to maximise his own chances of survival after their ship crashed, and are determined to return him to earth to face a military firing squad (so we’re told?!). Before take-off however, there’s some brief faffing about with someone accidentally leaving the loading bay doors open for a while, and… you can see where this is heading, right?

We’re first introduced to the crew of the ship via a series of ‘portrait’ shots which see them taking their positions for take-off and reporting their readiness, during which we note that, alongside about eight men, there are two women taking active roles on-board ship, which seems at least slightly progressive by the standards of the 1950s, don’t you think? [Also, it’s the same gender balance as ‘Alien’, if we’re keeping score.]

Immediately after this launch sequence however, we cut to the mess room, where the men are sitting around the table relaxing, talking about what they’re going to get up to when they’re back on Earth etc [shades of ‘Alien’, once again], whilst the two women hover behind them, refilling their coffee cups and collecting their dirty plates! Welcome to 1973, ladies.

Needless to say, for those who believe that science fiction should be a genre defined by Big Ideas, ‘It! The Terror from Beyond Space’ will prove absolute anathema. Issues of social progress, man’s place in the universe, or the possible implications of contact with extra-terrestrial life, all remain resolutely unexplored here. The film’s monster does not change shape, change size, absorb its victims’ personalities, communicate telepathically, reproduce asexually, become invisible, or do anything else remotely weird or noteworthy.

It may initially hide itself by lurking in the heating vents [ala ‘Alien’], but once it emerges, there’s no funny business with this guy – he’s just a good ol’ fashioned monster, with the teeth and the claws, and the growling and stomping, dragging corpses around and sucking the moisture and/or ‘life essence’ out of them, and such. (“It’s been sittin’ here for about half an hour, just lickin’ its chops”, a trapped crew member reports over the intercom at one point.)

What director Edward L. Cahn (who helmed far too many similarly action-packed b-pictures for me to even begin listing highlights here) and his collaborators give us with this one is in fact a nigh-on definitive exemplar of the Two-Fisted Sci-Fi ideal. Just a bunch of tooled up guys trapped in a tin can with a ravenous, bullet-proof beast - and if that ain’t enough to keep you entertained for 70 minutes, you probably should’ve tried the theatre across the street, mister.

Thankfully, our crew have set out on their journey into the unknown equipped with a crate of hand grenades, a wide variety of small arms, a cupboard full of experimental gas bombs and a bazooka (well, this is an American mission after all, I guess they needed the comfort factor). But, whilst their foresight in packing enough firepower to mount an assault on Colditz Castle may be vindicated by the fact that they’ve immediately encountered a blood-thirsty space monster, imagine their dismay when none of this stuff even slows it down!

Characters frequently say things like “I threw enough gas at it to knock out 67 elephants”, but still it keeps on comin’. They try electrocuting it, setting it on fire, even blasting it with radiation from the ship’s on-board nuclear reactor (of course there’s an on-board nuclear reactor), but to no avail. How will any of them make it back to earth alive? Well, I don’t want to give away the ending, but – just think ‘Alien’, and you’ll be on the right track.

If the movie I’ve described above sounds pretty corny, well, I suppose it is, but it’s certainly no less effective for that. Though clearly very much influenced by Hawks & Nyby’s ‘The Thing From Another World’ seven years earlier, Cahn & co simplified and streamlined that film’s actually rather complex and multi-faceted narrative, boiling it down to its basic essence and prioritising tension and man-vs-monster action over sub-text and thematics.

They were aided in this by, amongst other things, the fact that they had a way better monster suit to work with. Designed by Paul Blaisdell (Roger Corman’s go-to guy for this sort of thing) and inhabited by professional gorilla suit actor Ray ‘Crash’ Corrigan (who for my purposes is probably the biggest name on this film’s cast list), this thing is one mean bloody bastard of a critter, looking rather like the Creature from the Black Lagoon’s cigar-chomping, WWII vet uncle who opens beer bottles with his teeth. I daresay it must have really given some kids in the film’s original audience the heebie-jeebies, even as it sent others into paroxysms of delight.

Meanwhile, the film also boasts some pleasingly atmospheric photography and great, imaginative set design, realising the cramped, vertically levelled interior of the conical rocket ship in a physically believable manner which makes for a tense and challenging battleground upon which the men can engage the monster. (Having said that, I also loved seeing anachronisms like analogue clock faces, gas valves, mason jars and hand drawn blueprints making the journey into outer space, lending a defiantly low-tech vibe to proceedings, suggestive of a slightly re-tooled submarine movie.)

Cahn’s direction is snappily professional, and, sealing the deal, the cast – largely consisting of forgotten actors who I can imagine must have spent the ‘50s essaying hard-bitten corporals and/or small town posse participants – deliver a set of performances which are lively, engaging, and most importantly, entirely straight-faced.

A veritable model of filmmaking efficiency, ‘It!’ may not be the smartest atomic age sci-fi movie around (to put it mildly), but it’s certainly one of the most enjoyable and well-realised ventures in this vein that I’ve seen to date, however laughable the buck fifty model shots and pokey White House press rooms may be (got to love the ending, where the spokesman for the space programme returns to tell the world’s press, “eh, maybe we’ll just skip Mars”), and regardless of the hilarity the film’s unthinking misogyny is likely to evoke in modern audiences. As far as simple tales of scary monsters and the square-jawed spacemen who kick their behinds go, this one is tops.

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Bloody NEL: Lord of the Spiders by Michael Moorcock (1975)

Once again, I’m going to be out of the country for a few weeks, so whilst I’m gallivanting, I’ll leave you in the company of some recent additions to my paperback mountain, beginning with a few from the ever-pungent exploitation vats of New English Library.

Even before the late ‘70s saw paperback racks suddenly overflowing with sharks, crocs, rats, bears and crabs (more of which in a few days), monsters already seem to have often taken pride of place on NEL’s SF covers (see To Outrun Doomsday, for example), and, in their own weird sort of way, these delightful bat-headed spider things feel as iconic as anything in the realm of ‘70s British paperbacks. (Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to find a name to attach to the cover art anywhere online, but as ever, info or speculation is welcomed in the comments.)

Likewise, I’ve always had a real soft spot for Michael Moorcock’s early straight science fiction novels, but for some reason I’ve never gotten around to this one – originally published in ’68 as ‘Blades of Mars’ - or it’s predecessor ‘City of the Beast’.

Basically these books are an unabashed homage to Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Mars and Venus stories (lest we forget, Moorcock began his literary career, aged 17, as the editor of ‘Tarzan Adventures’), and verily, they are red-blooded stuff, full of grand sentences, with many commas, ending in proud exclamation points!

(Perhaps the fact that NEL also reprinted the Burroughs books in the ‘70s had something to do with their decision to acquire these particular Moorcock works? Who knows..)

Anyway, it never ceases to amaze me that Moorcock was knocking out this delightfully old school stuff at the same time that he was championing the most far out voices of SF’s experimental / psychedelic new wave as the editor of New Worlds. But then, that goes straight to the heart of what makes him such a unique and vital figure in the field of popular culture really, doesn’t it? At any given point in his career, he has contained multiples, and his determined refusal to acknowledge a dividing line between high and low culture, between intellect and entertainment, between reality and fantasy, should stand as an inspiration to us all.

The Adventures of John Carpenter in the 21st Century: Ghosts of Mars (2001)

Strangely enough, I’d pretty sure I actually attended the UK premiere of John Carpenter’s last Proper Movie to date way back in… 2001, I’m assuming? If I recall correctly, this event took place in the inauspicious environs of Leicester’s local arts cinema, and, as a student in the city at the time, I’d snagged a season ticket to their annual Fantastic Film Fest (oft referenced here in the past), and so went along.

The reception, it must be said, seemed muted. In fact I don’t recall the atmosphere being much different to that of yr average Tuesday night movie screening. Until I re-watched it this year, I didn’t remember very much at all about the film itself, but, being at the time a rather snobbish fan of cerebral, “big idea” sci-fi and avant garde freakiness, I don’t think I liked it very much.

More fool me then, and more fool the rest of the world, who apparently joined me in consigning ‘Ghost of Mars’ to unremembered oblivion amid the millennial whirl of the early ‘00s, prompting (or at least accelerating) Carpenter’s decision to pack it in and make a tactical withdrawal from the world of mainstream filmmaking.

Returning to the film in 2017, with of fifteen years of water under the bridge, I’m sure I won’t be the only Carpenter fan to take a chance on the recent blu-ray reissue and discover that, whilst it’s certainly no lost classic, ‘Ghost of Mars’ is, in a profound sense, actually pretty good.

I mean, clearly no one is going to try to make the case for ‘Ghosts..’ as one of Carpenter’s best films, and in terms of production value it’s probably one of his least ambitious projects, but in a sense it is the very modesty of the film’s ambitions that serve to make it such an enjoyable prospect today.

Taken on its own terms as a late-VHS-era b-movie in fact, I would contend that ‘Ghost of Mars’ is rock solid, with Carpenter’s distinctive guiding hand discernable in just about every aspect of the production, from the initial concept to the final edit. So - if the idea of John Carpenter directing a rock solid late-VHS-era b-movie pleases you, hesitate no longer over that “add to basket” button, because I’m confident you’ll have a good time here.

I don’t imagine that Carpenter planned ‘Ghosts..’ as his “last hurrah”, but in retrospect the movie’s tendency to fall back on story elements retooled from ‘Assault of Precinct 13’, ‘The Fog’ and ‘The Thing’ certainly gives it a self-referential “last lap of the track” vibe that – whilst much criticised in contemporary reviews - now allows us to indulge in some pleasurable nostalgia for an era in which movies such as these actually got made.

For those of us of a certain age and inclination in fact, ‘Ghosts of Mars’s potential as rainy day comfort viewing is immense. Not only is it probably the closest Carpenter ever came to the kind of modest, Hawksian western he always claimed he really wanted to make, but, speaking as a child of ‘90s video rentals, I also found myself loving ‘Ghosts..’s production design, which resembles a kind of perfect amalgam of every mid-budget/straight to video sci-fi actioner that that decade produced.

It’s full of unfeasibly bulked up post-‘Aliens’ assault rifles, tense walks down clanking corridors, faux-tough guy posturing, infra-red “monster-vision”, cyber-punky made up drugs and set within one of those weird, brightly lit ‘Total Recall’-esque dystopian off-planet colonies that actually looks quite nice and orderly -- and, somehow, all this squares quite nicely with the kind of no nonsense script that could easily have been “Raid on Dry Gulch” or some-such in a former life.

Natasha Henstridge from the ‘Species’ movies turns in a surprisingly strong performance as our resident space-sheriff, proving beyond doubt that she had the necessary acting chops to carry this kind of movie (if only anyone had been paying attention), and, if Ice Cube sadly doesn’t make much of an impression as our Snake Plissken/Napoleon Wilson surrogate (“Desolation Williams”!), there’s no shortage of other interesting contenders to fill the vacuum, from Jason Stratham doing his latter-day cockney action man thing to Robert Carradine drivin’ the big train, Joanna Cassidy from ‘Bladerunner’ fleeing across the Martian desert in a shakily CGI-assisted hot air balloon (shades of Edgar Rice Burroughs, perhaps..?), and, how can you say no to Pam Grier as the butch dyke space police commander? (With difficulty is the answer you’re looking for.)

Given its status as an unpretentious action-adventure movie furthermore, I think some of the ideas in ‘Ghost of Mars’ aren’t half bad. Considering the kind of comic machismo, barely concealed homo-erotic sub-texts and quaintly adolescent fear of women that had long dominated Carpenter’s films by the time he made this one, the decision to make the Mars colony a matriarchy is certainly an interesting one, and, though the implications of this are never really explored in much depth, there is nonetheless an enjoyable frisson to be found in watching an action movie in which most positions of power and normative authority belong to female characters, with the men conversely portrayed as ‘plucky underdogs’ and suchlike. (I also enjoyed the way that the film’s outlaw characters sneeringly accuse each other of “workin’ for The Woman”.)

The possessed Martian miners who comprise the film’s monster-threat are pretty good too, representing a distinctive and genuinely alarming spin on what could easily have been a rather ho-hum “Indians-via-zombies” type effort. With their bodies now inhabited by the spirits (or “ghosts”, y’see) of barbaric ancient Martian warriors, the human colonists begin filing their teeth, practicing grotesque self-mutilation and forging improvised new weapons for themselves, until they resemble some goth-damaged take on a Warhammer 40,000 army, waving their war banners and hefting improbably massive multi-bladed hand weapons as they bear down upon our heroes’ encampment. Though the mall-goth type make up they favour is.. kind of strange (well, it was 2001 I suppose), this is all pretty awesome, to be honest.

Although the film’s climactic siege situation had generally been read as a rehash of ‘Assault on Precinct 13’ (Henstridge & Cube’s similarly ‘Rio Bravo’-inspired sheriff/prisoner relationship certainly suggests as much), these more visible and flamboyant antagonists really make it more of a space-age/’Road Warrior’-filtered take on a good ol’ Rourke’s Drift scenario, and Carpenter clearly had a ton of fun with this notion, even throwing in a blatant homage to ‘Zulu’ at one point as he has his survivors adopt a first rank / second rank firing strategy to take down the Martians pouring through their over-run defenses.

All in all, it is difficult for me to find anything to dislike in a film that panders to my rose-tinted ideal of John Carpenter making a sci-fi action film in 2001 quite as warmly and generously as ‘Ghosts of Mars’. Even the soundtrack, built around woefully dated layers of down-tuned nu-metal guitar, worked quite well for me this time around, with the characteristic rhythmic drive of Carpenter’s compositions adding a welcome sense of urgency and forward momentum that such candy-coated sludge often lacked in the hands of the bands who popularised this questionable sound around the turn of the century.

I don’t want to build expectations for ‘Ghosts of Mars’ up too high in the midst of all this praise however. As stated, the film is certainly no gold-plated classic, but – and this is the key point – it doesn’t intend to be. If only more 21st century productions were content to set out with such modest, genre-constrained ambitions; perhaps more would succeed in fulfilling them half as well as Carpenter does here, and perhaps as a result us long-suffering viewers might have more fun of a weekend movie night. (Just sayin’.)