It! The Terror from Beyond Space

Veteran director Edward L. Cahn, specializing in independent B movies, taps the simple but effective screenplay by Jerome Bixby to create a claustrophobic sci-fi horror movie whose historic significance extends far beyond the film itself.

The recipe calls for massive doses of three basic ingredients (unknown menace + impossibility of escape + isolation from the rest of the world) which, when properly blended, pay pretty decent dividends in terms of entertainment.

And it doesn’t matter much if the art direction and special effects (the latter by Paul Blaisdell and Lane Britton) are laughable, or the dialogue is painfully bad, or even if there’s so much simple-mindedness that you practically need an abacus to keep track of it all – there’s also a crude love story so phony that not even Colonel Van Heusen can fathom it: “You and him, just out of nowhere?!“.

The bottom line is that “It! The Terror from Beyond Space” planted the motion-picture seed which bore the fruit of some authentic cult films for future sci-fi horror fans: from Roger Corman’s “Queen of Blood” (1966) to the impossible-to-ignore “Alien” (1979); from the deep-sea “Leviathan” (1989) to the mistreated “Event Horizon” (1997).

It’s rather surprising that such a low-budget, slipshod production would employ scientific terminology beyond the most hackneyed clichés, but it does, and that leaves us to confront an off-putting dichotomy with two-dimensional characters discussing “osmosis process”, and “bacteria […] attacking the bone marrow, resulting in a leukemia condition“. The screenwriter may have been a medical buff, but certainly wasn’t well-versed in psychology…