“Another name for Mars is …. DEATH!”

The 1958 sci-fi/horror hybrid, It!  The Terror From Beyond Space, opens with a NASA press conference.  The assembled reporters are reminded that, earlier in the year, America’s first manned mission to Mars was presumed to have been lost.  However, a second mission was sent to Mars and they discovered that the commander of the first mission, Edward L. Carruthers (Marshall Thompson), was still alive.

Unfortunately, all of Carruthers’s crewmates were dead.  Carruthers claimed that the murders were committed by a monster.  The commander of the second mission, Col. Van Heusen (Kim Spalding), instead suspected that Carruthers killed his crewmates when he realized they were stranded on Mars.  The ship had enough provisions to last the entire crew for one year or ten years for just one man.

The second mission is now on their way back to Earth, with Carruthers under house arrest.  While one crewman does believe that Carruthers’s story could be true, the others are convinced that Carruthers is a murderer.  What they don’t know is that the monster from Carruthers’s story is not only real but that it also snuck onto their ship during lift-off.  Tall and scaly with huge claws and a permanently angry face, the Monster — It, for lack of a more formal name — is lurking in the lower levels of the ship and hunting for food.

To state what is probably already obvious, It! is not a film that worries much about being scientifically accurate.  While it does explain how living on the surface of Mars caused It to develop into the predator that it is, this is also a science fiction film from 1958.  It’s a film where, instead of going to the Moon, the first manned spaceflight is to Mars.  It’s also a film where there’s no weightlessness in space, the two women on the ship serve everyone coffee, and a nuclear reactor is casually unshielded at one point in an attempt to destroy It.  Bullets are fired on the spaceship.  Grenades are tossed.  Airlocks are rather casually opened.

Fortunately, none of that matters.  Clocking in at a mere 69 minutes, It! is a surprisingly suspenseful horror film, one that makes good use of its claustrophobic locations (a lot of the action takes place in an air duct) and which features a surprisingly convincing and, at times, even scary monster.  It may be a man in a rubber suit but that doesn’t make it any less shocking when its claw bursts out of an an open hatch and starts trying to grab everything nearby.  The cast of It! are all convincing in their roles.  Watching them, you really do believe that they are a crew who have seen a lot together and it makes the subsequent deaths all the more effective,

It! was a troubled production,  The monster was played by veteran stuntman Ray Corrigan, who reportedly showed up drunk a few times and also managed to damage the monster suit.  Many members of the cast were not happy about being cast in a B-movie.  (Fortunately, their resentment probably helped their performances as the similarly resentful crew of the second mission to Mars.)  Marshall Thompson, who played Carruthers, was one of the few cast members who enjoyed making It! and, perhaps not surprisingly, he also gives the best performance in the film.

Troubled production or not, It! was not only a box office success but, along with Mario Bava’s Planet of the Vampires, it was later cited as one of the inspiration for Alien.  At its best, It! has the same sort of claustrophobic feel as Alien.  The scene where one of the crewman is found in an air duct brings to mind the fate of Tom Skerritt’s character in Alien.

It! is still a very effective work of sci-fi horror.  Remember, another name for Mars is …. DEATH!