Posted on 06/08/2009 10:56:33 PM PDT by Osnome
I like the b-movies of the 1950's and 1960's the best.
Little or no foul language, not too much violence, and the wacky cheesy monsters they created. Today it is all femminazi superbimbos in charge, tons of CGI effects, and they are all produced in Canada :-Z
Last night I watched a sci-fi flick from 1962 called: Journey To The Seventh Planet, that had some really hokey monsters- one of which was a one-eyed dinosaur creature with rat-like features and big three fingered claws. This film was created by the same team that made ANGREY RED PLANET of 1959. Ib Melchior wrote that flick and this one and many others. Ever see 'Planet Of The Vampires' 1965 by Mario Bava? That film was inspiration for ALIEN.
It's a bit of a stretch to say it was the inspiration for Alien, though. There are one or two similar shots. It! The Terror from Beyond Space was the predecessor to Alien in several significant ways.
Angry Red Planet is one I picked up last month, and it was as weak as I recalled BUT there is one moment which has never left me—when a guy gets absorbed by a giant Jell-O mold. Yikes! That one creeped me out as a kid.
I saw Journey to the Seventh Planet when I was a little kid visiting my aunt in Indianapolis. It was on some late night movie show called “Sammy Terry” with this ghoul guy doing shtick inbetween segments of the movies. Fun stuff.
Planet of the Vampires was pretty cool, and you’re right: it *definitely* was a huge influence on Alien:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uUXlc8lLEzY
Some others from that era I enjoy are
The Green Slime:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g79_ljVC5Wk
Robinson Crusoe on Mars:
The original War of the Worlds (no link, sorry);
and The Incredible Shrinking Man (not really a monster movie, but I liked the battle with the house spider)
I completely forgot about IT!... Definitely an influence on Alien, as you correctly point out.
Hey hey what about Howard Hawkes THE THING
and so was Roger Corman’s PLANET OF BLOOD of 1966.
And even The Exorcist (the puking material in the face caused by the ‘incubus’ scene in both pictures)
What about that episode of Dr Who called The Ark In Space( the outer space digger wasps) with a little bit of that animated episode of Star Trek: Beyond the Farthest Star of 1973.
In the end, the source material for ALIEN and the some early episodes of Star Trek(The Man Trap) are derived from A. E. Van Vogt’s THE VOYAGE OF THE SPACE BEAGLE, of which I have an autographed copy.
Back in the 70’s when I first saw these flick s here in Los Angeles, the horror night was hosted by some guy named Seymore, then Grimsely, then Elvira in the early 80’s
Fox had to pay Van Vogt a settlement because he was going to sue them for the similarities to BLACK DESTROYER.
Don’t forget 1956 Forbiden Planet, Walter Pidgeon, Anne Francis, Leslie Nielsen. With Robbie the Robot!!
One of my favorite, besides Creature from the Black Lagoon and others, from the 50s Sci-Fi is “Forbidden Planet”. It has great special effects, they solve the problem of how to make the monster look real by having it be invisible, they have Robbie the Robot in it, Leslie Nielsen(as a very young actor)and, best of all, a young and gorgeous Ann Francis. I like to watch the other ones mentioned on here also including the original “The Thing”...
Mmmm....Elvira.... Had a brief crush on her as a teenager, until Rhonda Shear and Up All Night! stole my heart away (I think it was my heart...it’s so hard to tell at that age, LOL).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g79_ljVC5Wk
<<
I saw that flick before, the only interesting spfx were those on Luciana Paluzzi(she was that evil babe in 007's Thunderball) and they were only chest high:-)
Green Slime was to be the first film ever excoriated by Mystery Science Theater 3000, but it was never broadcast.
Instead the first was The Creeping Terror with F-Troop’s Forrest Tucker.
Those were great times. The USA channel was awesome back then.
Don’t forget THIS ISLAND EARTH was very good too.
Got a good laugh out of that Braino Insect Claw monster that was chasing after Faith Domergue.
I saw that flick, it was boring!
Reminds me of the THE INCREDIBLE DOCTOR HUMMPH - - a brain in a fish tank.
None of these flicks hold a candle to Donovan’s Brain
LOL! It was horrible.
Here in L.A. there is an Elvira immitator called Ivanna Cadavre who appeared on channel 29 late at night a few years ago.
I saw it at the saturday matinee as a kid. Fun back then.
On the east coast it would have been Zacharly. Bulliagee!
>>The original War of the Worlds (no link, sorry);
and The Incredible Shrinking Man (not really a monster movie, but I liked the battle with the house spider)
<<
Around thirty years ago they made a spoof remake of that film called ‘The Incredible Shrinking Woman’ that had a lot of toilet humor.
Richard Matheson wrote ‘Incredible Shrinking Man’- I think.
I wonder if he is still alive- he was when that Will Smith vehicle I AM LEGEND
The Crawling Eye with Forest Tucker. The Brits made some good ones too! The Giant Behemoth. One om my favs!
I remember the former very well but not the latter.
Was not ‘X’ a British flick?
Are you referring to The man from Planet X?
In Chicago it would have been Goulardi
>>Anything from Hammer films used to scare the sheet out of me as a kid.<<
DON’T FORGET -AMICUS-
They made some good ones too.
Zacharly was cool, he always had these funny bogus experiments. His greeting was Bullilagee! We had chiller theater every saturday night on tv.
No, I mean X’ The Unknown~
some protoplasm from a deep crevace rises with radiation.
Man From Planet X was British too.
I thought it was boring.
Never have seen Devil Girl From Mars, I wonder if I can get it from NetFlix...
Really, you were not scared by the Rat-Bat-Lobster-Spider monster?
Then again when I saw that flick years later I thought it was cute.
I think Goulardi blew up toy soldiers and his motto was
“stay sick”
I know the movie. A mudddy looking sludge. The man from Planet X was made in the 30s.
How can we forget “Attack Of The Crab Monsters”!
JJ61
It did have a Samuel Becket-like existential dreadfulness, I'll grant you. But being stuck in that rocket with that bore of a "comic relief" was worse.
The bore? You mean that fat crewman who loved his sonic gun?
Was it not a relief when he got absorbed and dissolved by the giant martian amoeba?
They used that very same scene in Journey To The Seventh Planet- in some editions.
The edition I got from NetFlix cut that shot out.
Good memory! Yes, it's all about a radioactive mud creature that terrorizes a Scottish village.
>>
The man from Planet X was made in the 30s.<<
Dead wrong!
The Man From Planet X was made in the 1950’s...
It is as simple as that....
Yes, that film did have a nice busty but well clothed babe.
Hokey monsters with a silly ending and goofy dialogue.
As a child, I'd think- Oh No! Not the professor!
JJ61
What I do not understand is the flat title~ should it not be America Vrs The Flying Saucers ?
Remember that flick Earth Vrs The Spider?
Should have been titled: American Town Vrs The Spider.
After they kill him, and the heroes are on the spaceship, they just sort of forget his murder.
Just a slick horror film, not sci-fi, horror suspense.
Read the book by the late Jack Finney 1978 edit.
I see the clones as doppelgangers, which makes it a horror film. The fact that they are from space is the same as saying they are from a netherworld.
Just watched ‘Them!’ this past weekend. Fun. Fun.
Love brain films - Donovan’s Brain was good, so was Brain From Planet Arous.
Two great films that for some reason are little known in the States: Quatermass and the Pit (AKA Five Million Years to Earth) and Day of the Triffids.
And lest we forget all the giant critter films, how about Them! (best of them all), The Giant Gila Monster, Attack of the Crab Monsters, Tarantula, Earth vs. the Spider, The Deadly Mantis, Attack of the Giant Leeches, Night of the Lepus, The Monster That Challenged the World, Frogs...and so many more Creature Feature/Chiller Theater/Saturday afternoon bug-eyed monster delights....
I don’t remember the name of it, but there was a sci-fi movie back then with the radiation of a comet causing a black sludge to come and wreck things, eat people, etc. It wasn’t the one with the military guys discovering it in a crack in the earth. It was something else.
Anyone?
OH! One scene showed a scientist being swollowed by the thing, then a skull popped back out.
One of the all-time greats with James Arness as The Thing. A man-sized blood-sucking limb-regenerating intelligent... vegetable! And the scientists in that flick remind me of the global warming alarmists of today.
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