50's Edward L. Cahn Part Three

IT!  THE TERROR FROM BEYOND SPACE

(1958)
Overall: MEH

Dated and amateurish, It! The Terror from Beyond Space is typical low-budget drive-in hogwash where yet another Martian in a silly costume causes a bunch of hoopla for a crew of astronauts.  This is essentially the kind of set-up that Alien would utilize to a far more captivating, serious, and professional extent two decades later, but here the tiny budget and unintended campiness of the era is impossible to miss.  The cast does an adequate job without anyone hamming it up, though the women members of the crew are wasted and are only there to get lightly sexually harassed while taking care of the big strong men when they get hurt.  This is pre-Women's Lib of course, when most females in cinema where depicted as mere housewives anyway.  Infamous for its inadequate monster design and flimsy, loose-fitting costume which could have afforded to have been shot entirely in shadows to actually work, the meat and potatoes plot does not make for an exciting experience to begin with.  Everyone just keeps trying different things to kill the alien before running away and then talking about what other things they can try in order to kill the alien and run away again.

 

THE FOUR SKULLS OF JONATHAN DRAKE

(1959)

Overall: MEH

 

An oddball premise helps distinguish The Four Skulls of Jonathan Drake apart from other culturally insensitive voodoo-tinged cheapies from the time period, but the usual issues of poor production qualities and insufficient pacing do a disservice to the finished product.  English character actor Henry Daniell is ideally cast as the villainous shrunken-head practitioner who basically serves as a mad scientist stand-in with a mute assistant to boot, (played by another quirky character actor in six foot six Paul Wexler, who is heavily made up as a primitive native with a sewn-up mouth and putty on his face).  Orville H. Hampton's preposterous script has a "vengeance against the white man" angle via a family curse, but the plotting quickly gets stuck in the muck.  Characters talk, investigate, talk some more, lie in beds, and then talk a lot more with only about two or three set pieces thrown in that liven things up.  Edward L. Cahn's direction is as pedestrian as ever, but there is at least an attempt here to have a mystical and spooky atmosphere with the floating skulls of the title invading people's dreams, close-ups of the inherently eerie shrunken heads, Daniell in an elaborate voodoo mask, and Wexler's unnerving physical appearance.

INVISIBLE INVADERS

(1959)

Overall: MEH

 

John Carradine collects a paycheck in Edward L. Cahn's typically lackluster Invisible Invaders; an alien takeover B-movie that is heavy on narration and stock footage while being low on momentum and budget.  In this particular cockamamie sci-fi scenario, bodiless extraterrestrials decide to takeover the globe by reanimating human corpses, all because world governments will not stop engaging in nuclear bomb developments.  So once again, mankind's stubborn insistence on putting their efforts into technology that will eliminate people who live in different countries is used to justify the aliens saying "enough is enough" and just deciding to come down and wipe us all out before we do it ourselves.  Hardly original yet sufficient for such a cheaply made drive-in product such as this, the performances are sincere considering the dopey material and various shots of walking corpses with sunken eyes, a toy spaceship, invisibility sight gags, a sound gun firing, and glowing humanoid forms make for some fun, campy visuals.  The already brisk, sixty-seven minute running time is padded with scenes from other low-rent films as well as natural disaster footage, Carradine gets done away with early on, and almost every scene is nothing more than characters standing in rooms while talking, as was the norm at the time.