ALL SCI-FI

[Bud Brewster]

4

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What do you get when you combine The Three Stooges, The First Man Into Space, and The World, the Flesh, and the Devil?

Well, you either get today’s Featured Threads . . . or a very interesting cocktail party!

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Have Rocket, Will Travel (1959)

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HAVE ROCKET WILL TRAVEL was, according to Wikipedia, the first Three Stooges film to be released after their popularity surged in the late fifties.

It was followed by The Three Stooges in Orbit. I watched this during a marathon on TCM, the one celebrating the 40th anniversary of the moon landing. The thing is, the Stooges end up on Venus in this one, not on the moon.

That's the Stooges for you — they can't even get that right. It was supposed to be on the moon!

I realized I did see this as a kid when that giant tarantula appeared, zapping the fleeing Stooges with a beam of fire. (This all looked like footage lifted from the film TARANTULA (1955) but I was told later that it's original footage).

The Venus landscape is identical to the desert landscape of Earth which we see in the early scenes, so there's not much attempt at visualizing an alien terrain — maybe this is on purpose.

The Stooges then make the acquaintance of a talking pony, er, unicorn and get captured by a cube-like robot with 4 mechanical arms, which shrinks them and then creates robotic duplicates of the three.

Too many Stooges for my taste!

What's weird is that the much later Amazon Women on the Moon (1987), which parodied/copied old-style fifties sci-fi movies about trips to Venus or the moon, seems to have lifted much of its scenes from this comedy. In other words, the Stooges beat that movie to it by almost 3 decades!


BoG
Galaxy Overlord Galactus
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The World, the Flesh and the Devil (1959)

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______ The World, The Flesh and The Devil trailer


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The world ends — civilization, to be precise — and we don't see it happen.

The main character (Harry Belafonte) is working in a deep mine when it happens. There's a cave-in and he's trapped below. After a while, he begins to wonder why no one is coming down to rescue him, so he determines to exit the mine on his own.

At this point, the film takes on a slightly surrealistic bent. The survivor never finds any bodies, it's all just empty of people. I guess everyone was evacuated to somewhere . . . but, where?

The film avoids the grisliness of mass death and concentrates on the desolation of such a scenario. It also (later) addresses race relations of those times. The female survivor (Inger Stevens) doesn't seem to mind the skin color difference, but there is tension between the two, acknowledging the baggage left over from the old world.



I have The World, the Flesh and the Devil on Laserdisc, having purchased it a dozen years ago, which was about the last time I watched it up until the showing on TCM a couple of years ago.

What sticks in my memory is the character played by Mel Ferrer, who shows up late, after Belafonte & Inger Stevens have been on screen for awhile. His character comes off as rather creepy and ambivalent — I guess he was played that way on purpose to add tension. On the one hand he seems to be a civilized gentleman, but on the other he seems to be waiting to stick a knife in Belafonte's back at the right moment.

The last half-hour is rather vague and a bit bizarre. Belafonte and Ferrer are now running around the empty city canyons with rifles after having some civil discussions. Then the 3 characters are walking off together in peace. The message, it seems to me, is that mankind is essentially insane. Just 3 people may work out (justbarely!), but add a 4th and 5th and pretty soon the paranoia gains strength, the senseless killing starts.

Now, putting aside philosophy and social commentary, there's a point to be made on the pragmatic side. What many people who have seen this film do not recall is that the world is not left with just these 3 survivors. I'm fairly certain on this — at one point Inger and Harry finds out that there ARE survivors in other cities.

The problem, of course, is connecting with them to restart civilization, which will take some time. Well, I think they would need all the ones they can find. I'm not a scientist, but I'm also fairly certain that we would need a minimum amount of people for genetic variation to restart the population growth — something like 1,000 people, I would think.

This kind of goes back to the Adam and Eve myth. When I got into my early teens, I started asking questions of the adults about this. There was Cain and Abel, then another son, but how did all the rest of the people come about?

"Well, they were from . . . other places" was usually the vague answer.

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In the end, I prefer The Quiet Earth (1985) — a virtual remake — over this one. The Quiet Earth has the same basic framework of 3 survivors — a white man, a white woman and a black man — with the only difference the order of introductions (the white man is introduced first in The Quiet Earth).

The entire presentation of the latter film, with the first survivor going through different stages of insanity as this new empty world is impressed upon him, is much more interesting than the older film, where-in the characters are simply depressed, submerging their insanity. Their pretense lent another layer of boredom to an already fairly dull narrative (except for some of those shots of the empty NYC). It's grimly realistic, but just so slow.

I guess I could say this was already done to better effect in the earlier Five (1951).

BoG's Score: 5.5 out of 10


BoG
Galaxy Overlord Galactus
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First Man Into Space (1959 England)

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_______________ First Man Into Space Trailer


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The man of the title is a somewhat arrogant ass. He's a hotshot pilot and has always striven to be first at everything. This cocky attitude puts him at odds with his older brother and commanding officer (Marshall Thompson), whom he derides for lacking the skills of a great pilot.

This conflict is all demonstrated during the first test flight we see. The pilot, Dan, brings the ship down damaged, walks away unharmed, but instead of going to a debriefing like he's supposed to, he goes to his girlfriend's (Marla Landi) apartment to smooch.

As we might expect, Dan gets his comeuppance during the next key test flight, when he takes the craft higher than anyone has before, disobeying orders. He and the ship are bombarded by an exotic space dust which coats them as a protective shield.

The ship is found on the ground and Dan is presumed dead. But instead he is marauding around the countryside, killing cows and people in his insatiable need for blood. The cosmic coating which covers him now makes him look like a monster.



This is fairly effective as a low budget suspense tale of a monster from outer space — though he happens to be from Earth, just transformed.

The story makes the most out of the tension involved when we're still not clear on just what this monster-like threat is or what it looks like. The reveal is also fairly horrific for this type of fare. Dan the ex-pilot is a frightening monster who makes short work of various victims. The coating covering him grants him invulnerability to bullets, and the outer surface is like glass shards embedded in rubber. When he swipes his arm at a victim, he slashing open their skin!

Dan's physiology has been altered as well. For reasons not made clear, he can no long breath well at normal air pressure — as if the air it too thick! So, all his scenes are accompanied by the disturbing sound of labored breathing.

The story is similar to the Quatermass films of a couple of years earlier, warning us all of the potential dangers of scientific progress. There is a tragic tone by the final act, when we realize that Dan, even with his faults, certainly did not deserve such a fate.

BoG's Score: 6.5 out of 10


BoG
Galaxy Overlord Galactus
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Is there no man on Earth who has the wisdom and innocence of a child?
~ The Space Children (1958)