ALL SCI-FI

[Bud Brewster]

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Which science fiction premise interests you the most?

~ A South American plateau with living dinosaurs.

~ An alien who masquerades as the husband of a young woman.

~ A science project studies ants in the desert which are intelligent.
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The Lost World (1925)

I guess I'd be in the minority if I said that The Land Unknown actually used the lizards pretty well, and to the best of my knowledge none of the footage was borrowed from somewhere else. It was done originally for The Land Unknown.

As for the man in the suit, the T-Rex had it's faults, but they labored to make it impressive, with blinking eyes and drooling teeth.

And since it seems like Harryhausen and O'Brien were the only ones who could do animation really well, I doubt if those other productions would have been much better with animation if it weren't done by Ray and Willis.
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I Married a Monster from Outer Space (1958)

Good point, Krel. But an IMDB item in the Goofs section points out this troubling idea.

The plot assumes that men who have recently had children have to be human, but they may have been possessed after the conception.

This movie is the perfect feature to watch on a rainy Sunday afternoon — which is what I'm doing right now!

Here's an interesting IMDB trivia item I found.

The dogs who attack the undisguised aliens near the end of the film were initially too scared to approach the costumed actors. The dogs were then acclimated to the presence of the suited actors - perhaps too well, for when the time came to shoot the scene of the dogs attacking the aliens, the dogs didn't attack the aliens, but jumped playfully around and on them instead.

The dogs were then trained to go for the "breathing tubes" on the alien costumes. Apparently, the actors playing the aliens had to guide the dogs to attack the "breathing tubes."

And this poster is pretty good.



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Phase IV (1974)



Highly enjoyable and intelligent sci-fi thriller about a research facility in Arizona which is attacked by super-intelligent, normal-sized ants. Pollution and a damaged ecology are blamed for creating the altered ants (not radiation -- a sign of the changing times).

Not only can the ants gobble up animals and humans, they can hypnotize with telepathy. They swarm over their victims and coat them with a yellowish mucus. The ants attack computers and other machinery by chewing the wires. (Yes, there are "bugs in the system"! )

The ending is unexpectedly strange and surrealistic, and Paramount did some last-minute editing which (as usual) didn't help a bit.

Production design by John Barry ("Star Wars"). Directed by Saul Bass, famous as a title-work designer. Screenplay by Mayo Simon.

Starring Nigel Davenport and Lynne Frederick (both of who appeared in "No Blade of Grass" in 1970), Michael Murphy, Alan Gifford, Helen Horton, Robert Henderson.
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Is there no man on Earth who has the wisdom and innocence of a child?
~ The Space Children (1958)