Me: A is for American International Pictures.
Me Too: B is for Brass! Washington DC! Night! Tense percussion. Pentagon! Cut to…uh wait, let’s rewind the brass heading into their meeting because I’ve got to watch these guys walk around the corner in that hall again. I’m helpless to fully elucidate my delight at such bad acting, right off the bat, that you could spend all night just replaying two actors rounding a corner. Helpless to elucidate it at all.
Me: I noticed. “Fully elucidate”. My god. We are so bad at this. Trade out “communicate” for “fully elucidate” or I’m going to abandon this post altogether.
Me too: I wrote that then all sit at a big rectangular table but I’m having to change that because it’s not so big after all. It’s announced that at 0300 that morning the Expeditionary X1 rocket ship, missing for 61 days, was sighted drifting 90,000 miles off in space. Is anyone left alive? The MR1 appears to be a dead ship. They’ve had no contact since it was preparing to land on Mars two months beforehand and had believed to have crashed.
Me: Is it the X1 or the MR1?
Me Too: Lesson one. Do not ask this film to be too exacting.
Me: Or you.
H.o.p.: This movie’s even more hilarious than Buster farting! Write this down, too! FFFFFBBBBTTTT!
Me Too: The confusion stems from their wanting it to be Rocketship X-M with a hindsight on space travel that could only be supplied by 1960 peering back a few years and seeing how, no, Rocketship X-M wasn’t the best date movie in the world, not with everyone dying in the end. But back to the X1/MR1 which must be retrieved. And if there is someone in the ship, how to get them home safely? I keep wondering what that is on the wall behind the guy standing at the head of the table but I’m too lazy to take a pic, and besides we’re just anxious to get this movie rolling. After a lot of talk striving to make things seem vaguely credible, because talking suits lend an AIR, whether discussing fuel or the dormouse in the teapot, the Mission Heads leave Hollywood/DC for Hollywood/Nevada where there’s stock footage to fill some space, and, again, presumably lend an air of credibility. And more stock footage. And still more stock footage. And finally they’ve got the MR1 on the radar screen. They start a countdown minus one minute for bringing in the ship by remote control. And the world waits for the ship’s projected landing in Nevada at 9:12. News reports show footage of the 4 individuals who were on board, including a woman, of course, for sake of sexual tension and HIGH PITCHED SCREAMS, presumably.
Me: And who are these four people?
Me Too: Colonel Thomas O’Bannion, the navigator, played by Gerald Mohr, Naura Hayden as Dr. Iris Ryan, biologist and zoologist, daughter of the late Professor Alfred Ryan…
Me: All women of science in the 50s were the daughters of men of science, weren’t they?
Me too: And look at that television. They knew the meaning of framing a story. Which in this case you can tell will be all about O’Bannion, with his flight suit baring a glimpse of chest, and Ryan’s suit nicely emphasizing her contours.
Me: Holy, flying pheromones!
Me Too: Would you shut the hell up, already, while we account for the rest of the missing? The professor with the goatee is Theodore Gettell, played by Les Tremayne, designer of the rocket ship and auctioneer in “North by Northwest”. And last but kind of not least, Chief Sam Jacobs, the beat-talking electronics expert, played by Jack Kruschen.
Me: All good sci fi names. I’m hooked and wondering who has survived. Is it the hunk, the babe, the wizened professor or the engineer. My guess is it’s not going to be the engineer.
Me Too: The rocket landing after more stock footage, we should soon be learning.
H.o.p.: Could there be aliens on board?
Me Too: The Radiation Monitors approach…
Me Too: The door to the ship opens…
Me: That’s a ship?
Me Too: “It’s the girl!” She ushers ground crew into the ship. Spacey music starts.
Me: She could only appear to be Iris Ryan, right? That’s what that dark door seems to be telling us. What if she’s a monster in disguise and is devouring everyone in the ship, and she’ll come back out and drape herself against the door frame again, allure more into the ship, devour them all, and so on and so forth until there are no men left on Planet Earth and she reveals herself as actually being from Cat Women of the Moon.
Me Too: I was thinking the same thing, so we breathe a sigh of relief when all emerge though it’s with someone or something on a stretcher, a bit of green something peeking out from under the blanket where an arm should be. Iris begs, “How can anyone cope with that?”
Me: It’s not easy being green.
Me Too: To the hospital where whoever it is has been given a sedative. We learn the growth is spreading rapidly and that all the taped records on the ship are empty, as if erased!
Me: Uh oh. Iris could still turn out to be a monster.
Me Too: She perhaps has some clues. But she can’t remember how her crew mate was infected or by what! So, they tell her to start at the beginning and tell them everything that happened from the day they left.
Me: Wow, the girl is the narrator of the story. Cool.
Me Too: They were all in high spirits, just after take off, until they’re almost hit by a blazing red, highly radioactive meteor! And still are in high spirits. I’ve never seen people look so unintimidated by the prospect of being destroyed in a couple of seconds. All in a day’s work!
Me: All in a day’s work? We are so lame at this.
Me Too: Teddie drags off Sam to get some beauty sleep. “OK, professor, I dig!” And Tom delivers a speech on a childhood dog to Iris, about how he wanted that new dog to sleep in his room but the family wouldn’t allow it, so he used to have to go downstairs at night when he was a kid to make sure that dog was still there, and pretty sure people will be just as sure of space travel as he was of his dog. “And as I’d like to be of you,” he grins at Iris, lecherous, debonaire, something, I don’t know.
Me: Iris is every teenage boy’s new dog.
Me Too: He calls her Irish. Guy’s got a major lisp or something. She compares space to the lights on Broadway and they make a date to see Broadway when they get back to Earth.
Me: Never even mind what the interior of the rocket ship looks like. Right?
Me Too: Because it’s just Two Seconds to Destiny in another Hollywood death trap.
H.o.p.: When are they going to show the title?
Me: That’s right, they haven’t shown the title yet.
Me Too: I guess that’s why they have Iris orally identifying, “Mars the angry red planet,” as she glimpses their destination outside the portal, having made it through the Angry, Red Meteorite Belt.
Me (as Irish): “Sounds so foreboding! I wonder if some things aren’t better left unknown.”
Me Too (as Tom the Navigator): “That’s what they said on the Santa Maria…”
Me (standing in for First Nations’ Populations): Sore spot! Can you guess why?
Me Too (as Tom the Navigator, who is anxious to bag both Irish and Mars then move on to other brave new worlds for taking): “You know Irish, you’re the first scientist I’ve ever known with lovely long red hair.”
Me: Do you think if this was a real rocket ship that Iris would be put out by the navigator hitting on her all the time or do you think she’d be the Flame On, hep cat Martini girl anxious for action?
Me Too: I don’t know. Getting some mixed signals here. She accepts a Broadway date but now she’s complaining she doesn’t like being called Irish as she never knows whether he’s calling her by name or nationality. To which, Tom portentously replies, “When I call you by name, you’ll KNOW it.” And Iris responds with a look somewhat like this.
Me: Exactly like that.
Me Too: Go to Sam reading FANTASTIC magazine, “The Monster and the Martian Maid”, “Loathsome Beasts”, “Weird Monsters”! The tale he’s relating is about a woman who runs across burning sands as a monster relentlessly pursues, his five arms reaching hungrily for her! “To be continued next week”.
Me: Sounds vaguely like Tom chasing Iris, doesn’t it? I’d run too with safari-eyed Tom after me.
Me Too: The cover looks very much like Iris on the run.
Me: Interesting.
Me Too: Never-the-less, onward to Mars. Or FORWARD.
Me Too: And we pass some time with Tom looking on while Iris does things like type and try to hide the fact she’s sneaking perfume. Finally, at 47 days, they’re orbiting Mars and preparing to land.
H.o.p.: How long is this flashback going to be? Through the whole movie?
Me: Apparently H.o.p.’s beginning to think the more interesting plot line must be going on in the hospital, in the present.
Me Too: They land. Mars is rife with vegetation and Tom expects there’s bound to be something alive out there. He then proceeds to relate another story about how his family’s charmed, his grandfather having had a sixth sense, especially in Indian Country, because if there was an Indian around his ears would start to twitch. “It runs in the family.”
Me: Second allusion to Indians. Should we take note?
Me Too: I haven’t a clue. Later, nothing having moved around yet outside, they describe the vegetation as being frozen and it’s remarked that if there are Martians then they must be vegetable.
Me: Because no Martians have marched up and said “Howdy”.
Me Too: But they know that SOMETHING has got to be out there. But they’ve got the speakers on outside and there’s no sound, nothing. Which prompts Ted, the Professor, to remark that the thin air might explain the lack of sound. Iris picks up on it and says that would explain perhaps why the plants don’t move, no breeze! But Ted thinks otherwise. “I wonder,” he says, “could it be intentional? I know it sounds unreasonable. But it just doesn’t seem natural.”
Me: Doesn’t sound unreasonable at all.
Me Too: To which Tom replies, “You mean you think it’s controlled?”
Me (as Iris): “What beings could possibly exercise such fantastic control?”
Me Too (as Tom): “There’s one way to find out! I’m going out there!”
Me: Bold!
Me Too: Remember? Tom and the Santa Maria? Nothing’s left better unknown?
Me: Right.
Me Too: So they put on their spacesuits and Sam and Tom compliment their biologist/zoologist by going on about how the spacesuit hides her lovely curves. Tom’s remarking on how the designer must have been a woman hater, when Iris’ eyes land on the portal and she freezes, a peculiar blue creature glimpsed. She SCREAMS.
Me: You did say that would be her job, to scream.
Me Too: And thus does the flashback end, with my first memory of the film, as I saw this from the back of a station wagon at a Drive Inn Theater when I guess I was about four years old. I don’t know. It was released in 1960, when I was three, but I thought I was around five when I saw it, so cutting the difference maybe I was four?
Me: Yeah, I remember the scary blue alien looking in through the portal window.
Me Too: What happened? Iris can’t remember anything other than it was horrible! She’s obviously had a tremendous shock and developed a mental block. The doctor observes her memory is already taking on a quality of unreality.
Me: How would they know? Were they there? Have they ever been to Mars?
Me Too: No, but it’s a kind of curious comment on the movie as a whole. Remember how the woman on the cover of “Fantastic” magazine looked a lot like Iris?
Me: The one trying to outrun the five-armed Martian monster?
Me Too: Right.
Me: Maybe none of this happened? Maybe she’s in some strange shock over Tom pursuing her and there were no monsters after all? Other than Tom?
Me Too: She is, after all, a creature of the weaker sex.
Me: What about narcosynthesis? Can we get the whole truth and nothing but the truth via drugs?
Me Too: That’s what the good doctors are discussing.
Me: But her mind might snap!
Me Too: Indeed.
Me: Who cares?
Me Too: That’s what I say, but realize this, “When we penetrate her mind block into her suppressed memories, her recall will undoubtedly be colored by her mind’s interpretation of what she experienced. In effect, whenever she’s remembering anything that’s alien, frightening to her, we’ll see it as her mind saw it.”
Me: “And remember. Her mind had to save itself by forgetting!”
Me Too: In other words…
Me: What she has to say is up for interpretation’s grabs.
Me Too: But forge ahead, for as Iris notes, that memory…
Me: However unreliable…
Me Too: Must be excavated in order to help HIM.
Me: Whoever HIM is.
Me Too: As if we don’t know. The injection readied, they needle her, she grimaces and we float back to Mars where she’s telling Tom how “Horrible” it was what she saw but Professor Ted and Navigator Tom aren’t believing her either because they saw nothing!
Me (as Iris): “I tell you, it was there!”
Me Too: “Hey, three eyes! What a crazy peeping Tom!” Sam says.
Me: We are so hip in this movie.
Me Too: And Ted and Tom insisting that nothing was moving, there’s nothing there, though they had been previously going on about how all that nothing moving betrayed that there was something out there causing nothing to move, they sallie forth to explore…
Me: The tropics.
Me Too: Yes, Mars has palm trees.
Me: I remember this from when I was little, the explorers exiting the rocket ship into all that red.
Me Too: Did you remember they have no glass in their space helmets?
Me: Maybe it’s Iris who doesn’t remember.
Me Too: For kicks they shoot a plant, which freezes it or something so that it shatters, then march off looking for Martians!
Me: Yes, pulling our guns from our belts, let’s go find us a Martian!
Me Too: The plants appear to have nervous systems and little chlorophyll.
Me: Seems they may have found their Martians?
Me Too: Iris, assuring Tom that she’s perfectly capable of taking care of herself…
Me: Famous last words…
Me Too: Goes marching off to look at the plant life. Right into the arms of a big kind of Venus Flytrap with octopus arms that she conveniently wraps around herself in order to scream AGGGGGGHHHH and wail for Tom! Tom!
Me Too: Of course, Tom saves the damsel in distress, who recovers sufficiently to inform Sam her attacker was a giant, carnivorous plant that feeds by trapping animals and digesting them.
Me: Which means there must be animals running about somewhere.
Me Too: Enough excitement for one day, all agree to return to the ship, and Sam names his gun Cleopatra, as she’s such a “Cool doll.”
Me: The way she freezes things.
Me Too: Right. Though what that has to do with Cleopatra, I don’t know.
Me: Did you know that Abe Melchior, who directed and was a co-writer of the script for this flick, along with Sidney Pink, was also a writer for “Death Race 2000” with Robert Thom and Charles B. Griffith?
Me Too: You’re kidding.
Me: The film rises a couple notches on the esteem ladder, heh?
Me Too: Nope. At least not yet.
Me: Can’t say until the ending.
Me Too: We could but let’s give it 99.99 percent of a chance.
Me: Back to the rocket ship.
Me Too: Wise Professor Ted again says he feels they’re being watched and that there’s some purpose to what’s happening. That things are intentional, controlled, and perhaps they’re being controlled as well through the actions of the life forces doing the controlling.
Me: Deep.
Me Too: An “angry” sun rising on a new day, they step out again to explore. And, Iris, who’d already noted the plants have nervous systems, decides to take a machete to one to see what it’s made of.
Me: AGH!!!!
Me Too: What the hell Iris thought she was doing hacking at a Martian nervous system with a machete, I don’t know, but Sam shoots and shoots but to no avail, until Tom gets the idea of blinding the creature with the new fangled gun and it goes stumbling off. Undeterred, the crew decides to push on and see what’s on the opposite side of the ridge.
Me: I remember this! It was too cool. Water! Lots of it. A veritable Lake Powell.
Me Too: Despite the fact she was almost eaten by a Martian Venus Fly Trap Octopus, and the professor was almost eaten by a Daddy Long Legs Bat, Iris remarks the lake has the same feeling of deadness as everything else.
Me: Just what do you have to do to convince this girl you’re alive?
Me Too: They decide to set across the oily lake next day, and as they walk away the strange creature which had Iris had seen in the portal peers out over some rocks at them. But once they are inside the ship, Tom and Ted decide not to stay the full five days but take off because of Ted’s sense of a “controlling force”. But they find that a force field is holding the ship there. Whoever it is controlling things doesn’t want them to leave, but also doesn’t want to harm them…
Me: Or at least not outright kill them…
Me Too: Or else they’d already be dead. So off they go the next day to explore and see what’s across the lake, which Iris remarks on again as being…
Me: Dead. Sooo dead.
Me Too: Exactly. Despite this deadness, Ted sights through the binoculars a city composed of buildings half a mile tall.
Me Too: And, despite this deadness…
Me: AGGGGGGHHHHHH!!!!
Me Too: Yes, the waters bubble. A monster emerges. They furiously paddle in the other direction, away from the city and climb back onto land, the same three-eyed creature watching which Iris had originally glimpsed through the portal. The sea monster pursues them back to the rocket ship and they’ve all climbed up the ladder to board when somehow the sea monster manages to grab Sam though they’d plenty of time to get away.
Me: I remember this, too. It was scary to a little kid, watching Sam being absorbed by the monster.
Me Too: Yeah, I remember the monster then engulfing the entire ship, too. The same creature has touched Tom and the “compound” has eaten right through the suit. Iris says it’s an amoeba, single celled, engulfing its prey and digesting with extremely strong acids.
Me: An amoeba? but it had twirling eyes!
Me Too: If the hills have eyes, so can amoeba, okay? Are you going to argue with the zoologist?
Me: Not if she knows how to kill it.
Me Too: Which she thinks she just might! She’s experimented with the power from a small flashlight battery generating enough electricity to kill thousands of amoeba.
Me: Kali! Slayer of worlds!
Me Too: Tom decides to feed the radar power through the outer hull of the rocket ship and electrocute the monster. It works! At which point the three-eyed monster appears and proclaims, “RED ALERT, We of the planet Mars give you this warning. Listen carefully and remember…” Being of the weaker sex, Iris passes out. When she awakens the rocket ship is already Earth bound. The professor is dying, then is dead. She finds Tom comatose in his bunk, his arm engulfed in green jello slime. End of flash back.
Me: But “What was the warning? What did the voice say?”
Me Too: Curiously, she says that Tom had her turn on the tape recorder and maybe it’s recorded on the last tape.
Me: But she was passed out! How could she turn on the tape recorder?
Me Too: Don’t quibble! Anyway, now that they know Tom has an enzymatic infection they can attempt to save him.
Me: That’s a relief.
Me Too: Tom wrestling mightily against the pain of the infection is assured, “It’s OK. It’s all right.”
Me: Duh. No it’s not all right!
Me Too: No, it’s not! The infection resists everything they try, so Iris gets to work in the biological lab looking for a cure. And eventually she comes up with the answer. Electricity! It’s not a disease that’s eating Tom up, it’s an animal with a will to act, and as an animal it has the vulnerability of making the wrong choice. They’ll submit it to just enough electric shock to drive the creature off Tom to another, waiting culture. Tom is saved!
Me: So too the date with Broadway!
Me Too: And, finally, the audience hears the Martian’s warning, archived on the last tape.
Me: That warning is…?
Me Too: “We have known your planet earth since the first creature climbed out of the ooze of your primordial seas to become man. For millennia we have followed your progress, for centuries we have watched you, listened to your radio signals, learned your language and your culture. And now you have invaded our home. Technological adults but spiritual and emotional infants. We kept you here deciding your fate…you survived. Your civilization has not progressed beyond destruction, war and violence against yourselves and others. Do as you will to your own and your planet but remember this warning, do not return to Mars. You will be permitted to leave for this sole purpose, to carry this warning to Earth. Do not come here. We can and will destroy you, all your life on your planet…” Etcetera.
Me: And, finally, the credits.
Me Too: The Angry, Red Planet.
Me: They don’t want another Santa Maria.
Me Too: Nope.
Me: Humans should eat worms.
Me Too: Or grow up.
Me: Did Tom ever call her Iris?
Me Too: I didn’t notice.
Me: Neither did I.
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