Movies Seen Recently: It! The Terror From Beyond Space, The Trollenberg Terror, Empire of the Ants

It! The Terror From Beyond Space (1958) – It’s still goofy fun, just like it was when I first saw it, but man… it’s aging worse and worse.  Astronaut women whose job it is to clear dishes and pour coffee!  Smoking in the confined airspace you’re going to be living in for four months! Sitting in chairs perpendicular to the angle of thrust during takeoff! Tons and tons of unused pressurized airspace! Unsecured objects on shelves! Hand-drawn schematics of the rocketship!

But what are the high points?

1. Dabbs Greer (Reverend Alden from Little House on the Prairie) in a rare semi-heroic role.
2. Ray “Crash” Corrigan, a man-in-suit stalwart, finally playing a creature which let him stand up straight, unlike all those roles in a gorilla suit.

The Trollenberg Terror (aka The Crawling Eye) (1958) – Here’s an interesting behind-the-scenes factoid: This feature was based on a six-part British television serial, broadcast two years previous, made by the same writer and director and at least partially featuring the same cast.  Just imagine a contemporary Doctor Who version of the feature — and “imagine” is all you can do, because no part of the serial still exists.

Having condensed close to three hours’ worth of story to less than 90 minutes, it proceeds at a fair pace; and while its special FX are only a couple of steps higher than one imagines the original’s would have been, there’s a certain sort of magic involved in (putatively) massive eyeball-and-brain creatures with ropy tentacles trying multiple times to get the psychic girl before she ruins all their plans.

Empire of the Ants (1977) – If you can get through the interminable soap opera (in bad ’70s fashions) of the first half hour, then you get what you’re looking for in a Bert I. Gordon (“notorious B.I.G.”) movie: gargantuan ants, realized by pretty good split screen work (and the occasional full-size prop).  The standard-issue “radioactive waste” explanation doesn’t mesh so well with the actual “empire” part in the final act, that gives H.G. Wells the story credit, but GIANT ANTS.

Abandoned movies: Fangs of the Living Dead, Outpost Earth, City of Fear, Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger.