It! The Terror from Beyond Space (1958) on Netflix
A rescue ship reaches Mars and finds one survivor, Col. Edward Carruthers, suspected of killing his crew. He says a Martian life form did it, and none of the rescuers believe him.
- Netflix3.0/5
- IMDb6.0/106,734 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes74%
Trailer
Plot summary
Earth sends a second ship to Mars to learn what became of the first expedition. The rescue crew finds one survivor, Col. Edward Carruthers, who is taken back under arrest to face a court-martial for the deaths of his nine crewmates. He insists that a hostile life form from the planet killed them, and Col. Van Heusen, who commands the rescue ship, keeps him under watch. Carruthers's account gains weight once the ship heads home: a hatch left open on the Martian surface let something come through, and the crew now shares the vessel with a creature that hunts them through the lower decks.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about It! The Terror from Beyond Space (1958)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Ray "Crash" Corrigan, in his last film, would not travel to Topanga Canyon for Paul Blaisdell to measure his head, so the creature head did not fit: "[Corrigan's]...bulbous chin stuck out through the monster's mouth, so the make-up man painted his chin to look like a tongue". Blaisdell then added fangs to cover it.
- Along with Mario Bava's Planet of the Vampires and Curtis Harrington's Queen of Blood, this film's premise has been cited as an inspiration for the screenplay Dan O'Bannon wrote for Alien (1979).
- Corrigan turned up drunk on set a few times, refused to follow certain directions from Ed Cahn, and damaged the monster suit so that Blaisdell had to patch it up. Shirley Patterson was in a constant bad mood, furious to have been cast in a low-budget monster film.
- The creature costume became the property of UA, and a year later showed up in their 1959 John Agar opus Invisible Invaders, without additional payment for Blaisdell.
