An expedition from Earth travels to an alien planet and picks up one of the local life forms that’s determined to kill them. Hang on, isn’t that the plot of Alien? Kind of, but It! got to it first… in this case, the alien planet is Mars and the people from Earth have gone there to retrieve the only survivor of a previous mission, all of whom otherwise appear to have been murdered; he’s going back to Earth, therefore, to face court-martial and summary execution, cos who could possibly believe his claims that some hostile Martian life form was the real killer? At least until they discover said hostile Martian is on the ship bound for Earth with them… I haven’t really done an old-school creature feature for this “festival” so far, though I do have a fair bit of that sort of thing on the watchlist, indeed I think a few of them come from the same director too. This is a good example of what I used to call on my old review blog the narrative economy of older films, a lot of which were on average notably shorter than modern ones and didn’t fuck around when it came to telling the story; It! wastes remarkably little time in setting up its situation (which it does in somewhat clunky fashion, to be sure) and getting shenanigans underway, all over and done with in 69 minutes. It also doesn’t exactly waste time on niceties like clear characterisation or things like that, but it’s that sort of film… the shoot seems to have been kind of unpleasant due to the female lead being angry about being in a monster movie (as if the rest of her career had amounted to anything big; at least she got credited in this, unlike most of her other films) and the alien performer being a drunk, obnoxious shit. In fairness to the film, though, it has no pretensions to being anything other than what it is, i.e. an efficiently made B-film for a double bill that probably cost less than $100,000 to make; the monster costume is pretty good for this sort of thing, and the shadowy camerawork probably works in its favour, plus the actual ship interior design is pretty cool too and is where I presume most of the budget went. It! is what It! is, and however good Alien might be with a similar plot but more budget, I kind of appreciate the basic honesty of its small predecessor…
You must be logged in to post a comment.