You have to admit that It Came From Outer Space had a certain amount of solid dairy matter in there, even for the time.
I mean, come on – a 3D startle shot, complete with a scare chord, and then “Oh, it’s just a joshua tree.” Suspenseful scenes that lead up to a “false alarm” startle shot have always been cheesy – but when your startle shot involves your characters creeping up on a stationary yucca out in the open in just the sort of place that you’d expect to find one, you’re pushing it a bit even for mid-century sci-fi.
I’ll take Robot Monster for best unadulterated cheese, though – and if we can count the first few years of the '70s, I can never get enough Invasion of the Bee Girls, which still somehow feels like 1969, if you squint.
Perhaps, but look at the ending. That alone puts it beyond cheese. It’s one of the better surprise endings in film, and I don’t think anyone watching it today expects it coming. It was especially resonant when it was made, when it was a saying something very important about the time.
Look, can we get something straight. Any movie with stop-motion special effects by Mr Ray Harryhausen is by definition not cheesy. Even It came from beneath the sea with its five tentacled octopus (pentapus ?) is not cheesy. Consider the amount of work Ray put in his animations and you would understand why he is still respected and considered to be as close to the divine as possible by modern special effects technicians (of which many went into this line of work because of him).
I agree that nothin Harryhausen did was cheesy. However, usually the movies he did effects for were cheesy for reasons that had nothing to do with his animation. Usually, his work was the only thing that salvaged the movie.
Back to It Came From Outer Space: I realize part of my liking for the film is that I’ve seen it in 3D, as Arnold intended. That may be why some of the effect may seen cheesy today: they were to give a 3D thrill and it worked in that medium, but not flat.
And the most impressive 3D effect in the film wasn’t any of the explosions or anything; it’s the moment in the first reel when when scientist casually swings his telescope around to get a better view of the alien landing. It doesn’t mean much flat, but in a theater in 3D, the audience ducked. It was an especially nice 3D effect because it was so casual and unexpected.
It was adapted from a book by John Wyndham that was actually quite readable, although definitely not one of his best*.
*I’d love to see an adaptation of “The Chrysalids” (aka Rebirth) but I think it may be too internal to translate well.
Oh dang. I don’t think Triffids was cheesy either.
I saw most of these movies in a theater, when I was 10-15 years old, with kids my age. Our standards weren’t terribly high, but we could tell the difference between a seriously good SF or horror movie and a silly piece of crap.
We laughed at a lot of these movies, but most of them were pretty good – good enough to make us think or to scare us. Others, we’d just say “Oh that’s just silly” and we’d have popcorn fights or neck.
I was older when I saw Triffids, and I thought it was pretty good. Maybe it was the concept – blind people stalked by trees. I haven’t seen it for awhile though, so maybe it doesn’t hold up.
The film is pretty bad. The BBC made a mini-series which is very close to the book. Its out on DVD in the UK & Australia, the US may not be far behind for a release. RealityChuck the DVD of It came from Outer Space has an excellent commentary track which is worth checking out.
I’m going to have to track down a copy of Valley of the Gwangi After reading a few reviews it sounds like my kind of film
Tht brings up a good point. Saying something is cheesy doesn’t mean it isn’t enjoyable. I thought Road Warrior was cheesy, for instance. But it was a great movie! Because it was engaging, fun, enjoyable, fast paced, etc…
Now the Thunderdome part of the trilogy wasn’t cheesy. It was bad. Not enjoyable at all.
And I guess I have to say, that imho, there are several types of cheese. A movie or serial that is so bad it’s silly, like Santa Clause Vs the Martians, Zombies of the Stratosphere, Flash Gordon (the one with Queen doing the music) is one form of cheese. Let’s call it … government issue cheese. Then there are movies that are almost up to A status, but miss it by that much cheese. Let’s call that sharp cheddar. Many of the atomic mutation movies fall into this catagory. Then, there are the movies that purposfuly try to be cheese. Attack of the Killer Tomatos and any of the Troma flicks fall into this catagory. Processed cheese. And then, the movies so bad, they are a chore to even think of watching. The 3 new Star Wars movies, the aforementioned Beyond Thunderdome, certain other sequels and prequels, and any movie that just fails to entertaining in any way … Artificially flavoured imitation cheese product spread.
I remember that one by it’s other name, "Zontar, the Thing from Venus"
Speaking of eye creatures , The Trollenberg Terror (aka “The Crawling Eye”) is worth checking out. Giant eyeballs with tentacles crawling around in radioactive clouds in the Swiss Alps. Decapitating people, no less. Oh, and did I mention that they’re telepathic?
Village of the Giants (1965), in which a young Ron Howard invents a goo that makes living things get real big, real fast – only to have a coed clicque of the town’s juvenile delinquents (led by a young Beau Bridges) gobble up the goo and enjoy their turn as the town’s newest big shots, literally, by looming it over the sheriff from a height of 30 feet – when they’re not doing the frug with The Beau Brummells. Salaciously, as the teens’ bodies swell ever larger, necessity demands that their original clothes be cast off and replaced by a hastily improvised assortment of loincloths and bikinis, as even bedsheets manage merely to preserve the last of their modesty. One suspects that VotG was conceived as a junior-varsity version of a Russ Meyer flick, with the boobage safely scaled down for teenage titillation.
It’s not a purist’s atom-age gigantism flick either, since the dynamic at work is nutraceutical rather than atom-splitting and can’t be blamed on the military-industrial complex, or even the stock mad-scientist figure of old, but Howard’s idealistic teenager, who was only trying to solve the world’s hunger problem with his own great leap forward in the Green Revolution. Thus the themes of Village of the Giants are a quadruple-play on 50’s juvie-delinquency hysteria, the overly-optimistic space-age “better living through chemistry” mantra, Kennedy-Johnson liberal, Peace Corps idealism, and anxieties over a mounting “generation gap”.
Zontar the Thing from Venus is actually a lower-budget remake of the wonderful Corman film It Conquered the World, which was beautifully skewered by MST3K. Even without Mike and the 'bots, though, ICtW is a wonderfully bad joy to behold, with Peter Graves and Lee van Cleef and Beverly Garland and one of the most beautifully bad monster suits ever seen – the vgiant evil-faced teepee with lobster claws. The sorry-ass Zontar costume isn’t even in the same league. And the dialogue in ICtW is in a soapy, campy class of its own. I’ll give Zontar points for having what is easily the cooler name, though.
I grew up watching The Crawling Eye (The Trollenberg Terror), which showed incessantly on “Million Dollar Movie” in the NYC area in the 1960s, to the point where it’s one of the first things I imagine when I hear “Tara’
s Theme” from “Gone With the Wind”. It starts with an alpine mountain climber getting his head torn off (offscreen – this was fronm the 1950s), and goes downhill from there. For some reason the Brits loved Forrest Tucker in their monster flicks, and this one stars him as the Stalwart American hero in his pre-F-Troop days. It also features Aliens Taking Over People by Controlling Their Minds, another staple of 1950s Brit sci-fi. And, as with much British sci-fi back then, the monsters are really ooky and gross, yet the FX are awful. The best of all possible worlds.
