Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to an all new Reaction & Review. Tonight, guys, I'm gonna be covering a British sci-fi movie from 1967. That movie is "They Came From Beyond Space". Which is the second movie that came off the combo pack that also featured "In The Year 2889".
Now, for those of you who are new here, a couple of weeks ago, I did end up reviewing "In The Year 2889". And long story short, the movie really kinda sucked. Which is a shame, because that movie was the sole reason why I wanted to buy the combo pack in the first place. But alas, it didn't really do any favors for me. However, since this other movie was tied into the combo pack, I may as well check it out anyways rather than leave it out to dry.
Now, I don't really know much about this movie. I know that it's a British sci-fi movie, and as far as I can think of, the only British sci-fi movies I've ever seen are a good majority of the 007 films. So, this might end up being interesting. Now, I have seen at least *one* still image of this movie, and it features some guy who is wearing these over-sized goggles over his eyes. And it's the stupidest fucking thing I've ever seen. Now mind you, I'm not saying that as a shot at the movie. I mean, for all I know, there might be a reason as to why he is wearing those goggles in the first place. But still, those goggles look completely ridiculous to me.
So anyway, I may as well just quit stalling and see if this movie is any good. Part of me feels like it's not going to be, but I have been proven wrong before. So there is a chance that this movie could possibly be really interesting. But the only way I'm gonna find out if it is interesting, is if I shut up and I push play, and I'm gonna do that right now. So, without further ado, it's time to kick back, relax, and check out "They Came From Beyond Space".
13 minutes later
Well, guys, I've learned something new today. If you attempt to chip off a piece of unknown meteor that came from the moon, you will be mind-controlled by aliens. I never would've known that. I always thought, you know, you have the aliens come down themselves and do it personally. But not these aliens. They have to wait until someone inspects their meteor fragments up close and personal. At the very least, I've learned something new about them, so I guess that's all that matters.
8 minutes later
So, Dr. Temple here just threatened one of the security guards on site that he'll switch his car into full gear and crash it into the electrified fence, thus electrocuting the guards and possibly killing them. Even though one of them already had a gun in his hand, and he could've easily shot the doctor on site! Yeah, I know the doctor was hiding on the side of his car so that it would be harder to shoot him in case things go wrong, but still, him crashing his car into the fence would've left him without a plan of escape, if he had to go through with ramming his car into the electrified fence! Methinks the doctor should've had a backup plan just in case, but that's probably just me.
9 minutes later
OK...so, apparently, whatever the fuck happened to Stilwell and the old guy just a moment ago, they ended up getting something resembling chicken pox, hence why their skin ended up getting red dots all over their hands and face...interesting. And apparently, it's also affecting this crowd of people surrounding them as well. Not totally sure if that's some kind of power these aliens have or not, but still, at least it's something a little bit different.
1 minute later
Wait, so those dots on their bodies are actually traces of blood?! Uh...OK, I'm not a doctor, and I don't claim to ever be one, but last I checked, it wasn't blood. Now admittedly, we haven't seen the aftereffects on these victims, so there is a chance that it *could* be blood, but it's still a bit early to come to that conclusion, you know what I mean?
19 minutes later
Sorry, guys, for not saying a whole lot right now, it's just that this movie hasn't really given me much to react to within the last while now. I'm hoping, maybe, the movie will pick up soon, because this movie only has about 35 minutes left to go. So, I'm hoping for something interesting to happen soon. Otherwise, I'm gonna be a bit disappointed.
16 minutes later
You guys happen to remember when I talked about those over-sized goggles way early on, and it's reason as to why it exists? Well, I know now the context behind it. And yet, even so, it still looks *really* fucking stupid. Just thought I'd share that with you guys.
The Review
Well, guys, that was "They Came From Beyond Space". And um...yeah, let me go ahead and shut the movie off here...OK. Well, in case that wasn't an indicator to you guys, this movie was incredibly disappointing. I can't really say it's terrible or anything, but similar to "In The Year 2889" the movie's also rather boring at times, too. I'll get into all this eventually, but I should point out something first. You guys happened to noticed the poster of the movie, where it features the supposed aliens that are wearing black and have these sorta cool looking guns on them? Yeah, there are no aliens that look like that at all. The goggles are mostly accurate, but the aliens never wear them, it's just our main character and a friend of his who wear them for about a few minutes tops and that's it. So, just a heads up, you're not gonna find any aliens that look like they do in the movie poster.
And on that note, I want to start off by talking about the ending. Now, if you somehow really care about spoilers for a nearly 60 year old movie, then you may want to stop reading here or skip the next paragraph or two, because I have to talk about spoilers for the ending here. So, I had a lot of the questions in this movie that were mostly not explained. For starters, this "crimson plague" that gets mentioned by the aliens was basically the thing I talked about earlier where the people started getting infected with this chicken pox-like disease, one in which gets infected throughout most of the country. And I was wondering why they were even infected to begin with? Well, it was explained by the head alien that they spread the disease which to collect human bodies so that they can help them with their project.
What is this project you might be wondering? Well basically, they forced the humans to build a rocket ship back to their home planet because years of travel for them caused them to grow old, so they want to go back to their planet and die there. So while it's not exactly trying to paint itself as another cliche alien invasion story where they want to take over or destroy our planet, it's still sorta is on an accidental level. However, since they still brainwash the humans after one of them attempts to pick off a fragment of their meteorites, I'm still gonna count it as one because it basically has most of the same tropes as a lot of other alien invasion flicks do anyways.
Now, what does this have to do with the ending? Well, after they were forced to stop from extracting the silver plate that was in Dr. Temple's head (I'll talk about that later), the head alien honcho says that they failed and that they'll have no choice but to die on our planet. And it's here where Dr. Temple says that this whole thing could've been avoided if all the aliens did was just *ask* them, and that the humans would've helped. To which, the head alien frees the human's mind that he was controlling, and they make peace by shaking hands. The end. And no, I'm not kidding about any of this either. That is *literally* how the movie ends.
Now what makes this ending infuriating is the fact by admitting this, in which all the aliens had to do was apparently ask for the humans help, you are basically saying that there was no reason for *any* of this to happen at all! You could've not released a plague to contaminate the humans in order for them to help you rebuild your spaceship. You could've not frozen the other humans bodies for stupid reasons. You could've not done *any* of this and avoided all this crap to begin with! But instead, this admittance from this head alien honcho essentially turns this story into an idiot plot. One in which, again, could've easily been avoided had they not one any of the inane, stupid bullshit they pulled off in this movie. But no, instead we had to have this idiot plot happen in order for us to get a movie out of it. And that's the only reason why this idiot plot exists.
So, in case you skipped my spoiler paragraphs, I'll sum up the ending this way. It's completely stupid and asinine, and it honestly makes the movie feel a little bit more worse now that I've talked about it. But, I am gonna put that aside and talk about the rest of the movie. When it comes to the rest of the writing, barring that nonsensical, stupid ending, it honestly did have a lot of promise. It really did. I really think that, had this movie had gotten a tighter script, it really could've been a better movie. It could've fixed most of the problems that I mentioned in regards to the ending, plus also help develop our characters a bit more.
Well correction, I should say our main character, since he's the only one who we follow throughout the entire movie. Personality wise, he's boring as shit, and doesn't have much of a character to begin with. He also apparently can't be controlled by the aliens because of something I mentioned earlier. See, even though this movie doesn't entirely flat out say it, it's brought up earlier that our main character, Dr. Curtis Temple, was told by his doctor that he had gotten into a car accident early on, and it caused him to get a silver plating implanted into his head, which conveniently also acts as some sort of armor against the aliens mind control abilities. Which I guess if this movie is able to teach you anything, in the possibility that aliens do plan an invasion of Earth and if they try to control your minds, just make sure you either get into an accident where your head gets implanted with silver plating, or just wear something silver on your head in case you don't want to risk the former. Either way, at least this movie is able to teach something useful, I guess.
But in all seriousness, since the movie is only following one character throughout most of the movie, we get treated with scenes where he's trying to infiltrate the base where they got the humans who are forced to build the rocket for them. And this is where the movie starts to get boring, because throughout the second half of the movie, it spends most of the time with Temple, as he's busy spying on their activities while also getting ready to go infiltrate the base himself. And it's boring to watch, and by that point, I was almost starting to fall asleep myself because it's not interesting at all. Even when he eventually does free his love interest, Lee, who's also bland as hell, and also recruits a friend of his named Farage, who only shows up in the last 30 minutes or so of the movie, it's still boring as hell. I was waiting for something interesting to happen for me to care about what's going on, but it never came. And you're not gonna care about what's gonna happen in this movie because it doesn't give you much of a reason to care about it's characters, or it's idiotic story.
And on that note, I should sum up by stating that the writing in this movie is terrible. At first, I was gonna say that the movie wasn't that bad, if just very flawed. But thanks to that ending, it made the movie worse than what it already is. And that's just downright disappointing to say. Now as for the acting...well, it's OK, I guess. I mean, it's not really that good, but it's certainly not the worst acting either. I've heard far worse acting from other B movies such as this. But it's nothing really to write home about either. It's just below average acting at best, and there's really nothing more I can add to it other than that.
I will give the movie this, when it comes to the special effects, the sets inside the alien rocket ship look pretty cool. I mean, sure, it's nothing amazing, but for a movie that was filmed on a low budget, the sets here don't look too bad at all. I'm actually sorta impressed by them. That said, for everything else involving special effects, it's pretty cheap stuff. I mean, it does work for the budget that they were working with, but again, it's nothing really special. So, you just have to take it for what it's worth.
I want to touch upon the picture quality here for a moment. Because, similar to what I covered "In The Year 2889", the picture quality in this movie is ridiculously grainy. Now granted, I shouldn't be really expecting much, since this is technically a low budget film that came out in 1967. However, what disappoints me about this the most is the release of it. See, this DVD was put out by a company known as "Quality Special Products", and they're mostly known for putting out old products on older technology, such as Cassettes, Vinyls, CDs, DVDs, etc. Now on one hand, I appreciate that kind of effort, however, if they actually lived up to their name, they could've put in an effort by cleaning up the graininess when they put this combo pack out on DVD. It could've looked a whole lot better than what was presented here. Now I am aware that this particular movie is out on Blu-ray, so hopefully, whatever company that put this movie out on that format was able to fix this issue. However, with this DVD, they couldn't be asked to do that much. And as is, we got an ugly-looking movie released on DVD the way it is because "Quality Special Products" were too fucking lazy to get off their asses and clean the picture a bit on their films!
So anyway, setting aside the terrible picture quality, the camerawork here is OK. The lighting could've definitely used fine-tuning in some scenes, especially the early scenes where they were filming in the dark. It doesn't necessarily harm the overall picture quality, but it's still an issue by itself. The sound-mixing here is decent, I suppose. And the score here leans on being forgettable to kinda shit. A good majority of the early portions of the movie doesn't have much music, but what is here isn't really that good, or memorable for that matter. So, I'm just gonna toss the music here as a negative, since I wasn't really that big on it to begin with.
Ultimately, guys, when all is said and done, am I able to recommend "They Came From Beyond Space"? No. I really cannot recommend this thing, unless if you want to riff on it with some friends on a bad movie night. That's the only way I'm gonna be able to recommend this thing to you guys. Otherwise, no. The writing in this movie is shit, the characters are all bland and lifeless, and the picture quality really takes a hit here with it's graininess. In fact, even though it's kind of an obvious giveaway, I'm not gonna be able to recommend this combo pack to you guys, because neither movie is good enough to hold on to. And considering that I only bought this combo pack for the other movie that I already covered, and ended up disliking anyways, it doesn't make this combo pack any better. So yeah, I'm definitely gonna be trading this thing in the sooner, the better. And on that note, I'm gonna go and watch something better. And I'm thinking of something like "Redneck Zombies". Because that's a movie that was filmed on an ultra low budget, and it has better quality than either turd that I watched for the past couple of weeks. So, I'm gonna go and do that, because I need to feel a little bit more happier than what had to watch here.
Anyway, guys, with that, we come to the close of another Reaction & Review. Until next time, ladies and gentlemen, take care, and I will see you all later. Peace.
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