TCM Greatest Classic Films: Sci-Fi Adventures (Them!, Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, World Without End, Satellite in the Sky) (DVD)

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Warner Bros. march steadily onward in their quest to put what seems to be every old film in their vaults into two-disc, four-movie sets. Among their latest installments is "TCM Greatest Films: Sci-Fi Adventures" with "Them!," "The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms," "World Without End," and "Satellite in the Sky." The term "greatest" in this case seems unnecessarily lavish praise, since only one of the four films comes anywhere near "greatness" by any stretch of the imagination, another one is average, and two are decidedly below par.

Satellite in the Sky
Probably the less said about this 1956 film, the better. I vaguely remember seeing it when I was kid, but couldn't remember a single detail. I tried watching it as the first film in this set but couldn't get past a few minutes before giving up for better things. The movie is remarkably talky and slow for a sci-fi film. For the record, it stars Kieron Moore, Lois Maxwell (of later James Bond fame), Donald Wolfit, Bryan Forbes, with Paul Dickson directing. It has something to do with sending a rocket into space to detonate a bomb and, naturally, everything going wrong. Emphasis on the "wrong."

Film value: 3/10

World Without End
"World Without End," also from 1956, fares a little better than "Satellite in the Sky," although not by much. Instead of being talky and boring, it's mostly talky and corny. On a return trip from Mars, four astronauts (Hugh Marlowe, Christopher Dark, Rod Taylor, and Nelson Leigh) encounter trouble and go through some kind of Einsteinian time warp, winding up some 500 years in the future. As we've seen from countless postapocalyptic films since, people by this time have wiped out most of the planet, and only two surviving human types remain: normal-looking folks who live either underground in hiding or above ground in subservience to another group of mutated humans called "beasts." Shades of H.G. Wells and his "Time Machine" here, which, coincidentally, Rod Taylor would star in a few years later.

Not only have people changed, so have animals, with spiders the size of pickup trucks. Unfortunately, the movie also incredibly melodramatic. The people living underground seem intelligent enough, but they're afraid to advance their civilization. Worse, the men are all old or middle-aged and wear skull caps (for no apparent reason except to make them look oddly futuristic), while the women are all young and beautiful and wear short skirts and mid-twentieth-century hairstyles. They also speak perfect mid-twentieth-century English, don't smoke, don't drink, and don't swear. Apparently, we still have censors in the year 2508 A.D.

By today's standards, the film's special effects look primitive, and despite the filmmakers shooting the project in CinemaScope, the studio appears to have afforded it a minimal budget because the sets run high to plywood and colored lights. This movie makes the early "Star Trek" television shows look like George Lucas productions. The fact is, "World Without End" seems like little more than a widescreen version of the old Buck Rogers serial with Buster Crabbe. At least the old serial was fun.

Film value: 4/10

The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms
As everyone who grew up in the 1950s knows, the government's testing of atomic bombs unleashed all sorts of unforeseen menaces upon the world, like giant ants, giant spiders, giant scorpions, and in 1953's "The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms" a giant aquatic dinosaur. It's a wonder any of us got out of the decade alive. Must have been the strength and endurance of Eisenhower that carried us through.

Although the movie has a number of things going for it, it's a far cry from today's computer-generated monster flicks, and, in fact, it isn't among the best the Fifties had to offer. Still, it's got its charms, not the least of which is that it's the motion picture that started it all. I'm referring to giant monsters awakening or mutating as a result of atomic blasts. All the rest of the giant-creature features would follow, but it was this low-budget, independent production that pretty much got the ball rolling.

One of the more important of the film's draws is that it was the earliest film over which stop-motion genius Ray Harryhausen had complete control, and his dinosaur creation continues to look good. The dino is a composite of several different critters, with a lot of Harryhausen's own imagination thrown in. It's sleek and menacing in an efficient rather than outright scary way, yet it's actually pretty cool to look at. Harryhausen, as you know, would go on to do the creature work for such notable undertakings as "The 7th Voyage of Sinbad," "20,000,000 Miles to Earth," "Mysterious Island," "Jason and the Argonauts," "The 3 Worlds of Gulliver," "The Valley of Gwangi," "From the Earth to the Moon," "One Million Years, B.C.," "The Golden Voyage of Sinbad," "Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger," and the first "Clash of the Titans."

Another of the film's appeals is that it's based in part on a work by fantasy writer Ray Bradbury, a short story called "The Foghorn," about a sea serpent that hears the sound of a lighthouse foghorn, mistakes it for a potential mate, and falls in love. Even though the lighthouse and the serpent are about all that's left of Bradbury's story, it's the inspiration that counts.

"The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms" predates Disney's "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea" by a year, but it doesn't predate Jules Verne's novel of the same name, so it was clearly Verne the producers were hoping audiences would recognize. The "Beast" itself is a prehistoric, seagoing dino, a rhedosaurus Harryhausen called it, frozen in the ice of the North Pole for 100,000,000 years and reawakened by an atomic blast. It immediately heads south along the Eastern seaboard, making for New York City and wreaking havoc along the way.

The human stars are largely unimportant, as they play second fiddle to the monster, but in case you're wondering they are Paul Christian (Swiss-born actor Paul Hubschmid) as Professor Tom Nesbitt, a handsome nuclear physicist who first sees the beast; Paula Raymond as Lee Hunter, a beautiful assistant paleontologist and romantic interest for the professor; Cecil Kellaway as Dr. Thurgood Elson, an absentminded-professor type who reluctantly comes to believe in Nesbitt's crazy dinosaur theory; and that staple of Fifties B-movies, Kenneth Tobey, stalwart as ever, as Col. Jack Evans.

The movie takes its own sweet time getting to the point, the only serious action occurring in the movie's last half hour. The rest of the movie is all introductions, exposition, and atmospheric build up. Nobody believes Nesbitt when he says he sees the creature, and it takes him the film's first hour to track down other witnesses to try and convince the government how desperate the situation is getting. Finally, the creature attacks New York City, and the movie reaches the climax for which everybody has been patiently waiting.

In the film's only genuinely silly scene, a cop walks up to the beast and attempts to shoot it with his revolver. I mean, this is a monster that must be 300 feet tall! The rest of the Manhattan activity involves the creature generally running amuck and the populace trying to get out of its way. The creature destroys many a cardboard building in the process, but Harryhausen and the prop people keep it from looking too phony.

Frankly, I was rooting for the monster. He's only defending himself, after all, and he's returned to New York because that was apparently his ancestral home. Watching the beast eat a roller-coaster is especially satisfying.

Film value: 5/10

Them!
From the German expressionistic films of the Twenties to Universal's movie monsters of the Thirties and Forties to the gigantic, mutated critters of the Fifties, horror cinema underwent considerable change in its early, developmental years. Growing up in the 1950's as I did, though, the history of film didn't matter so much as the here and now, and a lot of the old creature features from that era still mean a lot to me. Of all of them, I think "Them!" from 1954 stands out as both a personal favorite and the epitome of the breed. After more than half a century it remains THE quintessential giant-bug picture.