IT! THE TERROR FROM BEYOND SPACE

Ripped off for Ripley?

Ian Berriman

RELEASED 30 MAY 1958 | PG | Blu-ray/DVD Director Edward L Cahn Cast Marshall Thompson, Shirley Patterson, Kim Spalding, Ann Doran “The movie that inspired Alien!” – or so the internet would have you believe. Tommyrot. True, It! shares certain elements with Ridley Scott’s classic: a monster that sneaks about in the ventilation system picking off a spaceship’s crew one by one; an open-theairlock ending. But Alien’s Ron Shusett and Dan O’Bannon denied having seen it. And It! was following a template, anyway – screenwriter Jerome Bixby, later of Trek, admitted to taking his lead from The Thing From Another World. Setting all that aside, what we have here is a thinlycharacterised ’50s B-movie, flatly directed and featuring unremarkable performances. Yet it remains a better-thanaverage example of its type. With its…

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SFX (Digital) - 1 Issue, Summer 2016

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