Horror Express: It! The Terror From Beyond Space (Edward L. Cahn, 1958)

If the fact that much of the first half of Dan O’Bannon and Ronald Shusett’s original script for Ridley Scott’s ‘Alien’ was borrowed from Mario Bava’s ‘Planet of the Vampires’ (1965) has been widely acknowledged by this point in time, it seems to have been less frequently observed that a significant amount of the material in the second half of Scott’s film (the ‘monster loose on the ship’ stuff) comes to us direct from this little number – an admirably straight-up SF-horror programmer, made for peanuts in 1958, and likely selling a great many more of them as it proceeded to blow the minds of monster kids around the globe in these good ol’ triple feature matinees and suchlike.

In the far-flung future of 1973(!), a moustached official addressing a press conference in a disconcertingly cramped looking White House briefing room sets the scene for us. Earth has lost contact with the first manned mission to Mars shortly after it landed, and a shiny, lava lamp-shaped rescue ship has been dispatched upon its wobbly, sparkler-powered way to see what gives.

We re-join the crew of this rescue ship shortly before they once again depart from the red planet, having picked up the sole survivor of the earlier expedition, Colonel Carruthers (Marshall Thompson), who claims that the rest of his crew were killed by an unseen monster of some kind. Disregarding this fantastic story, the rescue ship guys naturally figure that he must have murdered his crewmates in order to maximise his own chances of survival after their ship crashed, and are determined to return him to earth to face a military firing squad (so we’re told?!). Before take-off however, there’s some brief faffing about with someone accidentally leaving the loading bay doors open for a while, and… you can see where this is heading, right?

We’re first introduced to the crew of the ship via a series of ‘portrait’ shots which see them taking their positions for take-off and reporting their readiness, during which we note that, alongside about eight men, there are two women taking active roles on-board ship, which seems at least slightly progressive by the standards of the 1950s, don’t you think? [Also, it’s the same gender balance as ‘Alien’, if we’re keeping score.]

Immediately after this launch sequence however, we cut to the mess room, where the men are sitting around the table relaxing, talking about what they’re going to get up to when they’re back on Earth etc [shades of ‘Alien’, once again], whilst the two women hover behind them, refilling their coffee cups and collecting their dirty plates! Welcome to 1973, ladies.

Needless to say, for those who believe that science fiction should be a genre defined by Big Ideas, ‘It! The Terror from Beyond Space’ will prove absolute anathema. Issues of social progress, man’s place in the universe, or the possible implications of contact with extra-terrestrial life, all remain resolutely unexplored here. The film’s monster does not change shape, change size, absorb its victims’ personalities, communicate telepathically, reproduce asexually, become invisible, or do anything else remotely weird or noteworthy.

It may initially hide itself by lurking in the heating vents [ala ‘Alien’], but once it emerges, there’s no funny business with this guy – he’s just a good ol’ fashioned monster, with the teeth and the claws, and the growling and stomping, dragging corpses around and sucking the moisture and/or ‘life essence’ out of them, and such. (“It’s been sittin’ here for about half an hour, just lickin’ its chops”, a trapped crew member reports over the intercom at one point.)

What director Edward L. Cahn (who helmed far too many similarly action-packed b-pictures for me to even begin listing highlights here) and his collaborators give us with this one is in fact a nigh-on definitive exemplar of the Two-Fisted Sci-Fi ideal. Just a bunch of tooled up guys trapped in a tin can with a ravenous, bullet-proof beast - and if that ain’t enough to keep you entertained for 70 minutes, you probably should’ve tried the theatre across the street, mister.

Thankfully, our crew have set out on their journey into the unknown equipped with a crate of hand grenades, a wide variety of small arms, a cupboard full of experimental gas bombs and a bazooka (well, this is an American mission after all, I guess they needed the comfort factor). But, whilst their foresight in packing enough firepower to mount an assault on Colditz Castle may be vindicated by the fact that they’ve immediately encountered a blood-thirsty space monster, imagine their dismay when none of this stuff even slows it down!

Characters frequently say things like “I threw enough gas at it to knock out 67 elephants”, but still it keeps on comin’. They try electrocuting it, setting it on fire, even blasting it with radiation from the ship’s on-board nuclear reactor (of course there’s an on-board nuclear reactor), but to no avail. How will any of them make it back to earth alive? Well, I don’t want to give away the ending, but – just think ‘Alien’, and you’ll be on the right track.

If the movie I’ve described above sounds pretty corny, well, I suppose it is, but it’s certainly no less effective for that. Though clearly very much influenced by Hawks & Nyby’s ‘The Thing From Another World’ seven years earlier, Cahn & co simplified and streamlined that film’s actually rather complex and multi-faceted narrative, boiling it down to its basic essence and prioritising tension and man-vs-monster action over sub-text and thematics.

They were aided in this by, amongst other things, the fact that they had a way better monster suit to work with. Designed by Paul Blaisdell (Roger Corman’s go-to guy for this sort of thing) and inhabited by professional gorilla suit actor Ray ‘Crash’ Corrigan (who for my purposes is probably the biggest name on this film’s cast list), this thing is one mean bloody bastard of a critter, looking rather like the Creature from the Black Lagoon’s cigar-chomping, WWII vet uncle who opens beer bottles with his teeth. I daresay it must have really given some kids in the film’s original audience the heebie-jeebies, even as it sent others into paroxysms of delight.

Meanwhile, the film also boasts some pleasingly atmospheric photography and great, imaginative set design, realising the cramped, vertically levelled interior of the conical rocket ship in a physically believable manner which makes for a tense and challenging battleground upon which the men can engage the monster. (Having said that, I also loved seeing anachronisms like analogue clock faces, gas valves, mason jars and hand drawn blueprints making the journey into outer space, lending a defiantly low-tech vibe to proceedings, suggestive of a slightly re-tooled submarine movie.)

Cahn’s direction is snappily professional, and, sealing the deal, the cast – largely consisting of forgotten actors who I can imagine must have spent the ‘50s essaying hard-bitten corporals and/or small town posse participants – deliver a set of performances which are lively, engaging, and most importantly, entirely straight-faced.

A veritable model of filmmaking efficiency, ‘It!’ may not be the smartest atomic age sci-fi movie around (to put it mildly), but it’s certainly one of the most enjoyable and well-realised ventures in this vein that I’ve seen to date, however laughable the buck fifty model shots and pokey White House press rooms may be (got to love the ending, where the spokesman for the space programme returns to tell the world’s press, “eh, maybe we’ll just skip Mars”), and regardless of the hilarity the film’s unthinking misogyny is likely to evoke in modern audiences. As far as simple tales of scary monsters and the square-jawed spacemen who kick their behinds go, this one is tops.

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Bloody NEL: Lord of the Spiders by Michael Moorcock (1975)

Once again, I’m going to be out of the country for a few weeks, so whilst I’m gallivanting, I’ll leave you in the company of some recent additions to my paperback mountain, beginning with a few from the ever-pungent exploitation vats of New English Library.

Even before the late ‘70s saw paperback racks suddenly overflowing with sharks, crocs, rats, bears and crabs (more of which in a few days), monsters already seem to have often taken pride of place on NEL’s SF covers (see To Outrun Doomsday, for example), and, in their own weird sort of way, these delightful bat-headed spider things feel as iconic as anything in the realm of ‘70s British paperbacks. (Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to find a name to attach to the cover art anywhere online, but as ever, info or speculation is welcomed in the comments.)

Likewise, I’ve always had a real soft spot for Michael Moorcock’s early straight science fiction novels, but for some reason I’ve never gotten around to this one – originally published in ’68 as ‘Blades of Mars’ - or it’s predecessor ‘City of the Beast’.

Basically these books are an unabashed homage to Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Mars and Venus stories (lest we forget, Moorcock began his literary career, aged 17, as the editor of ‘Tarzan Adventures’), and verily, they are red-blooded stuff, full of grand sentences, with many commas, ending in proud exclamation points!

(Perhaps the fact that NEL also reprinted the Burroughs books in the ‘70s had something to do with their decision to acquire these particular Moorcock works? Who knows..)

Anyway, it never ceases to amaze me that Moorcock was knocking out this delightfully old school stuff at the same time that he was championing the most far out voices of SF’s experimental / psychedelic new wave as the editor of New Worlds. But then, that goes straight to the heart of what makes him such a unique and vital figure in the field of popular culture really, doesn’t it? At any given point in his career, he has contained multiples, and his determined refusal to acknowledge a dividing line between high and low culture, between intellect and entertainment, between reality and fantasy, should stand as an inspiration to us all.

Bloody NEL: Hook: Virility Gene by Tully Zetford (1975)

You know that feeling when you pull a promising looking book off the shelf in Oxfam and think, “what the actual fuck”?

I’m not sure whether the gentleman portrayed on the cover (‘Hook’ himself, presumably) has already been dosed up with some ‘virility gene’, or else is just exalting in the fact that he clearly doesn’t require any, but either way, his hastily sketched lower quarters speak for themselves.

You will also note that he appears to be carrying a model of a gothic cathedral around on his back, but… what this uncredited cover art may lack in terms of SF verisimilitude, it more than makes up for in its dedication to what I suspect was a New English Library editorial edict that, wherever possible, SF BOOKS SHOULD BE PURPLE. (I’d love to pin down this exact shade of ‘NEL purple’ for some future home redecoration project.)

Scanning through the book before writing this post, it actually seems as if it might be quite a lot of fun. Clearly written in a spirit of tongue-in-cheek self-mockery, and with an eye to the ‘70s pulp market’s seemingly unquenchable appetite for numbered action series in which unstoppable, sub-Bond heroes perpetrate blood-curdling mayhem, it’s two-fisted, laser-blasting fight scenes, lusty drunken carousing, bizarre future-slang banter (‘gonil’ appears to be this world’s expletive of choice) and saucy intimations of inter-species hanky panky as far as the eye can see.

Tully Zetford, it turns out, was one of many pseudonyms used by the prolific Kenneth Bulmer, who we last encountered here via his ‘hard-luck spaceman’ yarn To Outrun Doomsday. NEL published four ‘Hook’ novels in 1974-75 (‘Virility Gene’ was the final one), but the indefatigable Bulmer proceeded to knock out a further six instalments in the series under his own name, although curiously, these were published only in German, and all appeared simultaneously in 1988.

Bloody NEL: To Outrun Doomsday by Kenneth Bulmer (1975)

Last but not least in our quartet of ‘70s NEL SF gear, here we have another superlative cover illustration from Ray Feibush.

It’s the sense of perspective provided by the little fighting man on the bottom left that really makes this one work I think. Totally awesome is perhaps the phrase I’m looking for.

Even more extraordinary is the fact that Feibush actually gets a credit for his work this time around, hidden in the corner of the back cover. Will wonders never cease?

A hardened paperback warrior, Kenneth Bulmer (1921-2005) wrote around 160 published novels across five decades, utilising enough pseudonyms to fill a train carriage. The vast majority of his output was science fiction, but he wasn’t adverse to the occasional run of westerns, historical fiction or ‘Men’s Adventure’ series titles.

‘To Outrun Doomsday’ was originally published by Ace Books in the U.S. in 1967.

Pan-demonium.

 Following this 2014 post on the work of paperback cover artist Sam “Peff” Peffer, I’ve become quite interested in expanding my collection (and appreciation) of Pan paperbacks.

With their preference for colourful oil paintings bluntly depicting events within the book, Pan’s old-fashioned approach to cover illustration was the polar opposite of the modernist, design-based aesthetic of their rivals at Penguin, seemingly reflecting the fact that they tended to publish a far higher quantity of war stories, British Empire yarns and other such ‘square’ subjects, with just the occasional revered author or hot-headed literary turk thrown in for good measure.

Even in terms of the latter (with writers such as Alan Sillitoe), Pan seemed always to stay pretty ‘down to earth’ in comparison to their competitors. It’s certainly difficult to imagine anything terribly experimental finding a home between their covers during the ‘50s and ‘60s, and they rarely indulged in much science fiction. (Trying to imagine what the bloody hell their stable of cover artists might have made of a William Burroughs or Philip K. Dick book could definitely lead you to a few sleepless nights.)

Admittedly, they did move with the times and get a bit ‘psychedelic’ toward the end of the ‘60s with stuff like the Adam Diment books, but it always feels like a bit of a grudging acceptance of modernity, and, as a result, Pan’s output remains far less collectable and less rarely celebrated than that of Penguin, even though their design and illustrations are often very good, with a great deal of charm.

The bold, brightly coloured, no-nonsense paintings (kind of like the best of American pulp paperback arworkt, but with any hint of sex or sleaze surgically removed), the bold, upper-case block lettering, black spines and that distinctive yellow logo…. since I rearranged my book shelves last year and put all the Pans in one place, they really stand out, giving me an itch to acquire more. As such, some of my more recent finds are shared below.

(1960, cover art by Glenn Stewert)

A grand old man of BBC radio productions, Charles Chilton (1917-2013) wrote ‘Journey Into Space’ as a series of radio dramas between 1953-58, subsequently adapting them into a trilogy of novels, published in Pan between ’58 and ’62. See the above wiki links for as much information as you could possibly wish to know on these subjects.

Though he has a nice clear signature, Google turns up nothing on cover artist Glenn Stewert.

(1968, cover designer unknown)

The better looking entries in the Horror Stories series are probably about as close to ‘iconic’ cool as Pan paperbacks get, and this is definitely one of my favourites. As is often the case with Pan - great fonts.

(1952, cover artist unknown)

I don’t know anything about this one, and can’t read the artist’s signature, but it’s quite lovely isn’t it? Quite abstract by Pan standards.

(1957, cover by Rex Archer)

With no slight intended to ‘Rex’, you’d think they’d have gone with something a bit more.. classy for Hemingway, but what the hey, I like it. Kind of reminds me of an old Indian movie poster or something. As someone appears to written above the title of my much abused copy: ‘potent’.

(1962, cover by ‘Michel’?)

Because you can’t get to the end of a cover art gallery without a bit of Erle Stanley. This isn’t one of the more lively crime covers in my collection, but for connoisseurs might like to note that the spine is killer - really jumps off the shelf.

And finally, scribbled on back inside cover of ‘The Case of the Runaway Corpse’, we find one of those curious oddities that occasionally turn up to hint at a book’s past life – in this case, rough notes for a letter decrying the excessive expense and loudness of a new church organ, apparently.

Annual Report: 2000AD / 1979AD (Part # 2)

Returning to the wanton carnage gleefully doled out to impressionable youngsters as 1978 gave way to ’79, and first up we have the annual’s only ‘horror’ strip, wherein generic occult investigator Doctor Sin (no relation to Doctor Syn?) kicks some Satanist ass in a few pages of exceptionally enjoyable Wheatley-inspired mayhem.

Lest we forget, when 2000AD debuted in ’77, it rode in on the coattails of what we might today term a ‘reboot’ of iconic ‘50s British comic book hero Dan Dare. With some beautiful, somewhat Moebius-esque sci-fi artwork and a touch of icky space-horror, plenty of effort has been taken to make clear that this ain’t yr granddad’s Pilot of the Future. In fact, even Dare himself looks a tad sinister in his portrayal here. Pretty brilliant stuff all round, to be honest.

Given that it would initially seem to have exerted a hefty influence here, it would seem natural at this point to observe that ‘Alien’ hit cinemas in 1979, were it not for the fact that this annual was most likely on sale by the final quarter of ’78, with the material therein presumably being prepared considerably before that, whereas ‘Alien’ didn’t premiere until June ’79. Curious, no?

Meanwhile, regardless of 2000AD’s futurist agenda, it seems to have been more or less compulsory for mid-twentieth century Earth publication to include at least one page like this. Who DREW all of these damn things anyway? Were they made in-house, or was there an agency or something that editors could ring up and say “give me a page’s worth on a vaguely sci-fi theme, stupid as possible please”? Who knows?

Next we move on what is probably my favourite strip in the whole annual. As was demonstrated by the M.A.C.H. 1 strip featured in the first part of this post, 2000AD at this stage in its evolution seemed perfectly happy to serve up its action-adventure hi-jinks with a hefty dose of the kind of unreconstructed quasi-fascist/anti-commie survivalist fantasy stuff that would never have flown (or at least, would have been rendered heavily satirical) after the comic moved toward a more socially conscious / left-leaning outlook in the ‘80s.

Political concerns aside though, nothing can distract from the sheer, unmitigated charm of ‘INVASION’, an ongoing strip in the weekly comic at this point, in which a valiant underground network of honest, god-fearing, flares & flying jacket favouring blokes fight to defend old England from the invasive ravages of the –uh – ‘Volgans’, whose skull-insignia flouting fascism and failure to appreciate the majesty of the Clifton Suspension Bridge just won’t do in the West Country, old son.

A thing of beauty and a joy forever, I present this strip to you in its entirety with no further comment.

Next up, the inevitable crossword! Admittedly, this annual keeps it pretty high on comics, low on rainy day puzzles and other such filler, but you didn't think we were going to get away without one of these did you?

Ok, now we’re talking. Dredd. Brendan McCarthy (??). The future. Artwork here emanates ‘cool’ so strongly, I'd recommend protective eye-wear before scrolling down.

After a pretty lame installment of future-sports strip Harlem Globetrotters (never liked that one much), things wrap up with the continuing chapter of another one-off strip, a rather lovely, tentacle-heavy Quatermass-esque sort of thing entitled ‘Guinea Pig’. Again – great stuff.

The final pages leave us with a few bonus thrills, as reproduced below, and then it’s splundig vur thrigg, bloglets!

In conclusion then: boy children of the 70s and ‘80s may have had to amuse themselves without the aid of Playstations, noxious energy drinks or 24/7 access to porn, but nonetheless, they don’t know how lucky they were, having such unhinged pulp storytelling and exceptional graphic art thrown at them on a regular basis as they browsed the magazine rack in the Co-Op. Truly, those were the days, etc etc.

As a final note, it occurred to me whilst going through this annual again for scanning purposes that, with the exception of the space lady being menaced by some sort of reptilian beast on the cover illustration, I don’t think I spotted a single female figure portrayed anywhere in this annual – not even in the background, or in crowd scenes. Which is… some kind of an achievement. I mean, talk about yr ‘boy’s own adventures’, wow. Even the sacrificial victim in the Satanist strip is male!

Actually, thinking about it, I suppose one of the reasons for 2000AD’s early success was probably its willingness to give pre-teenage boys exactly what they were looking for at the point just before those pesky hormones started to kick in, dumping such conventions as sappy romantic sub-plots and ‘characterisation’ in favour of simply portraying crazed, amoral brutes blasting each other to pieces with an arsenal of over-sized military hardware, in a universe where scary things like girls and human interaction need not concern them. (For a demonstration of what might have occurred had this trend been taken to its logical conclusion without the intervention of the more enlightened minds who helped raise 2000AD’s artistic stock in the ‘80s & ’90s, perhaps see the entire existence of Games Workshop.)

Anyway, I hope you’ve enjoyed this Annual Report, but if not, rest assured – as the name suggests, I promise this will only happen once a year.

Breakfast In The Ruins will return in January with all the usual nonsense, dark gods willing, and in the meantime, let me take the opportunity to say thanks fro reading, and to wish each and every one of you happy and fulfilling 2016.

Annual Report: 2000AD / 1979AD (Part # 1)

Striking about for some relevant content to keep this most un-festive of blogs ticking over through the festive period, I found myself scanning the shelves for good scanning material, and was reminded that, back in the lead up to childhood Christmasses long-gone, there was little I enjoyed so much as an f-ing good annual.

Whilst I’m confident that the concept of an ‘annual’ will be familiar to those raised in the UK, I’m not really sure of the extent to which the tradition of such publications crossed over to other territories. Maybe they did, maybe they didn’t. I don’t know. But I don’t recall ever seeing an American annual, or a French one, or a Russian one, so as such, I will risk patronising a large section of my readership with a brief definition:

An annual is a magazine-sized hardback book, published in the last quarter of each year, containing a compendium of material related to a popular weekly comic, magazine, TV show or entertainment franchise, aimed specifically either at distant relatives seeking an affordable Christmas present for a child, or else a pre-Christmas sop for parents seeking to keep said children busy through the holidays. Due to their sturdy construction and fleeting cultural relevance, these volumes will inevitably spend the remainder of humanity’s tenure on earth periodically popping up in charity shops and provoking fits of nostalgia in those aforementioned children’s grown up selves – which is great.

As with the vast majority of content on this blog, I am too young to have appreciated the 1979 2000AD annual when it first appeared, and so, strictly speaking, I can’t term the feeling that overcame me when I received it as a gift from my darling wife last year as one of ‘nostalgia’, but nonetheless, the feeling of joy I experienced whilst flicking through its pages, observing this pivotal stage in the British comics revolution that I caught the tail end of a few years later, was palpable.

Unlike the concept of annuals, I’m sure that, for the vast majority of potential readers of this blog, 2000AD needs no introduction. (If it does, here’s a wiki link.)

2000AD was still finding its feet at this point, with the material herein presumably developed around eighteen months after the comic was launched in February ’77, and this annual finds the title at a pretty fascinating stage in its development, slowly transitioning from the more traditional ‘boys own’ war/adventure stuff from which it emerged toward the heady brew of dystopian, punk-spirited satire and pop-art infused risk-taking that would come to define in it through its ‘golden era’ in the ‘80s and early ‘90s.

If much of this annual’s content admittedly seems pretty shoddy and anachronistic in view of what came later, it at least goes about its business in a gutsy, intermittently imaginative, and, it must be said, extraordinarily violent fashion that clearly points the way toward the title’s ‘imperial’ phase. With (I suspect) an impressive cross-section of British comics talent working behind the scenes, even the most juvenile and old fashioned strips here convey a sense of vision and craftsmanship that leave the vast majority of their domestic competitors in the field of blood-thirsty ‘70s comics in the shade, making it easy to see why 2000AD so quickly came to dominate this particular corner of the market.

At this stage, the comic’s writers and artists remained anonymous, and so in general I’m not going to go out on a limb trying to identify anyone as we go through the following scans. I have my suspicions here and there, and I’m sure that more dedicated Brit-comics aficionados than I will be able to pick out many of the contributors in seconds, but to avoid potential mistakes and embarrassment, I’m going to keep quiet on the subject. If you happen to be one of those aforementioned aficionados, further info is welcomed in the comments below.

Anyway, after somewhat alarming contents spread featuring what appears to be a live action Tharg the Mighty, the first number here is a one-off, ‘The Biggest Game of All’ which runs through a particularly thuggish variation on the old ‘time travellers return to prehistory, change stuff, inadvertently erase humanity’ yarn, all concisely wrapped up in five pages.

Next up, the M.A.C.H. #1 strip, as featured from prog # 1 onwards but dropped at some point shortly after this I believe, is a thinly veiled rip off of the Six Million Dollar Man, with the titular protagonist here putting paid to a dirty commie attempt to infiltrate the world of ice hockey! (He’s ‘Man Activated by Compu-puncture Hyperpower’ by the way, in case you were wondering).

One of this annual’s best stand alone sci-fi shorts, ‘Food!’, is such a great example of quintessentially cynical 2000AD fun, I thought it best to scan it for you in its four page entirety. (Thanks to a signature sneaked in on the final frame, we can credit Brett Ewins for the artwork on this one.)

One of the more imaginative takes on standard action-adventure tropes in 2000AD’s ongoing series at this point came from war/time travel yarn ‘The Phantom Patrol’, as represented here via a weirdly compelling photo-realistic yet almost entirely background-less art style. Interestingly, the strip’s concept bears more than a passing resemblance to the wildly entertaining Sonny Chiba movie G.I. Samurai, which coincidentally was also released in 1979.

Believe it or not, we’re currently less than a third of the way through this annual (say what you like about Tharg’s editorial boasting, it’s hard to deny this thing is indeed a shoe-in for “the most hyper-powered annual [I’ve] ever seen”), so our trawl through the wonders within will hopefully continue in a few days, once I’ve had a chance to spend some more quality time sweating over the scanner.

In the meantime, we’ll finish with a couple of examples of the space-filling ‘factual’ features that inevitably serve to further bulk out any good annual.

In partiucular, I’d seek to draw your attention to the spectacularly sensationalist feature on the exploits of the Victorian clairvoyant Daniel Dunglas Home, in which a 2000AD staff writer’s attempts to tie historical events in with their own fictional universe are pretty audacious and actually very cool indeed if you ask me, in a sending-young-minds-off-on-an-inspiring-flight-of-fancy sort of way.