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It Conquered the World / The She-Creature; July, 1956
Topic Started: Apr 3 2016, 05:37 PM (369 Views)
Laughing Gravy
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It Conquered the World (Dir. Roger Corman) / The She-Creature (Dir. Edward L. Cahn)
Strange Science Cinema #065/066

Double-features don't get much better than these, folks.

First, a pointy hat from Venus - one of only nine survivors of a dying race - comes to earth, hides in a cave, and craps big electronic bats that bite you on the back of the neck and turn you into a POD PERSON in It Conquered the World.

Peter Graves works at a space program that is just like NASA, only based all in one small office. And their satellites keep vanishing. Cop: "The scientific achievement of the century has disappeared! We've got to find it!" Disbarred scientist Lee Van Cleef thinks he knows what the deal is, though: an alien intelligence on Venus is shooting down the spacecraft as a warning! (Okay, he's no lawyer, but whatever the scientific equivalent of "disbarred" is, he's it.)

Beverly Garland, Mrs. Lee Van Cleef, is not having any of it. And what in the HELL was Beverly doing marrying creepy, beady-eyed Van Cleef anyway? In any case, she's going to spend virtually the entire movie bitching at Van Cleef for being such a nut about Venus and Venusians. Peter Graves did much better than Lee did; he married lovely Sally Fraser, who's quite helpful and supportive - right up until she tries to kill him with a bat.

Lee has invented a radio that allows him to talk to static, which Van Cleef claims is a superior intelligence from Venus who has just happened to take up residence in a cave outside of town and is crapping the mind-control bats to, well, conquer the world. Pay attention, please.

Million-dollar Dialog:
Beverly to Lee after dinner: "I'm going into town. When I get back, I pray to GOD you'll be rational."

Peter: "You're a sick man."
Lee: "The whole world is sick."

Once bitten by these things, you become a soulless automaton who lives only to serve your Venusian master. And the bats die. So it's a pretty bad deal all 'round. Lee argues that once IT takes over, there won't be any more crime, no war, and no limit to mankind's progress. Peter points out that there will also be no emotion, no love. These two just are gonna have to agree to disagree. Beverly, meanwhile, disgusted by the entire situation, tells her hubby, "For a few dollars, you can HIRE a woman who can match all your fetishes!

What with everything going on, the people start to panic, and the whole town attempts to flee in terror, including a gentlemen who attempts to flee with his saxophone, and I'm not even going to hazard a GUESS as to what THAT is all about.

The army is called in, but it pretty much consists of Dick Miller and Jonathan Haze, so no WONDER everybody is panicking.

After a hard day of fighting a Venusian invasion, Pete would like to come home, put up his feet, light up a Lucky Strike, and maybe coax the little woman into bringing him a li'l drinky-winky. Sally, though, is now a slave of IT, and instead of a pair of slippers and a vodka & tonic she's got one of those big-ass bats for hubby. He manages to kill it, and then -- knowing that his chances of making it to his next anniversary with this woman are nil -- blows her away. He doesn't seem all that upset about it, either, oddly.

Meanwhile, over at the Ghetto NASA, all the scientists are now working for IT except the pretty one, and she discovers a file full of dead bats, so she has to go. I don't know why she's wearing only a skimpy slip in her big death scene, but thank you, Roger Corman.

To move our narrative along, Beverly goes to the cave with a shotgun for IT. She finds IT, and the IT hits the fan. (I needed to make that joke, psychologically.)

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YIKES! What th' hell IS that thing?!?! IT looks like Mr. Potato Head as designed by H.P. Lovecraft! Bev says, "You think you're going to make a SLAVE of this world! I'll see you in HELL first!" But alas, she beats IT there. I for one will miss her. That pisses Van Cleef off, and he heads to the cave with a blowtorch and a major mad on.

Million-dollar Lee Van Cleef Hissed Dialog to a Venusian Pointy Hat:
"I made it possible for you to come to this earth and you made it a charnel house!" Oy, right in the Venusian eye, the torch goes.

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We're left with Peter Graves to thoughtfully relate the moral to this tale.

"He learned almost too late that man is a feeling creature. And because of it, the greatest in the universe. He learned too late for himself that men have to find their own way, to make their own mistakes. There can’t be any gift of perfection from outside ourselves. And when men seek such perfection, they find only death. Fire. Loss. Disillusionment. The end of everything that’s gone forward. Men have always sought an end of toil and misery. It can’t be given, it has to be achieved! There is hope. But it has to come from inside. From man himself."

Wow. Not a dry eye in the house. I cried all the way through another Gawd-awful Popeye cartoon, Gopher Spinach (do NOT ask). I got s'more popcorn and watched the trailers from the drive-in snack bar (nice, big windows) for upcoming films The Beast of Hollow Mountain (Wow!) and Fire Maidens of Outer Space (Wowzy-WOW-wow!) before trudging back to the family DeSoto for our next film, The She-Creature.

People will tell you that Bette Davis and Joan Crawford invented the once-lovely-film-stars-turn-old-and-get-bitchy-and-creepy genre of film, but uh-uh. It was Chester Morris and Tom Conway. Ches is a hypnotist (wearing a hideous jet-black toupee) who keeps his wife, lovely Marla English, in a permanent trance (oy, the bed sores she must get) and pulls her psyche into and out of various previous lives from which she's been reincarnated. Every once in a while, just because he can, he reverts her into a terrifying sea monster with a long tail, teeth in its stomach, wings on its shoulders, stringy seaweed hair, and colossal boobies. The She-Creature stalks out of the sea and murders various people for no reason anyone has ever been able to figure out, no matter HOW many times they've seen this thing. Mr. Conway is the publicity agent who turns Chester and Marla into media superstars; Cathy Downs is Mrs. Conway, in the cast to add some beauty (way to go, American-International Pictures); Lance Fuller, who can't act, is the paranormal debunker who's trying to debunk a sea monster that keeps ripping people in half; and, showing AIP's first real proclivity for giving old movie stars supporting roles in their films (wait'll Buster Keaton gets here!), Morris and Conway are joined by - get this - Frieda Inescourt, Jack Mulhall, Frank Jenks, Edmund Cobb, Kenneth MacDonald, and El Brendel! Way!

Million-dollar Dialog:
Mr. Fuller, asked to come to work for Mr. Conway: "I've been trained to FIGHT stupidity and ignorance, not get RICH on it!"

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Reportedly, Director Cahn thought that the monster looked stupid and so it's not much seen very clearly until the end, and even then he left off the tail and the tummy-molars. There are some fairly gross for the time scenes of corpses, though.

A few more things...

  • These are not B-movies. They were co-features.
  • They made a small fortune for AIP.
  • Paul Blaisdell created and played both monsters.
  • The She-Creature is available on DVD (out of print, but not hard to find) and was one of 25 DVDs I worked on for the nice folks in England.
  • It Conquered the World is not available on DVD or Criterion Blu-ray as of yet. It was made fun of by MST3K, the cads.
Absolutely, positively quintessential viewing for anyone who wants to enjoy movies, and much, much more indicative of 1950s sci-fi than War of the Worlds or The Day the Earth Stood Still.
"I'm glad that this question came up, because there are so many ways to answer it that one of them is bound to be right." - Robert Benchley
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The Batman
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Don't have either, so hopefully these two gems get a Blu-Ray release from Kino or Olive or someone.


Always be yourself! Unless you can be Batman...then always be Batman!
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