Space Master X-7 (1958)

There are better movies of two hours length. I loved the actress'performance.

Let me be very fair here, this is not the best movie in my opinion. But, this movie is fun, it has purpose and is very enjoyable to watch.

Blistering performances.

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

A quick moving film about what happens when we aren't careful with potentially deadly, unknown substances. Here, an arrogant scientist is acting on his own and unleashes a kind of plant/creature that devours everything in its path. After an encounter with his ex he is eaten by the thing. Forces move in and burn the creature but it has contaminated other objects and may be carried by the ex-wife. Much of the movie involves hunting down this woman who thinks she is suspected of murder. I have to admit that the interrogation of different women on a plane aren't done very well. Perhaps the first thing you do is lay it on the line. There is good suspense at the end and it leaves one with a little something in the pit of the stomach. Good 1950's stuff.

Some films can actually affect a person's pyche for life and this little black and white 'B' sci-fi/horror flic certainly found a niche in my memory that has never left me. I saw this movie at the Rialto Theater in Loveland Colorado in late August 1958. I had just turned 13 years old and the very next day my mom and dad, myself and my 19 year old brother were leaving for California in our 1956 Mercury Monterey to go to Disneyland. This film was billed as the 'B' presentation of a double feature. The 'A' film of the evening was the now original true cult classic' The Fly ' starring the venerable horror meister Vincent Price. At the intermission between films (remember those?) I was so tickled by the closing shot of Price's head on the body of a fly trapped in a spider web screaming in that weird little voice "help me' that i ran to the concession stand with anickel to by Cracker Jax (yes, a nickel) and gleefully cried 'help me', help me' .Remember I was 13.... 'The Fly' did not frighten me at all. Little did I know...'Blood Rust' as the next feature was titled for that release has never left me...the V2 rocket launched from New Mexico with a camera pointed to the incredibly disappearing ground...the filter from the rocket with the odd granular spores being placed in petri dishes...then the Blood Rust spores growing in the bell lab bottle...releasing the puffs of spores as the fungus bubbled like thick slime pudding...the discovery that it fed on human blood and tissue creating uncontrolled growth... the gash on the scientist 's head caused by his wife throwing an ashtray in the divorce argument scene at the lab in the desert... his last desperate phone call for help...His arm and hand slowly sinking into the bubbling Blood Rust ...The wife, thinking the cops were after her for his death, cutting and dying her hair in a hotel only for the viewing audience to see the Blood Rust fungus growing out of the waste basket where she had thrown her locks...She was carrying IT!!...the DC6 pilots flying her home to Hawaii trying to control the aircraft as the fungus breaks out of her luggage and pushes out of the baggage compartment and 'grows' up over the passenger windows and finally over the pilots cockpit windshield...In every scene the hideous growth making a grotesque, slobbery, slime, BLUB BLUB sound. I had to walk home in the dark, across the railroad tracks through old man Jenkins scabrous apple orchard and down the long dirt road that ended at my family's farm house. I couldn't sleep. The well pump kept kicking on going BLUB BLUB BLUB. Now I know this film was just a grade d drive- in film but I could not get it out of my mind. It has something to do with the idea of having some parasitical growth covering you body and eventually your mouth and nose strangling you. But it was just a movie..Right? By the end of the first day of driving on our trip to California (we only made it to Grand Junction, this was before the Interstate system) which was the day after I had seen this movie my parents swore they would never let me see another 'monster' movie again. I was a sniveling, crying, mess. I hadn't slept and to top it all off we stayed in a motel that had another water pump that would kick on with a BLUB, BLUB, BLUB sound.The whole trip continued in this vein. For years afterwards my older brother( and we all know how older brothers can tease) could get a rise out of me by simply saying BLUB,BLUB. I would love to see this odd, quirky little film re-released. It has never been shown on tv to my knowledge. To this very day I cannot look at a pair of Mickey Mouse ears in the same way that I'm sure others do. My reaction is to think of that DC6, in the last shots of the film, making an emergency landing in Los Angeles and to see a little Blood Rust oozing off the runway toward a housing development in the distance....a distance that back in August of 1958 I thought included the Magic Kingdom.

As a child I spent the summers with my grandparents in northern New Jersey. In the summer of 1959 the parents of a friend of mine were taking him to see a movie at a drive-in and I was invited,which movie didn't matter to me, just a chance to see a movie was great. The movie was Space Master X-7 and as child of 11 it scared the heck out of me (my mental film vault still has a has a clip of the scientist being absorbed by the fungus). That was the 1950's, cold war, Castro and all, traveling to outerspace was still a dream. A child of 11 today would find the movie laughable and the effects lame, but in the dark of a summer night in 1959 the movie had its effect.

Behind this bland, forgettable and indescriptive title is one of that decade's more interesting low budget items. "Blood Rust" was probably the script's original name, and this refers to the red coloring of Mars which, as is found out on the return of a space probe, is a fungal overgrowth that could easily thrive on the Earth. THE ANDROMEDA STRAIN, while not exactly a remake, shares both the panicky concept and something akin to realism in its approach. SPACE MASTER's an Edward Bernds quickie, no nonsense drive-in fare with logic secondary to pace, but there's a continual teetering on the edge of DETOUR-like brilliance that makes it, if not a classic, quite exceptional.The strength of writing is ever evident, as the threat to humanity theme is subverted away from the usual conquering hero routine to documentary-like police procedural, the pursuers taking on near anonymity as our attentions, and sympathies, focus on the fleeing "Typhoid Mary". She's finely played by Lyn Thomas, a mature and intelligent 50s beauty in the Jan Sterling mode. We're told just as much as we need to know about her, that she once was involved in an S&M fling (I kid you not, it's ALL THERE in 1958) with arrogant scientist Paul Frees (Richard Deacon doing Clifton Webb, and does he deliver cutting lines!) Their unholy reliance resulted in a child that she now wants back in her new life of respectability. His experiments with the alien fungus result in his hideous death and the government, knowing that she was with him at the time, has to track her down so that she won't infect the world. However, they can't throw the public into panic (cover-up stuff, another first) by saying why they've put out an all-points bulletin out on her, so she goes into hiding and flees so that she won't be framed for his murder! Now I ask you, how often do you run into plot intricacies (as opposed to absurdities) like this during your typical monster movie round-up?At the same time SPACE MASTER X-7 is as frustrating as it's intriguing, because get-it-out-on-schedule Bernds never quite takes that extra step ahead of his time. There's a beautiful scene involving Miss Thomas and a cop the predates PSYCHO, where you're rooting for her to get away and the world's fate be damned, and though this perversion of empathy carries on the irony of it is somehow lost in the climactic shuffle. Said climax, stunningly prepared for in both mood and pacing, aboard a threatened air liner complete with children on the threshold of death, is shied away from in terms of intensity when it could've become a Hitchockian runaway carousel. One feels, by the movie's end, that something truly magnificent just didn't quite break free from the shackles of its period's conventions.I think this one's ripe for a remake and hopefully by someone with brains and taste. It certainly has a plot, very friendly to updating, that doesn't sit still. One thing that gets this film footnoted out of the collective amnesia is the presence of Moe Howard as a cab driver. He's funny as can be but plays it straight, as a regular Joe who finds himself in the midst of things, and makes one wish that, like brother Shemp, he and the rest of those Stooges would've done a little more dramatic character work.