Terror from the Year 5000 (1958)

i must have seen a different film!!

It's funny, it's tense, it features two great performances from two actors and the director expertly creates a web of odd tension where you actually don't know what is happening for the majority of the run time.

A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

It is neither dumb nor smart enough to be fun, and spends way too much time with its boring human characters.

Of all the horror movies that I subjected myself to in the sixties, this was the most terrifying. Werewolves, vampires, Frankenstein or aliens didn't phase me. The "lady from the future" as we call her to this day, scared the crap out of us. If we were out playing at night, she was behind every tree. That vision haunted me until I was somewhere in my 20s. I have not seen the movie since around 63 and it may make me laugh today, but that was the most horrifying creature they ever came up with as far as I am concerned. From the time she exited that water heater with a window until she was sprawled out on that table at the end, all I wanted was for her to be gone.

Hey, the night scenes were even hard to make out on the 1962 Zenith black and white TV, but it still scared us so much that my sister and I couldn't wait to be frightened by it the following year or whenever it was shown again and it was definitely tops on our scary movie list. I mean come on, Sorry, Wrong Number(1948) was pretty scary back then. But this hideous looking creature stole the beautiful nurse's face and the scene where she confronts the guy in the hospital bed is chilling indeed. This is one horror flick that has managed to stick in my mind for forty some odd years. Its not like it won any academy awards but neither did Hitchcock.

AKA "Terror From the Year 5000", shown on "Chiller Theater" back in the early 1970s... As kids, we called this the "Chicken Lady" movie because we thought the mutant Future Womans shrieks sounded like some kind of chicken (?)... Hey, but the name stuck...for us, anyway...Almost 35 years later and I still recall it as the single scariest *bleeping* movie I ever saw! I Picked up a DVD copy online to watch with my kids... of course now this thing is one giant wheel of CHEESE compared with modern day CGI gorefests and bloodbath flicks. And it is no longer "scary" to me at all; my kids laughed uncontrollably every time the Future Woman jumped out and fried someone with those radioactive Lee Press-On Nails! BUT...For my $$$ still rather see 100 movies like this than drek like "The Hills Have Eyes","The Devils Rejects" or "Saw"...Rather odd to notice now - as an adult - that Salome Jens, aka Future Woman, was ONE HOT BABE without that mutant makeup job!Hellllllllllooooooooooo Nurse Salome!

As far as I know, this is the first American feature film about time travel via a time machine. A time machine was featured in the American serial BRICK BRADFORD (1947) and in the English comedy TIME FLIES (1944). Film firsts should be noted and applauded even if the films they appear in are otherwise unremarkable. TERROR FROM THE YEAR 5000 is a somewhat lackluster production with uneven performances and direction. I say that this film is shade a better than most other low budget quickies from 1958 in that its story slightly more imaginative. The time machine was something new to films in 1958, the bit with the hypnotic finger nails is certainly unusual and don't forget the four eyed mutant cat from the future. I thought the idea of having the future women at first mistakenly speaking Greek was a clever idea, since the present people had sent the future people with trinkets that had Greek writing on them. The make up for the future woman is quite poor, no wonder the director mostly kept her face hidden throughout. There is one scene where the scientists leave the island and go to a movie on the mainland. AIP studio heads must of come up with this scene to insert a little promotion. The film they go to see is AIP's I WAS A TEENAGE FRANKENSTEIN. Oh, by the way, I like the 1958 Edsel Corsair that Ward Costello drives.