They Came From Beyond Taste

Michael Gough as the Master of the Moon. No, I'm not kidding. 

THEY CAME FROM BEYOND SPACE
(1967, 85m 12s; Kino Lorber)

In my opinion, the single best critical overview of Freddie Francis' uneven directorial career is to be found in  Paul M. Jensen's 1996 book THE MEN WHO MADE THE MONSTERS, which devotes a substantial chapter to him. An articulate defender, even Jensen makes few claims for THEY CAME FROM BEYOND SPACE, Francis' 1967 science fiction film for Amicus. 

He allows for a certain visual vitality early on (what Jensen calls "an atmosphere of dangerous uncertainty"), after which point it becomes merely "silly," as its hero Robert Hutton "spends nearly an hour of the film trying to learn what the audience already knows." (He's not much of an expert, staring at one point that "No propulsion system on Earth could get to the moon and back," not very long before one really did.) The film was apparently made back-to-back with another film by the company, Montgomery Tully's THE TERRORNAUTS, which was made first and gobbled up the greater share of the budget allotted for the pair, which left Francis in an unfortunate situation. As filmmaker David DeCoteau mentions in the audio commentary track he shares with David Del Valle, the film's real problem is that it has a lousy script. This is partly due to its literary source (a 1941 science fiction novel, THE GODS HATE KANSAS by Joseph Millard, that was naïve even by 1967 standards) and an adaptation by producer Milton Subotsky that was, intentionally or unwittingly, aimed at eight year-olds.

Believe it or not, these are the good guys.

Hutton plays Dr. Curtis Temple, the director of a scientific unit studying the possibility of extraterrestrial life - which, in itself, is kind of silly. He and his associates work in a spacious and largely empty room where is taped to the wall a poster of the Solar System that I had on the wall of my own room as a child, and the impressive floor is a mosaic interpretation of space that makes the operation site seem a repurposed Turkish bath house. Temple works closely with his fiancée Lee Mason (Jennifer Jayne, an actress with a strange auburn bouffant and an endlessly jutting lower lip that seems to lead her from place to place). By a strange coincidence, just as we are getting to know them, they pick up a sighting of a series of what appear to be meteorites coming down to Earth, but they are in fact flying in a V formation. Just as it's casually mentioned that Temple has a steel implant covering part of his brain from an old war injury, Lee and some others visit the Cornwall site where the meteorites have fallen. As an attempt is made to take a sample of them, Lee is "taken over" by something within, and she commands the other meteorites to seize the other men in the group similarly. ("The brains of these primitives seem quite suitable for our purposes; we have made a most excellent choice," says one, staring dully into camera.)

Jennifer Jayne as Lee Mason - programmed by the Moonies.

What follows then for awhile is a fusion of INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS (1955) and QUATERMASS II (1957), as the men and women possessed by alien intelligence set up a base to serve as headquarters to an imminent invasion - not from another planet, but from our own Moon. It is quickly learned by the Moon people that Temple is exempt from their takeover tactics thanks to his steel plate, and when he belatedly figures this out, he pays a visit to the only man he can still trust, his brilliant colleague Farge (Zia Mohyeddin), with whom he designs and creates a colander-like helmet (melted down from Farge's beloved loving cup awards from dog shows!) to protect him, a pair of bizarre Cronenbergian goggles with the ability to see through the Moonies' earthly disguises, and a special ray gun - all in what seems the space of an afternoon. Then they proceed to invade Earth's first Moonbase and take on none other than the egomaniacal Master of the Moon (Michael Gough, in a role he was obviously born to play), attended by shirtless, pot-bellied servants dressed like Mickey Hargitay's Crimson Executioner in BLOODY PIT OF HORROR. Since I've told you most everything, I'll say no more of the story except that Temple's climactic meeting with the Master of the Moon aspires to a note of corny, wiser-than-thou irony; it might have played that way on the page in 1941 (pardon my skepticism) but onscreen it's just a chorus of raspberries.

Luanshya Greer - an interesting character who deserved a better film.

Francis is on record as having said that he really wasn't all that keen on horror, and THEY CAME FROM BEYOND SPACE argues that he had even less affinity for science fiction. It seems he took Subotsky's script and simply carried on (a la Nurse, Teacher, Constable, Cabby and Cleo), doing what he could with what little he had.

Despite the director's cavalier handling, I was still able to find a meager measure of enjoyment in the film by approaching it as an unexpected adjunct to what I've called "Continental Op/Pop" cinema. Consequently, the film can be approached as a demonstration reel of visual solutions to various problems.

Once our heroes penetrate the Moonbase, Don Mingaye (Hammer's resident art director) gives the film some scenic panache that evokes Bava's DANGER: DIABOLIK, made around the same time. (The scale model special effects by Les Bowie, however, find the budget pinching badly.) DP Norman Warwick's pictorial interaction with the minimal sets, often from oblique and exaggerated angles that wisely stress form and geometry over content, complemented with quick cutting during action sequences and a wildly jazzy score by James Stevens, lends the proceedings a certain comic-book dynamism. Indeed, the Stevens score alone would relate this film in a fraternal sort of way to Amicus' later film SCREAM AND SCREAM AGAIN (1970), with its Edgar Wallace krimi-inspired jazz score by David Whitaker.

This film has had previous releases on VHS and DVD, but the new Kino Lorber release is its first appearance on Blu-ray (85m 12s). This 1.85:1 presentation sourced from Studiocanal is undoubtedly an all-time best; the colors are bold, the image sharp, and it has a decent mono track. The Del Valle / DeCoteau commentary is pretty much a lively bull session about a film neither of them likes very much; each makes worthwhile observations, and there's a personal reminiscence by Del Valle of a backstage encounter with Michael Gough. As it's all improvised, there are occasional whoopsie-daisies (Honor Blackman played Emma Peel, "Freddie Fisher," etc) but if you're feeling forgiving and a need for some sassy solace after watching the main feature, here's your ticket. There's also a theatrical trailer. Available on Blu-ray and DVD at a persuasive price. 
  
(c) 2020 by Tim Lucas. All rights reserved.

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