They Came From Beyond Space - 1967

There are often many, many attempts by different companies to cash in on a popular genre or movement within film.  Why, just recently we had dozens of sci fi movies making their presence known after the success of Gravity, and there's always room for one more retarded Marvel movies to come out and be exactly like the others.  So, I present to you They Came From Beyond Space (TCFBS), which when it premiered as part of a double feature, was called, "the two worst films the company ever produced".

This movie was a difficult one, and I don't mean difficult to watch or difficult to rate.  I just mean it felt unsure of what it was trying to be from 10 or so minutes in.  First of all, it looks okay, despite the fact it was extremely low budget.  However, that might be because it reuses sets and props from a Doctor Who movie that was also made this same year.  So, if you are a fan of the old Doctor Who movies and TV shows, there's some trivia.  

TCFBS begins with some meteors that appear to be infecting people somehow.  At first the influence is simply thought to be a disease, called the crimson plague, however it's victims seem to be portraying odd behavior.  We follow Robert Hutton as Dr. Curtis Temple, a man who has a metal plate in his skull, and is thus unaffected by the meteors influence.  His fiancee, however, is affected, and soon she goes into isolation, to the point of keeping armed guards and an electric fence around her property (which is where the meteors are).  Temple breaks into the compound to try and figure out what's going on, but he's not going to like what he finds...

TCFBS is relatively simple, it's not hard to watch by any means, yet it still felt like a chore to get through.  I don't know if I could say exactly why, but it's yet another one of these movies I'm inevitably going to give 1-2 stars and ramble on about pacing, which again, was a problem here.  Anyone else feel like we're stuck in a time loop?  The pacing does suck though, to be honest.  I just feel like, if you reach that point in a movie where you look away, casually interested in the dirt under your fingernails, the movie is not doing it's job.  

Mostly it's build.  Hell, the dude doesn't even break into the compound until well around the hour mark.  Being 85 minutes long that doesn't leave a lot of time for things to happen.  He breaks in, and that's when it does finally get "good".  I'm obviously using the word good in a relative term here.  It's not like, 2001: A Space Odyssey "good" or anything.  More like, "Hey, I don't want to turn this shit off and break my computer" type good.  There's all sorts of weird ass random elevator scenes, cool vaults, and you get to watch some 8-5 business-man looking dude in a tan jacket walking around pretending he's interested in random shit.  That's the relative "good" you get here.

The movie is instantly forgettable, indescribably inane, and torturous.  I don't recommend it unless you really, really like guys in tan jackets.  That's an extremely small demographic (I hope).