by Randy Palmer
The phone rings; it’s the space installation with a message for Nelson: the satellite has vanished from its radars. As he and Joan prepare to leave, Nelson tells Anderson, “I don’t like what you’re thinking.” In their car outside Joan comments, “I always knew Tom was a little ‘off,’ but tonight he went too far.’’ (But Joan was in the kitchen with Claire when Tom was talking to Paul about the Venusian voice. Did director Roger Corman forget something here?)
General Pattick (Russ Bender) arrives at the installation to confer with Nelson’s team of scientists, Pete Shelton (uncredited screenplay coauthor Charles B. Griffith), Ellen Peters (Karen Kadler), and Floyd Mason (Paul Harbor). None of them can offer a reasonable explanation why the satellite disappeared from the radar trackers, but by the time Nelson arrives it has reappeared and reestablished its usual orbit. Nelson believes the equipment might be faulty, but to be absolutely certain, they will have to bring the satellite down and recheck the instrumentation.
Meanwhile, Anderson is conversing with his Venusian “friend,” who responds to questions with unintelligible beeps and blips. (Are we to believe that Anderson can decipher this gibberish on the spot? Has he memorized a decoding key?) He excitedly tells Claire, “He drew the satellite to his world, and now he’s back, within an hour!” (This is some all-powerful alien.) Claire, who obviously thinks her husband has become totally delusional, pleads with him to come to bed. “You’ll feel better in the morning,” she promises. For someone as brilliant as Anderson is supposed to be (Paul Nelson refers to him as “a genius” in an early scene), Tom is blithely unaware of Claire’s opinion that he’s in need of psychiatric help. He elects to sleep by his radio wave equipment in case there are any incoming messages during the night.
The following day the satellite crew attempts to guide the craft back to Earth safely, but it begins behaving erratically. General Pattick warns, “Don’t experiment with it! Send it back up!” But it’s too late: the satellite explodes before control can be regained. Moments later Anderson receives a communication on his own equipment. The alien has survived the crash and is less than ten miles south of the town of Beechwood. Anderson is ecstatic, but Claire chides him, “You’re a sick man, Tom.” He ignores her. “The whole world’s sick, darling, but that’s all over now.” Tom believes the alien has made the journey to Earth to “rescue Mankind from itself.”
Lumbering through the brush at the crash site, the alien uses its antennae to send out invisible waves which disrupt all forms of energy. All at once clocks run down, telephone and telegraph lines lapse into silence, engines die (there’s an amusing shot of a forklift lapsing into inactivity as the operator none too subtly lets go of his control stick), and TV and radio stations go off the air.
Like everyone else, Paul and Joan find themselves stranded when their car dies en route to the installation. A horrendous whining from above rivets their attention on the sky, and they watch helplessly as a small airplane crashes into a ravine, killing the pilot. “We may be needed as witnesses,” says Paul. They decide to hike to Tom’s house to report the incident.
At home, Anderson provides the alien with the identities of the key citizens of Beechwood: Mayor Townsend, Chief of Police N. J. Schallert (Taggart Casey), General Pattick, and Paul Nelson. Along with their wives, this makes a total of eight persons the alien intends to put under mental lock and key. It begins producing batlike offspring which implant control devices in their victims’ necks. But like a bee, once they’ve stung their target, they die. Furthermore, there is the implication (conveyed by several lines of dialogue, though never explicitly stated) that the control bats are programmed, in a fashion, to target a specific individual and can’t be used on anyone else.
A creeping terror is slowly spreading through the town of Beechwood. Claire narrowly avoids getting caught up in mob violence. She finds Tom being accosted by a fellow who blames him for the sudden eruption of martial law mentality that the city’s leaders are using to control the populace. Tom dodges his assailant’s attack and jumps into his car—the town’s only functioning automobile—to head for home. On the way he explains to Claire that Beechwood has been selectively “de-energized.” With a shudder Claire realizes Tom has been telling the truth all along and that he has the potential to become a dangerous and powerful ally of the Venusian invader.
General Pattick leaves the satellite installation on foot. Moments later he is attacked by one of the Flying Fingers and becomes a slave to the will of the alien. When he returns to the installation, Pattick tells the staff that they have been caught in the midst of a Communist uprising. He orders Sgt. Neil (Dick Miller) to assemble his men and set up camp to the east, where they are to observe any unusual activity. Little does Sgt. Neil know that Pattick is sending the troops on a wild goose chase to keep them out of the way while the alien does its dirty work.
When Paul and Joan arrive at Anderson’s home, Tom assures them there is a method to the alien’s madness. This creature, he insists, has come to Earth to help mankind, not harm it. Paul isn’t sure he believes everything Tom is telling him about this thing he keeps calling a “benefactor”; his natural inclination is one of caution. Tom admits to a feeling of triumph—after all, he has been predicting these very events for years. Paul resents Tom’s blind devotion to the invader; he feels that his friend is being misled, but Tom refuses to discuss the matter.
Paul asks for a ride to the satellite installation, but Tom tells him that, like everything else in Beechwood, the lab has become totally inoperative. Instead, he offers the Nelsons a ride home. While Joan and Paul walk outside to the car, Tom relays a message to the alien: “Trace the energy from the car. It will lead you to Nelson’s home. He’s difficult, but his mind is of the utmost value.” In spite of its strange requests and demands, Tom honestly believes the alien is a benevolent creature and friend of mankind.
From their living room window, Joan and Paul watch fearfully as panic creeps through the streets of Beechwood. Paul tells Joan to keep the doors and windows locked while he ventures outside to see what he can learn, but as soon as he grabs a bicycle and leaves the house, Joan is stung by one of the Venusian’s Flying Fingers.
On his way to the installation, Paul watches Chief of Police Shallert (who has been controlled) gun down Edgar Haskell, owner of the local newspaper, for refusing to follow evacuation procedures. When Paul demands an explanation, Shallert cryptically refers to orders and tries to place Nelson under protective custody. Paul fights his way free and makes his way to the installation, which he finds locked and apparently abandoned. General Pattick suddenly appears and offers Nelson a ride back to Beechwood—a tip-off that Pattick has been controlled. (The audience already knows this but Nelson does not.) When Paul notices a metallic wire attached to the back of Pattick’s neck, he realizes that everything Tom Anderson has been telling him is true. He knocks Pattick unconscious and commandeers the jeep, then drives to Tom’s house to try and reason with him.
But Tom isn’t ready to give up his dream. He explains to Paul how he paved the way for the alien to come to Earth. The creature is one of only nine surviving members of a race of beings that was “born too soon” amid the eruptions and gases of the primordial planet Venus. What is readily apparent to Paul—that the alien is an opportunistic creature using its intellect to woo Tom into helping it escape a dying world—is anathema to Tom, who rationalizes the orchestration of recent events (such as the herding of the townsfolk into the desert and the controlling of minds by the Flying Fingers) as unfortunate temporary byproducts of a new world order that will ultimately benefit mankind. A disgusted Paul Nelson leaves Tom’s house determined to find a way to thwart the alien’s plans on his own.
But things worsen rapidly. The invader cuts the power to the jeep, forcing Paul to return home on the bicycle. By then, Joan has become possessed. In one of the film’s best sequences, Joan greets her husband and offers him a present—one of the Flying Fingers, which flutters away from her outstretched hands
as she chillingly comments, “I’m going for a walk. When I get back you’ll feel much better.” In her absence Paul manages to kill the little creature and almost immediately the telephone rings: it’s Tom, who claims he wants to apologize and invites Paul back to his house to talk things over. “Joan’s car will run,” he offers—a hideous reminder that Paul’s wife has shed her humanity forever. Paul accepts the invitation, but before he can leave there is something he must do. He must kill Joan.
The alien has actually ordered Tom to murder his best friend. As Tom explains to Claire, Paul is one of four persons on the list of key people who were not placed under mind control. The others—General Tomlinson, the mayor, and the mayor’s wife—were all killed in the crush of the evacuation. Rather than see Paul die at the hands of his best friend, Claire suggests using one of the remaining attack bats to infect him, but Tom explains that they have in fact already been used on the members of Paul’s own scientific staff. The alien is unable to manufacture any more control devices for at least another week—too long a time to allow Paul to live. Outraged by the alien’s command to her husband to kill his own best friend, Claire switches on Tom’s transmitting equipment and tells the creature she is going to find and kill it.
When Paul arrives, Claire slips out a side door and drives Tom’s car to the cave where the alien is hiding. Oblivious to his wife’s absence, Tom admits to Paul for the first time that certain doubts are clouding his mind. Grabbing at this unexpected opportunity, Paul launches into a tirade, steamrolling over Tom’s objections in the process with his observation that this creature from a dying planet is nothing more than an alien conquistador, an emotionless being who has preyed on Tom’s emotions and desire to help his own race simply to further its own nefarious ends.
Meanwhile, armed with her husband’s rifle, Claire explores the convoluted passageways of the cave, determined to destroy the creature that has ruined her marriage and her life. When she sees the huge, conical shape of the beast shuddering to life out of the dank shadows of the cave, she falters momentarily, then cocks the rifle and fires.
But the bullets are ineffective. With arced, razor-edged pincers, “It” reaches out to Claire’s neck and drags her down, as she screams hideously.
Claire’s screams reach Tom through the transmitting equipment which Claire has inadvertently left on. Here at last is incontrovertible proof that the alien is not what it says it is. When Tom hears the creature mauling his wife, he finally admits the reality of the situation. With Paul’s help, he plots to take out the humans serving the alien and then crush the creature itself.
Tom drops Paul off at the satellite installation. Inside, General Pattick, Pete Shelton, and Floyd Mason—who have murdered fellow scientist Ellen Peters—are plotting the overthrow of the American government. Paul opens fire with his pistol, killing Shelton and Mason but only wounding Pattick, who manages to escape in one of the installation’s jeeps.
Meanwhile, Tom almost runs straight into Chief of Police Schallert, who has parked his cruiser in the road to block the only entrance to Elephant Hot Springs, where the alien is hiding. Ducking his gunfire, Tom circles through the woods and sneaks up behind Schallert, setting him afire with a blowtorch. As his body burns silently in the grass, Tom jumps into the cruiser and heads up the road to the cave.
The jeep driven by Paul comes to an abrupt stop, its power cut by the alien. As he begins a slow trek up the winding road to Elephant Hot Springs, Paul hears in the distance the unmistakable sound of another car engine. Hiding in the brush on the side of the road, Paul ambushes and kills the driver of the approaching vehicle—Gen. Pattick—and then heads in the direction of the cave.
Meanwhile Sgt. Neil’s troops, having heard screams from inside the cave, cautiously advance into the darkness. There they find the alien entity hovering over the body of Claire Anderson. Neil orders his men to fall back as the thing crushes one of them in its enormous pincers.
The creature pursues the troops outside. Riflemen unload dozens of rounds of ammunition, but the bullets bounce harmlessly off the creature’s tough hide. Even bazooka shells seem to do little damage. Neil hears the sound of a car and shouts at the driver to back off, but it is Tom Anderson, who convinces Neil to call off his troops. Tom uses his blowtorch to burn through the only penetrable part of the thing’s exterior—its eyes. But getting this close to the creature means certain death in its razor-sharp pincers. As its brain is cooked into mush, an impossibly long arm reaches out, grabbing Anderson by the throat.
By the time Nelson arrives, Anderson lies broken and bloodied alongside the carcass of the thing that almost conquered the world.
It Conquered the World proved to be a significant improvement over Day the World Ended. The script was tightly structured, and the dialogue was more realistic and delivered by actors of a higher calibre. The chemistry between Lee Van Cleef and Peter Graves was fervent and dynamic. Both actors met their roles with enthusiasm and commitment. Nowhere was there a hint of embarrassment at finding themselves in a low-budget monster movie. Graves had already appeared in Red Planet Mars and Killers from Space, and would go on to star in several other genre offerings, and Van Cleef had previously appeared in The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms. Graves especially shined in his penetrating exchanges with Van Cleef and the encounter with Sally Fraser as his alien-possessed wife. Regrettably, Fraser was probably the weakest link in a chain of otherwise strong performers, including the ever-dependable Beverly Garland (who proves in this film that she’s a much better actress than she is a screamer). In secondary roles, Dick Miller and Jonathan Haze provided unobtrusive comic relief, and up-and-coming Corman scriptwriter Chuck Griffith wasn’t bad as Pete Shelton, one of the scientists who relinquishes control to the alien.
On the technical side, the film offered serviceable, if unremarkable, cinematography by Frederick West. Continuity suffered somewhat from a short shooting schedule, notably in scenes with the military jeep, which sometimes displayed a “No Riders” sign and sometimes did not, and in the climax which involved the driving and abandonment of various vehicles. The music score by Ronald Stein (who soon became AIP’s in-house film composer) is not his best; at times it is severely melodramatic and not very memorable. Still, it doesn’t damage the film all that much.
What did damage the movie were some of the changes Roger Corman made to the picture’s climax. According to the script, the monster never left the confines of the cave in which it was situated. It had no need to move from place to place because it used its batlike offspring to infect human beings, who could then carry out its nefarious commands and desires. There was to have been only one scene where the creature moved at all, and that was when it left the satellite and was briefly shown moving through the bushes, wiggling its antennae.
There are several versions of what really happened on April 10, 1956, the date the scene was shot. Roger Corman has been quoted as saying that since he paid for the monster, he was going to show it, whether or not the film suffered as a result. Corman himself has often told the story that the monster had to be rebuilt after Beverly Garland laughed at it during rehearsals; his version of events appeared most recently in his book How I Made a Hundred Movies in Hollywood and Never Lost a Dime. The claim that “by that afternoon our monster was rebuilt ten feet high” is not only implausible, it’s untrue. Blaisdell’s Venusian stood six feet high from day one. It was never rebuilt. It was never modified. The fact of the matter is that Corman would never have stood for the amount of time and money it would have taken to rebuild the costume at that late date.
There is another story that when Beverly Garland first saw “It” she snickered, “So you’re going to conquer the world, eh?” and kicked it over. Bob Burns, who often visited the set of many Blaisdell film projects, knows that this never happened. “The very construction of the costume wouldn’t allow for someone kicking it over,” he said. “In fact, it took three off-camera people to tip the thing over when ‘It’ died at the film’s conclusion.�
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All things considered, the most likely scenario seems to be one offered by Paul Blaisdell himself: someone on the crew forgot to bring the generator which was needed to power the lighting equipment or the generators failed (it was difficult to recall with precision so many years after the fact). Consequently, Corman was forced to bring “It” out of the cave so the film could be finished using natural light.
Instead of filming on a soundstage, Corman and crew had set up camp near Bronson Quarry in Griffith Park, a favorite location for many 1950s sci-fi and monster films. Blaisdell protested the decision to shoot the climax of the film outside the cave. He had constructed “It” as a stationary being—the monster had no walking appendages—which would merely sit on a rock shelf in a niche inside the cave. To try and force it to move or make it look even somewhat ambulatory would probably prove disastrous. Blaisdell felt certain audiences would laugh once they saw “It” in direct sunlight. But Corman was adamant: the film could not run over schedule or over budget. There wasn’t time to get the generators up and running. So the castors that Paul had built on the underside of the costume (used to roll it from the workshop to the movie set) became the monster’s walking gear.
The only way to get the creature to move on film was to have Paul “duckwalk” inside the suit, inching it along bit by bit. Sure enough, once viewers saw the monster in broad daylight, theaters filled with catcalls and laughter.
Blaisdell was at the premiere, watching the audience’s reactions in dismay. He got up and walked out before the picture finished playing.
Months before, when Blaisdell began working on the full-size creature (which he affectionately dubbed “Beulah”), expectations were running high that “It” would raise hackles, not hoots from viewers. Everyone from AIP prez Jim Nicholson to director Roger Corman felt that this would turn out to be one of Paul’s most awe-inspiring creations. The three of them agreed that a creature that came from the planet Venus, with its low gravity, should naturally be built rather low to the ground. Blaisdell envisioned it as a kind of “miscalculated mushroom,” but the finished costume was often referred to as “the cucumber creature” by the press.