list http://www.spout.com/ Recent community activity around It Came from Outer Space on Spout Copyright 2005-9 Spout, LLC Spout RSS http://www.spout.com/images/SpoutLogoRSS.jpg http://www.spout.com/ 136 30 http://www.spout.com/films/It_Came_from_Outer_Space/17502/default.aspx Title: It Came from Outer Space
Year: 1953
Director: Jack Arnold
Plot: It Came From Outer Space is one of a handful of science fiction films from the 1950s that plays as well today as it did on its original release, this despite the fact that its original 3-D elements seem to be lost. It was also the first science fiction effort of director Jack Arnold, and one of three excellent 3-D features that he made (the others were Creature From the Black Lagoon and Revenge of the Creature) during that format's short-lived history. It was also, along with The Incredible Shrinking Man, one of the two most sophisticated films he ever made in that genre. Additionally, it was Arnold's first opportunity to use the desert setting that seemed to inspire him in some of his best subsequent movies. Based on a story by Ray Bradbury, the movie starts off in a gentle, lyrical mode, almost reminiscent of Our Town, as the narrator introduces the tiny Arizona town where the action will take place. Writer John Putnam (Richard Carlson), a new arrival to the town and an amateur astronomer, is looking at the skies with his fiancée, schoolteacher Ellen Fields (Barbara Rush), when they see what looks like a huge meteor crash into the desert. Putnam and Ellen go to the site of the crash and find a huge crater. When he goes down inside, Putnam sees what is very obviously some kind of vehicle or device embedded in the ground, but before he can show it to anyone, a rock slide buries what he saw. He reports that a spacecraft of some kind is buried there and is duly ridiculed by the local press and some of his own colleagues in the astronomical community, and even Ellen has her doubts. The local sheriff, Matt Warren (Charles Drake), is downright hostile because he believes that Putnam is not only an interloper, but has also taken Ellen away from him. Putnam is at a loss as to what to do, and doing something -- or, perhaps, not doing anything -- becomes a critical matter when various townspeople start to disappear, including Ellen, to be replaced by alien "duplicates." A small but significant part of this action is told from the standpoint of the aliens, who are only glimpsed in brief flashes as they move through the desert and the underground caves where they are hiding. Putnam ultimately comes to understand that the aliens are actually benign and only need time to repair their ship and leave; but by then, the sheriff and the rest of the town have started taking his original warning seriously and their intervention threatens the lives of everyone. Reason and a peaceful approach prevail, but only just barely, and the space travelers are allowed to go on their way -- in return, they restore the real townspeople. The movie ends on a hopeful note as Putnam predicts that someday, when we're ready here on Earth, the visitors will be back to make formal, peaceful introductions. ~ Bruce Eder, All Movie Guide
Times Tagged: 6
Number of Lists: 4
Number of blog posts: 1
SpoutRating: 3
]]>Sun, 09 Nov 2008 16:30:14 GMTIt Came from Outer Space1953Jack ArnoldIt Came From Outer Space is one of a handful of science fiction films from the 1950s that plays as well today as it did on its original release, this despite the fact that its original 3-D elements seem to be lost. It was also the first science fiction effort of director <a href="/players/P____79976/default.aspx" style='text-decoration:underline'>Jack Arnold</a>, and one of three excellent 3-D features that he made (the others were <a href=/films/7411/default.aspx style='text-decoration:underline'>Creature From the Black Lagoon</a> and <a href=/films/28780/default.aspx style='text-decoration:underline'>Revenge of the Creature</a>) during that format's short-lived history. It was also, along with <a href=/films/16987/default.aspx style='text-decoration:underline'>The Incredible Shrinking Man</a>, one of the two most sophisticated films he ever made in that genre. Additionally, it was Arnold's first opportunity to use the desert setting that seemed to inspire him in some of his best subsequent movies. Based on a story by Ray Bradbury, the movie starts off in a gentle, lyrical mode, almost reminiscent of Our Town, as the narrator introduces the tiny Arizona town where the action will take place. Writer John Putnam (<a href="/players/P____84185/default.aspx" style='text-decoration:underline'>Richard Carlson</a>), a new arrival to the town and an amateur astronomer, is looking at the skies with his fiancée, schoolteacher Ellen Fields (<a href="/players/P_____9847/default.aspx" style='text-decoration:underline'>Barbara Rush</a>), when they see what looks like a huge meteor crash into the desert. Putnam and Ellen go to the site of the crash and find a huge crater. When he goes down inside, Putnam sees what is very obviously some kind of vehicle or device embedded in the ground, but before he can show it to anyone, a rock slide buries what he saw. He reports that a spacecraft of some kind is buried there and is duly ridiculed by the local press and some of his own colleagues in the astronomical community, and even Ellen has her doubts. The local sheriff, Matt Warren (<a href="/players/P____20054/default.aspx" style='text-decoration:underline'>Charles Drake</a>), is downright hostile because he believes that Putnam is not only an interloper, but has also taken Ellen away from him. Putnam is at a loss as to what to do, and doing something -- or, perhaps, not doing anything -- becomes a critical matter when various townspeople start to disappear, including Ellen, to be replaced by alien "duplicates." A small but significant part of this action is told from the standpoint of the aliens, who are only glimpsed in brief flashes as they move through the desert and the underground caves where they are hiding. Putnam ultimately comes to understand that the aliens are actually benign and only need time to repair their ship and leave; but by then, the sheriff and the rest of the town have started taking his original warning seriously and their intervention threatens the lives of everyone. Reason and a peaceful approach prevail, but only just barely, and the space travelers are allowed to go on their way -- in return, they restore the real townspeople. The movie ends on a hopeful note as Putnam predicts that someday, when we're ready here on Earth, the visitors will be back to make formal, peaceful introductions. ~ Bruce Eder, All Movie Guide6Taggedy Taggged (6-10)413http://www.spout.com/ProductImages/t19037xz5g8.jpghttp://www.spout.com/films/It_Came_from_Outer_Space/17502/default.aspxFilm http://www.spout.com/blogs/spoutblog/archive/2008/10/31/36853.aspx Post By: SpoutBlog
Post To: SpoutBlog on spout.com
Post Date: 10/31/2008 5:00:30 PM
Body: It’s Halloween, a time when sales of candy and rentals of horror movies spike off the charts. Candy has been around since the time of the ancient Egyptians, but the horror film is barely 100 years old. The genre is enjoying a resurgence in popularity over the past several years: right now you’ve got Saw V in wide release, Let The Right One In in limited theaters, the vampy teen Twilight coming up in a few weeks and True Blood making waves on HBO. Studios can’t seem to go more than a few months without releasing some sort of a zombie flick, and vampires are coming back into their own. But what was the first real horror film? Before movies existed, people had to get their scares from books and the local newspaper, but now you can just switch on cable and tune into NBC’s Chiller channel for instant scares. Check out a brief history of the horror movie after the break, and look just how far we’ve come. Georges Méliès is best known for his short film A Trip To The Moon, with the iconic image of the Man in the Moon with spaceship embedded in his eye like a bullet. He was born in France in 1861 and eventually became a successful stage magician, although he found more fame (but no fortune) as a filmmaker in the then newfangled art of cinema after seeing a demonstration by the Lumiere brothers in 1895. For the next several years he created some of the first films to feature special effects, especially using the “stop-trick” of stopping the camera and substituing something into the frame before resuming filming. Just watch any episode of Bewitched or I Dream of Jeannie to see this used ad infinitum. One of Méliès’ first films was Le Manoir du Diable, or The House of the Devil, which is considered to be the world’s first horror film. It’s two minutes long, extremely grainy, and not scary at all by today’s standards. It premiered on Christmas Eve in 1896, and was the first in a string of many short horror films, including Le Diable Noir, Le Monstre (check out the dancing skeletons!), and Le Chaudron Infernal. By the early 1900s, Germany was producing full-length feature horror films with Der Golem in 1913 (remade in 1920), as one of the first Frankenstein-esque films, Das Kabinett des Doktor Caligari in 1919, which influenced the look and feel of the classic horror films of the 1930s, and Nosferatu in 1922, which was one of the first enduring vampire stories. These movies eventually made their way to Hollywood, and by the 1930s Universal was making many of the horror films which are considered the “Universal Classic Horror” movies. Films like Dracula, The Mummy, and The Hunchback of Notre Dame were just some of the films that terrified audiences and launch the careers of actors like Lon Chaney, Bela Lugosi, and Boris Karloff. These movies persisted through the 1950s, although by then the fear of the atomic bomb had given rise to movies about irradiated creatures terrorizing mankind, like Them! and Tarantula. The possibility of aliens invading the Earth and having their way with humans was also a common theme in horror films, from Invasion of the Body Snatchers to It Came From Outer Space. The late 1950s also featured often gorier films, a trend that continued heavily through the 1960s. Hammer Films seized on the new obsession with gore and churned out low budget bloodfests often starring Peter Cushing or Christopher Lee. This period was also when Vincent Price rose to popularity, having starred in the very popular House of Wax in 1953, he went on to star in a series of low budger horror flicks for Roger Corman, based on the works of Edgar Allan Poe. Although films that were based in gore continued to be made through the 1960s and 70s, they were considered camp and didn’t break into the top ten. In 1960 Alfred Hitchcock turned the tables to show that it was often unhinged people who were more terrifying than ever with Psycho. Gone were the supernatural creatures, the irradiated monsters, and so on. But by now horror had become splintered and fractured with many different subgenres and categories. The late 1960s through the 1970s saw popular horror movies like Rosemary’s Baby, Jaws, The Exorcist, and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. By the 1980s, Jason, Freddy, and Michael were the top trio of movie monsters, who spawned multiple sequels that were all extremely formulaic and repetitive, and by the 1990s the fervor for horror movies had died down. Although in the early 2000s, horror movies became extremely popular again with supernatural movies like 1999’s The Blair Witch Project jumpstarting the craze that went on to movies like and The Grudge and The Ring, and “torture-porn” began filling seats with people begging to be grossed-out in movies like Saw and Hostel. We’ve come a long way since Georges Méliès flickering short films entertained audiences, and he could probably have never imagined the kind of horror movies people would be watch today. But he’d probably be fascinated by the special effects, and making inventive scary movies of his own. Originally posted on:SpoutBlog
]]>Fri, 31 Oct 2008 21:00:30 GMTSpoutBlogSpoutBlog on spout.com10/31/2008 5:00:30 PM It’s Halloween, a time when sales of candy and rentals of horror movies spike off the charts. Candy has been around since the time of the ancient Egyptians, but the horror film is barely 100 years old. The genre is enjoying a resurgence in popularity over the past several years: right now you’ve got Saw V in wide release, Let The Right One In in limited theaters, the vampy teen Twilight coming up in a few weeks and True Blood making waves on HBO. Studios can’t seem to go more than a few months without releasing some sort of a zombie flick, and vampires are coming back into their own. But what was the first real horror film? Before movies existed, people had to get their scares from books and the local newspaper, but now you can just switch on cable and tune into NBC’s Chiller channel for instant scares. Check out a brief history of the horror movie after the break, and look just how far we’ve come. Georges Méliès is best known for his short film A Trip To The Moon, with the iconic image of the Man in the Moon with spaceship embedded in his eye like a bullet. He was born in France in 1861 and eventually became a successful stage magician, although he found more fame (but no fortune) as a filmmaker in the then newfangled art of cinema after seeing a demonstration by the Lumiere brothers in 1895. For the next several years he created some of the first films to feature special effects, especially using the “stop-trick” of stopping the camera and substituing something into the frame before resuming filming. Just watch any episode of Bewitched or I Dream of Jeannie to see this used ad infinitum. One of Méliès’ first films was Le Manoir du Diable, or The House of the Devil, which is considered to be the world’s first horror film. It’s two minutes long, extremely grainy, and not scary at all by today’s standards. It premiered on Christmas Eve in 1896, and was the first in a string of many short horror films, including Le Diable Noir, Le Monstre (check out the dancing skeletons!), and Le Chaudron Infernal. By the early 1900s, Germany was producing full-length feature horror films with Der Golem in 1913 (remade in 1920), as one of the first Frankenstein-esque films, Das Kabinett des Doktor Caligari in 1919, which influenced the look and feel of the classic horror films of the 1930s, and Nosferatu in 1922, which was one of the first enduring vampire stories. These movies eventually made their way to Hollywood, and by the 1930s Universal was making many of the horror films which are considered the “Universal Classic Horror” movies. Films like Dracula, The Mummy, and The Hunchback of Notre Dame were just some of the films that terrified audiences and launch the careers of actors like Lon Chaney, Bela Lugosi, and Boris Karloff. These movies persisted through the 1950s, although by then the fear of the atomic bomb had given rise to movies about irradiated creatures terrorizing mankind, like Them! and Tarantula. The possibility of aliens invading the Earth and having their way with humans was also a common theme in horror films, from Invasion of the Body Snatchers to It Came From Outer Space. The late 1950s also featured often gorier films, a trend that continued heavily through the 1960s. Hammer Films seized on the new obsession with gore and churned out low budget bloodfests often starring Peter Cushing or Christopher Lee. This period was also when Vincent Price rose to popularity, having starred in the very popular House of Wax in 1953, he went on to star in a series of low budger horror flicks for Roger Corman, based on the works of Edgar Allan Poe. Although films that were based in gore continued to be made through the 1960s and 70s, they were considered camp and didn’t break into the top ten. In 1960 Alfred Hitchcock turned the tables to show that it was often unhinged people who were more terrifying than ever with Psycho. Gone were the supernatural creatures, the irradiated monsters, and so on. But by now horror had become splintered and fractured with many different subgenres and categories. The late 1960s through the 1970s saw popular horror movies like Rosemary’s Baby, Jaws, The Exorcist, and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. By the 1980s, Jason, Freddy, and Michael were the top trio of movie monsters, who spawned multiple sequels that were all extremely formulaic and repetitive, and by the 1990s the fervor for horror movies had died down. Although in the early 2000s, horror movies became extremely popular again with supernatural movies like 1999’s The Blair Witch Project jumpstarting the craze that went on to movies like and The Grudge and The Ring, and “torture-porn” began filling seats with people begging to be grossed-out in movies like Saw and Hostel. We’ve come a long way since Georges Méliès flickering short films entertained audiences, and he could probably have never imagined the kind of horror movies people would be watch today. But he’d probably be fascinated by the special effects, and making inventive scary movies of his own. Originally posted on:SpoutBlog http://www.spout.com/members/0/tags/sci-fi/MemberTagFilms.aspxsci-fi
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