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Phantom from Space
By Marc | April 29, 2008
It’s been a while since my last bad movie review on Zontar, the Thing from Venus, so I’m long overdue for wasting hours of time. This time we’ve got Phantom from Space, a nice little film from 1953, produced and directed by W. Lee Wilder, the brother of Billy Wilder but creator of such epics as Killers from Space and Manfish. This movie is also part of my SciFi Classics 50 Movie Pack.
Of all the movies I could have picked to review, I think this could have been the biggest mistake. I chose it more for the length rather than synopsis on the package – 73 minutes.
It starts out with the narrator giving us some exposition of a UFO appearing over Alaska, then making its way to Santa Monica, California, while we are shown stock film clips until the real story starts. The object is being tracked by cars with radio equipment and giant antennas sticking out of the roofs, uh, mobile communication units. A woman comes running up to one of the “units” and says there is an emergency.
After some investigation and interrogation, the woman and her husband, along with their boarder (who had known the woman for years), were having a picnic. Somebody wearing a crazy diving suit approached them, so punches started flying. The husband is dead and the boarder is under suspicion of making it up. There is a subplot here that could have been developed and is alluded to, but no, it just ends here.
The cops are on the lookout for the attacker, so they get a police artist to sketch the guy. Holy cow is that guy not earning his pay! Either that was the best art 1953 could provide, that was the best they could come up with on the set, or they were going for the 2nd grade minimalist approach. The man and woman are let go after the description matches up with another attack at a refinery, and we never see them again.
Soon the team of movie heroes is assembled at a lab/science museum, consisting of the police detective investigating the attacks, some guy from the “Communications Commission”, a military officer, and a scientist and his assistant, Barbara. Occasionally Barbara’s idiot husband shows up with their dog and becomes emasculation personified. You should probably know about Joe Wakeman of the Chronicle. He’s your stereotypical reporter with the hat tilted to a jaunty angle, a huge camera, and slimy disposition. Not a part of the team, but he makes his appearances quite often.
It turns out the alien/attacker is invisible outside of his spacesuit. You know when he’s around, because you get some earsplitting Theremin tones accompanied by chairs moving and doors opening and closing. I’m serious about the earsplitting part. I had the volume turned pretty low and still felt like my head was going to explode.
The scientist and military guy discover that the space suit is highly radioactive, but not the helmet. Enough radiation to kill a man, yet they play around with it on a table with only rubber gloves for protection. The helmet is a breathing apparatus for methane gas, which invisible guy breathes, and the helmet is nearly empty. The two guys exit, leaving Barbara to continue her work, which mainly consists of pouring smoky liquids from one beaker to another. Strike that. It ONLY consists of pouring smoky liquids from one beaker to another. Whenever she does this, you know she is doing some serious work.
The invisible alien enters, frightens her after she notices a footprint, and then carries an unconscious Barbara off to who knows where. She comes to presumably in the same lab room, seeing a floating space helmet accompanied by forced breathing. She threatens him with a pair of scissors and lets out a tiny gasp when he takes them from her, and is perfectly calm and collected seeing the scissors tap something out on the table. Babs gets a pencil to write it down, inconspicuously grabbing an ultraviolet lamp. After shining the light on the scissors and seeing a human-like hand holding them, THAT’S when she starts screaming.
The suit has disintegrated, but not until our heroes have surmised that the “x-man” is not of this world and made of silicon.
Time to trap him, study him, and probably hold him for questioning by the police. A makeshift alarm system is concocted out of plywood, light bulbs, and wires. They’re in a lab filled with all sorts of gizmos and chemicals and all they can come up with is a few optical alarms hooked up to a piece of wood letting them know in which of 4 sectors of the lab there is an intruder.
Alert! They’ve got him! Nope, turns out to be Joe Wakeman of the Chronicle, trying to get a scoop in the middle of the night, so he is filled in on what is really happening. The team gets to the alien, wearing the helmet, and everyone is instructed not to make him nervous. Reporterman uses his super reporter powers and totally ignores these instructions by attempting to take a flash photo of him. Needless to say, Wakeman is attacked, the helmet dissolves, and the x-man dashes.
He’s trailed to the giant telescope and is finally fully seen by shining ultraviolet lights on him. After a bunch of tapping with a wrench, gasping for air, and making the dog excited, the alien dies and falls many feet to the floor. Now that he’s dead, the scientist lets us know that they don’t have to use the special lights to see him. How did he know? Beats me. Finally, like everything else the alien brought with him, his body dissolves into nothing as dawn breaks and everyone enjoys another smoke.
I’ve pretty much just given you a fairly detailed synopsis of the movie. It’s terrible, but the acting is slightly above the level of Zontar (that of grade school Christmas program understudies). If you still feel you need to watch it, go right ahead. If you’re still pondering, please don’t see it. Think of it this way: I wasted my time so you don’t have to. I love bad movies and I always will. But some, like this one, I have to write about to justify the hour and 13 minutes I lost.
Topics: Reviews | 1 Comment »
April 29th, 2008 at 3:17 pm
I’m glad you have this outlet to write about it. This way I don’t have to justify the hour and 13 minutes I might’ve lost after you explained the entire show, because I didn’t watch it with you. I can’t go to the same level of dumb, plotless movies you can. The movies I like tend to be dumb in other ways.