saud29 Reviews

It! The Terror from Beyond Space (1958)

This is Great!! Where do you think Aliens was derived from?

[8/10 · 21 October 2005]

Folks, most movies of the sci-fi genre from the 50's and 60's were low budget stinkers, the list is too long to mention. But this movie was well done, had suspense and a good plot, and most of all was the inspiration for Ridley Scott's Alien. The monster stalks the crew in the same fashion, moving level by level and picking off crumbs until a confrontation at the end.

You get glimpses of IT, and each time as his screen time increases so does the level of menace. I saw this years ago and got my 15 yr old son to watch it. Even he saw the similarity. Yes, the rubber monster costume isn't the greatest, but the mask is startling. Suspend physics for a bit and ignore the science from 1954, and you'll agree this was a notch above dreck like "The Beginning of the End", "The Snow Creature" or "Tarantula".

Everything old is new again. Just like "Earth vs the Flying Saucers" was ripped off into "Independence Day" (including the virus), "IT:The Terror from Beyond Space" stands up to its descendant "Alien". If you can get this movie on DVD, its worth it.

Asylum Erotica (1971)

A strange blend of erotica and slasher gore

[6/10 · 30 September 2005]

Wow! You ever wonder why you are who you are, and how you got this way? I saw this movie in 1973 when I was 12 years old. Didn't know it at the time, but it was happily inappropriate for a group of impressionable pre-teens. My day camp counselor who was about 17 at the time took us to see this along with a karate flick ("The Hong Kong Cat"). It was classic - the counselor and his girlfriend drinking beer & sitting five rows behind nine raucous and rowdy 12 year olds. Then when the first solo shower scene of one of the inmates comes on, followed by a pretty sizzling interracial lesbian vignette, we were dead silent. "Slaughter Hotel" is a roller coaster ride of wood-inducing soft core action, followed by well, slaughter. There are spots where they try to make sense of the story, but its basically a maniac loose in a hospital where all of the female patients are lusty and attractive. I remember thinking how I could get a job at a place like that? Years later it reminded me of the Richard Speck episode from the sixties, where he killed 8 nurses in Chicago. I got this on VHS from Amazon a few years ago, and it maintains its ability to stimulate. Yeah we were all marked after that movie. We later graduated to hard core flicks on 42nd St in NYC, but I digress..Rent this if you can, and see if doesn't maintain your ah, interest. Klaus Kinski probably removed this from his resume, but I consider this one of the godfathers of there slasher genre.