It Conquered the World ** (1956, Peter Graves, Beverly Garland, Lee Van Cleef ) – Classic Movie Review 2485

Producer-director Roger Corman’s 1956 monster movie stars Peter Graves as a well-meaning scientist called Dr Paul Nelson. Lee Van Cleef plays Nelson’s old friend and fellow scientist, the disgruntled Tom Anderson, who cultivates the friendship of a giant cucumber (or is it an ice-cream cone?) alien creature from the planet Venus, which secretly wants to take control of the Earth.

Tom makes contact with the Venusian creature Zontar using his radio transmitter, to help to bring peace and save doomed humanity from itself. He guides the alien monster to Earth from Venus to rid mankind of feelings and emotions by telling the alien which humans it should attach mind control devices to. But that ends up only threatening civilisation as we know it, starting with Zontar disrupting all electric power on Earth, including motor vehicles.

And mayhem and death result after Paul comes home to find his wife Joan (Sally Fraser) newly assimilated by a flying bat-like creature that carries the mind control device. Then Tom’s wife Claire Anderson (Beverly Garland) sets off with a rifle for the alien’s cave to try to kill it and the scientists rush after her.

This is an endearing if pretty daft cheapo slice of sci-fi hokum, made in the spirit of 50s paranoia by enterprising producer-director Corman, patterned after Invasion of the Body Snatchers and It Came from Outer Space, but without the budget necessary for the basic production values needed for such a project.

The cast also includes Sally Fraser, Charles B Griffith, Dick Miller, Jonathan Haze, Taggart Casey, Karen Kadler, Paul Harbor Thomas E Jackson and Russ Bender.

Corman later said about the heroine Beverly Garland: ‘Always make sure the monster is bigger than your leading lady.’ When Garland first saw the creature, she commented: ‘That conquered the world?’ and kicked it over.

Corman called in Charles Griffith to do a final rewrite, two days before filming began. Griffith said about the creature: ‘I called it Denny Dimwit and somebody else called it an ice-cream cone. I was around when Paul Blaisdell was building it, and he thought the camera would make it look bigger.

The creature is by Paul Blaisdell, who also played one in Voodoo Man. The design of the creature was Corman’s idea. He reckoned because it came from a big planet, it would have evolved to deal with heavy gravity and would be low to the ground. Later he said it was a mistake, the creature would have been more frightening if it was larger or taller.

An X certificate of the day, it is a PG now. British censors were worried about the scene near the end where the creature is destroyed by a blowtorch, on the ground that it depicted cruelty to animals. AIP successfully argued an enemy alien from outer space was not an animal!

It was later re-worked as Zontar, the Thing from Venus.

It was released as a double feature with The She-Creature by AIP, whose executive Samuel Z. Arkoff, employed his brother-in-law Lou Rusoff to write the scripts for both films.

© Derek Winnert 2015 Classic Movie Review 2485

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