It Conquered the World

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Movie
Original title It Conquered the World
Country of production United States
original language English
Publishing year 1956
length 71 minutes
Age rating FSK 16
Rod
Director Roger Corman
script Lou Rusoff
Charles B. Griffith
music Ronald Stein
camera Frederick E. West
cut Charles Gross Jr.
occupation

It Conquered the World is a 1956 science fiction / horror film directed by Roger Corman .

action

Paul Nelson accepts his old friend and fellow astronomer Tom Anderson's invitation to dinner. Anderson is ridiculed in the professional world because he vehemently warns against provoking alien living beings with satellites advancing further and further into space. Anderson tries to convince Nelson of his theory by playing strange, voice-like notes that seem to come from Venus . Nelson, however, remains reserved and incredulous.

Anderson's wife Claire, who, like everyone else, believes her husband is going mad, begs him to come to his senses. Anderson weighs and starts communicating with a stranger when Claire goes to bed. As it turns out, Anderson wants to help the being with the invasion of the earth, to incapacitate the people and - as the being claims - to protect them from themselves. Above all, however, Anderson feels satisfaction that he was right with his alien theory. When the creature, which turns out to be a bloodthirsty monster, arrives on earth with the help of a hijacked satellite and following Anderson's coordinates, it paralyzes communication and transport and makes individuals, including high-ranking military officials and the sheriff, submissive through mind control. People who defend themselves are killed.

Nelson visits Anderson again and tries to convince him to fight against the being and not to give up the humanity he despises, but initially in vain. Only when the creature kills Nelson's wife Joan and finally Claire, who has desperately tried to bring the creature down on her own, Anderson turns against the attacker and can finally destroy the monster, which he pays with his own life.

Background and reception

It Conquered the World was the first in a series of rapidly produced and filmed science fiction / horror films by B-movie specialist Roger Corman. The client was the film company American International Pictures (AIP). The production followed a commercially promising trend in American cinema in the 1950s, the invasion film, which is about the attack by extraterrestrial beings or mutated animals on humanity and with strips such as The Thing From Another World , The Day On Which The Earth Stood ( both 1951) and Battle of the Worlds (1953) began. It Conquered the world primarily quotes Die Demonischen ( Invasion of the Body Snatchers ), published in spring 1956 , whose motif of telepathic or other mind control of the attackers was to strongly influence the science fiction genre from then on.

It only took Corman five days of shooting to get everything done. The film premiered on July 15, 1956 as a double feature with Edward L. Cahn's The She-Creature . It Conquered the World made a hefty profit, especially when measured against extremely low production costs. The contemporary criticism praised the acting achievements as well as Corman's directing, but scoffed at the shallow script, the " special effects " (which were already below average for the time) and the art design of the monster, which today enjoys cult status among science fiction fans. Beverly Garland is said to have scorned "THAT conquered the world ?!" when she saw the model for the first time. In his book Keep watching the skies! In retrospect, film historian and critic Bill Warren counts the film as one of the more entertaining 1950s SciFis. Some things are sloppy, but others are staged in an original way. The plot and dialogues could have been convincing with a little fine-tuning.

Frank Zappa addressed the film in his song Cheepnis ( Roxy & Elsewhere ), a personal homage to B-Movies, in which he advocates the thesis the cheaper they are, the better they are . He described the monster in the film as " inverted ice-cream cone with teeth around the bottom"

The two lead actors Peter Graves and Lee Van Cleef later became known internationally, the former for his starring role in the television series Mission: Impossible accept , the latter as one of the most influential performers of the spaghetti western genre.

In 1966, also on behalf of AIP, a TV remake of the film was made under the title Zontar: The Thing from Venus . Directed by Larry Buchanan.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Mark McGee: Faster and Furiouser: The Revised and Fattened Fable of American International Pictures , McFarland 1996, p. 58
  2. ↑ Bill Warren: Keep watching the skies! American Science Fiction movies of the fifties. Volume I. 1950-1957. McFarland 1982, p. 293
  3. ↑ It conquered the World on IMDb.com