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mst3kproject · 7 years

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Spacemaster X-7

On this outside this looks like an extremely unpromising movie. The closest thing it has to a star is Moe Howard from the Three Stooges, and it was written by George Worthing Yates, who also penned Bert I. Gordon classics like The Amazing Colossal Man, Earth vs the Spider, and Tormented. One of the main characters is portrayed by actor Bill Williams, whose list of poor career decisions includes playing Dutch in The Giant Spider Invasion and deciding his stage name would be William Williams – at least the other William Williams in show business put that 'Dee' in the middle! The plot features a rocket full of monkeys going into space and bringing back an amorphous hostile life form that is kept inexpensively off-screen for most of the run time. And of course, there's the title, which is reminiscent of Rocketship X-M and has even less to do with what actually happens in the movie. And yet, despite all these ingredients for disaster, Spacemaster X-7 is actually shockingly good.

Dr. Charles Palmer has discovered life on Mars, which is awesome! Too bad the life in question is a virulent reddish fungus that thanks him for naming it 'blood rust' by eating him and having the rest of his laboratory for dessert. The Department of National Security kills the fungus by burning down the lab, but then they have to track down Dr. Palmer's ex-girlfriend, Laura Greeling, who may have gotten the spores on her clothes when she dropped in to demand full custody of their son. Even worse, because the existence of the blood rust is a secret, Laura hears about the fact of Palmer's sudden death but not the cause. Afraid she will be charged with his murder, she flees across the country, leaving a trail of blood rust in her wake!

There's a fair bit of suck in this movie. The blood rust itself is rarely seen, and when it is, it's sheets of rubber with a bit of goo on top, 'animated' by pumping air through it. It looks more like bubble gum than an alien life form and you can definitely see why they chose to show it as little as possible. Half the story is narrated at us by a guy in glasses sitting at a desk, literally reading his lines off the script, which nearly kills the movie before it can even get started – nothing the narrator says couldn't have been exposited at us in another way. There's a horrible scene in which Moe the Cab Driver describes Laura to a police sketch artist, with constant emphasis on how attractive she was. And the ending is far too abrupt with a lot of things taken for granted, and no closure on a couple of points.

Once it gets started, however, it sucks you in. Much like Them! (also written by George Worthing Yates), Spacemaster X-7 knows that its special effects are dumb, and doesn't want to spend more time looking at them than it absolutely has to. Rather than being a monster movie, it therefore detours into a mystery of sorts, with the Feds looking for Laura and her trying to escape them. Progress is slow, but steady: first they only know that this woman exists, then they get her description, then her name, then come face-to-face with her and almost miss her. Meanwhile we see Laura herself becoming ever more terrified and desperate, changing her appearance and leaving her luggage behind in the effort to avoid arrest – and spreading more blood rust as she does.

Stories based on a lack of communication tend to be annoying. In the hands of a bad writer, situations can become ridiculously contrived as coincidence after coincidence must pile up to keep the misunderstanding going long after normal, sane people would have just talked to each other. Spacemaster X-7's first strength lies in finding a situation where this works. The air force can't just announce that Laura is carrying an infectious organism from another planet, because that might prompt a panic. They can't explain it to Laura personally, because they don't know where she is. They have to let people know that finding her is urgent, but can't say why, so they merely say she's 'wanted for questioning', which is not reassuring to her.

Furthermore, Laura herself doesn't seem like an unreasonable person. We meet her demanding custody of her child, whom she believes Palmer is neglecting. Palmer is a huge asshole, but what we see of Laura here doesn't make her look like a saint, either. She's gotten married and started a new life for herself, and she has no intention of letting her less-than-savoury past disrupt her newfound happiness. Herein lies her problem: if she talks to the police about her visit to Dr. Palmer, they might let it slip to her husband that she had not gone to adopt her dead sister's son like she claimed. We in the audience know that Laura is not a very nice person, and we know that what she's doing is causing damage, but the longer we spend with her the most sympathetic she becomes, and we worry about what will happen when she's caught at the same time as we know she must be.

Laura's crowning moment as a character is when she finds out, second-hand, about the blood rust and what her actions have meant for the strangers around her. Although she has every reason at this point to fear both exposure and punishment for fleeing the police, she immediately turns herself in. Her own problems, as overwhelming as they seem to her, are nothing with the fate of the world at stake.

Unfortunately, with that done, the movie just ends. I would have liked to see Laura reunite with her husband and son and know either that she's going to live happily ever after with both of them, or that her past is out and her husband has left her but she gets to know she saved the world. Either would do – we know Laura well enough by now to want to see how her story ends even if it ends in ruins. All we see, however, is her getting on a bus with the rest of the passengers from her flight so that they can be decontaminated, and it's over.

This is only one of a couple of anticlimaxes. As the movie nears its end, the airplane Laura has boarded is trying to make an emergency landing – the blood rust in the luggage compartment is growing out of control, damaging the plane and trying to break into the passenger area. This has actually been fairly suspenseful and we're primed to see it come to something. We want the passengers to get off the plane just in time, before the blood rust tears it to pieces. We want to see the decontamination crews move in to torch the remains while the passengers react with both terror and relief. Instead, it just lands and everybody walks calmly on to the buses. So far, Spacemaster X-7's pursuit plot has managed to keep our minds off how cheap it is (the guy who made the blood rust itself literally did it for free just so he could say he'd worked on a movie), but in the final moments it reminds us that effects are expensive, while stock footage is not.

Another problem with the movie is that we never get to know the people who are technically our heroes, Agents Rattigan and Hand. These are merely government spooks chasing Laura across the country. We know they're the good guys because we're told they're the good guys, but we never get to know them as people the way we do Laura. Maybe this is intentional, to help encourage us to sympathize with her, but a little more attention paid to our protagonists would have been nice. Plenty of crummy sci-fi movies have given characters like these at least a semblance of personality, even the ones who consider them disposable mooks!

I don't think Spacemaster X-7 is trying to make a point about the nature of government secrecy. The movie certainly does present a situation that could be used to argue either side: if the televised and radio announcements that they were looking for Laura had included the information that she was unwittingly carrying something dangerous, she probably would have turned herself in far sooner. On the other hand, it would also have told the whole world that a nasty organism from outer space had arrived on Earth, opening up the possibilities of mass panic and of other interests trying to get a sample of blood rust in order to study or weaponize it. If the characters had ever had a discussion about this, I'd figure it was probably the point, but as is, it sits there as something they could have explored but didn't bother.

Finally, Spacemaster X-7 is also the absolute pinnacle of 50's false movie advertising. The title is taken from the name of the space probe that supposedly brings the blood rust back to Earth. There were probably plenty of lurid and exaggerated titles they could have given the movie, but they chose the one that made it sound like it takes place in outer space. The movie's poster features the obligatory phallic rocket with the even-more-phallic tagline piercing new worlds of TERROR! and absolutely nothing to indicate that most of this movie is a police investigation! The people who went to see it in theatres must've felt downright lied-to, especially when the a-picture preceding it was The Fly, a movie that's about exactly what it says it's about!

What we've got here, really, is a good middle of a movie. The opening, with the narrator and the stock rocket footage, sucks. The ending might as well be a cut back to the narrator, telling us that they can't show us what happened next because the production company ran out of money. It took them a while to pick up the ball, and once they had it, they dropped it before they reached the goal, but for forty minutes or so Spacemaster X-7 is actually a pretty good little movie.

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