Go Retire Psychiatrist

Svengoolie Intro: “Calling all stations! Clear the air lanes! Clear all air lanes for the big broadcast!”

What I noticed last night while watching this movie was that I didn’t check the clock nearly as much I generally do with Svengoolie show movies. I don’t know what that means, other than dementia can progress in more subtle ways than I thought.

I’ve never seen the 1967 British movie “They Came From Beyond Space” and I found out that the film was based on a novel by Joseph Millard, titled “The Gods Hate Kansas” published originally in 1941 and republished in 1964.

The main players are Dr. Curtis Temple (played by Robert Hutton); Lee Mason (played by Jennifer Jayne); Master of the Moon (played by Michael Gough, pronounced “Goff”); Farge (played by Zia Mohyeddin).

I have a couple of general comments about the romantic and the fighting scenes. What’s up with Dr. Temple’s perfunctory peck on Lee’s forehead? They were supposed to be lovers but you gather that only from a few scenes, none of which involve torrid smooching like you mean it.

The fighting scenes were better, reminding me of the old west barfight brawls in which bodies and furniture are flying all over the place. The action was so frenzied at times between the extraterrestrials and the zombified earthlings that it ripped open a wormhole vortex allowing Walker, Texas Ranger to fly in and kick butt because, as everybody knows, Chuck Norris is the sole provider of justice in the cosmos. In fact, the movie is about extraterrestrials from beyond space because they’re too scared to be in the same universe with Chuck Norris.

Anyway, the ETs get to earth driving souped up meteors and immediately take over the minds of everybody except Dr. Temple, who has a souped-up silver plate in his head because he drove his souped-up Lamborghini into Lee Ho Fook’s Chinese restaurant known for souped-up beef chow mein which was immortalized in a Grateful Dead song about werewolves in souped-up Soho in London.

Lee gets possessed by the ETs in the meteorites and, like everybody else who gets zapped, assumes a flat affect and monotonal speech. The relationship between her and Dr. Temple goes from lukewarm to freezing immediately and the gang of roving UFO abductors build a factory bigger than the small town they take over. It turns out to be a cheese factory in keeping with the type of movie they’re in.

The movie takes on a modern ring when the townsfolk come down with what looks like the measles despite having gotten the vaccine and they all end up in the deep freeze.

Dr. Temple figures out the principle of how an effective weapon might help them cut the cheese margin gained by the monsters but he would have been helpless without the technical genius of his little buddy, Farge, who could actually build it.

There’s a showdown with the Master of the Moon, which is where everybody assumes the cheese guys originate although the surprise pops up when Dr. Temple manages to convince him that if he’d just said “pretty please” they could have avoided all the trouble of the freezer burn issues. OK, so as usual, no spoilers and I think the movie, despite the gadget ending, is fair. The fight scenes were good. I give it a Shrilling Chicken Rating of 3/5.