Stalked on a Spaceship! 10 Films Anticipating Pandorum
The very best -- and worst -- of intergalactic cabin fever
For critics, Pandorum has been like an alien in the ventilation shafts -- it's on the radar, heading towards them, but they just can't see it, no matter how hard they try. The glimpses from the trailer make it look, well, familiar, which got us to thinking about some of the of the movie's precursors, those examples -- both in the very best and worst sense -- of the sci-fi/horror sub-genre we like to call... "Stalked on the spacecraft!"
It! Terror From Beyond Space (1958)
While Alien had plenty of ancestors in sci-fi short stories and movies like The Thing From Another World, it's most closely compared with this 1958 low-budget offering. Fair enough, too, because this has an alien creature stowed away on a spaceship, picking off the crew and moving in the ventilation shafts. An air lock finds its way into the plot, too. It's creaky sci-fi at best, but not without amusement for the hoary old sexist dialogue and that seam running up the monster's back.
Frankenstein Meets the Space Monster (1965)
The laughs are all inadvertent in this one, even though its co-writer, respected poet and academic George Garrett reckons he originally penned it as a send-up. Martian Princess Marcuzan and her bald, Dr. Evil-looking sidekick Dr. Nadir arrive on Earth in their balsa wood spaceship to steal human women for captive breeding. The only obstacle to their nefarious plan? Earthling astronaut Colonel Frank Saunders who, after being made half cyborg by NASA, is made totally crazy when the Martians blow him out of the sky. Now a monster-type creature, Frank (enstein) rampages after the aliens -- and that means they unleash their "space creature", which is... Crispin Glover's dad Bruce Glover, making his film debut under a hundred pounds of furry costume. High tension ensues -- if by "high" you mean "belly", and by "tension" you mean "laughter".
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
Between charting, oh, three million or so years of human evolution in a breathtaking jump-cut and taking us into the light fantastic of infinity, Stanley Kubrick also made 2001 a chilling exercise in AI run amok. Granted, HAL 9000 doesn't lay eggs inside you, nor does he melt the bulkhead when his battery leaks, but his red-glowing eye is suitably demonic and he's close to omniscient when it comes to the Jupiter Mission. When HAL reads your lips and learns you're questioning his authority, look out, because the next step is him crashing a spacepod into your buddy and turning off the life functions of your other pals in suspended animation. Then, with you isolated outside the spacecraft, he'll refuse to let you back into through the pod-bay doors. Happily, here's where you take advantage of the genre's always-handy plot device -- the air-lock -- to get back inside and take his mind apart.
Solaris (1972)
Even HAL 9000 at his most functional would've been hard-pressed to label the source of terrific illumination in Solaris, Andrei Tarkovsky's existential mindbender remade, to little effect, by Steven Soderbergh a few years ago. Aboard the craft orbiting the liquid planet, neutrinos -- maybe -- will reorganize themselves into exact simulacra of the people you knew who are now dead or otherwise unavailable. Drawn from your own memory, they're so life-like it's... enough to make you want a Giger-style creature to kill you all off just so you won't have to think about it anymore.
Dark Star (1974)
Riffing on much of the above in the lowest possible budgetary form, John Carpenter's student film -- written with future Alien scribe Dan O'Bannon, with design by future Nostromo concept artist Ron Cobb -- recast 2001 (and maybe Solaris and Silent Running) as a psychodrama between disaffected living astronauts, an involved dead guy, a computer... and an alien represented literally by a beachball. Aside, perhaps, from the lobster shadow in Teenagers From Outer Space, it's the cheapest monster ever. But pretty funny, and it works in a galactic hippy tale where you don't trip into infinity but are blown into it or, maybe, surf it.
arendr on 09-24-2009 07:46 PM
Pandorum actually looks like a cheap rip off of Alien (which is to this day one of the most brilliant sci-fi movies I've seen).
Playboy Slim on 09-24-2009 09:03 PM
"Pandorum" is probably the worst sci-fi of the year. Worst horror? "Saw VI".