Saturday, September 16, 2017

The Outer Limits: “The Invisible Enemy” (Daystar Productions, Villa Di Stefano, United Artists Television, 1964)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night’s Mars movie screening paired Stranded with a TV episode, three short films and an intriguing “ringer,” a promo reel Paramount prepared for their proposed version of John Carter of Mars, the long-awaited film of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Mars books whose rights passed from Disney to Paramount back to Disney again, which ultimately made the film but scissored off the “ … of Mars” from the end of the title, thereby alienating science-fiction fans who might have flocked to theatres to see a film of the Burroughs Mars cycle and not attracting anyone else. The version Paramount was contemplating looks, from this promo reel (with some of the special effects, especially the detailing on the CGI of the animal characters, definitely unfinished), pretty much like the John Carter Disney actually released (and lost tons of money on). Easily the most professional piece of filmmaking we saw last night was the television episode, “The Invisible Enemy” from the 1963-65 series The Outer Limits, whose opening sequence I remember more than anything from the shows themselves: the TV image blacked out and an unseen voice started barking at us, “There is nothing wrong with your set. We have taken control” (and at the end the same voice said, “We now return control of your television set to you, until next week at this time, when we return you to … The Outer Limits”). 

This was from the tail end of the series’ run (episode 7 of season 2 originally aired October 31, 1964 — and I suspect that originally showing it on Hallowe’en was no coincidence) and it begins with a prologue showing the M-1, the first manned human expedition to Mars, which carries two crew members, one of whom gets out of the spacecraft, walks across a sea of sparkling sand and is on his radio telling his crewmate that everything’s just fine, when … his voice turns into a scream and then cuts off, indicating his death. The other crew member goes out and meets a similar fate, and then … after the original credits sequence we get a Lifetime-esque title, “Three Years Later,” and three years later the snazzier, more streamlined M-2 is about to land on Mars. Its mission is partly to do what M-1 was supposed to do — examine Mars’s resources to see what human colonizers would have available to them and what they would have to bring, or figure out how to make — and also to find out what happened to M-1. One of the quirkiest aspects of this show is the casting: the mission commander of M-2, Major Charles “Chuck” Merritt, is played by Adam West, who two years later would be Batman on the high-camp 1966-1968 TV version produced by William Dozier, while the mission control scientist is played by Ted Knight, Ted Baxter on The Mary Tyler Moore Show — and he did such a good job as the amiable bumbler Ted Baxter it’s hard to believe Knight as someone who’s supposed to be super-smart. Another is the director, Byron Haskin, who’d already entered Mars-movie hall-of-famedom with the 1953 version of The War of the Worlds and when he made this had just finished Robinson Crusoe on Mars (also with Adam West, though not as the title character!), which Haskin once hailed as the best film he’d ever done, only he hated the awful title its distributor slapped on it and blamed the title for the film’s commercial failure. 

The M-2 contains four crew members instead of just the two that flew on M-1, and they’re solemnly instructed by Mission Control that even if they leave the ship, they’re supposed to remain visible to the people in the ship at all time. Only one of the astronauts, curious about the wreckage of the M-1, goes behind it, out of view of his comrades in the spacecraft, and while he’s out of eyeshot a monster emerges from the “sea” of sand and gobbles him up. The people inside the spacecraft are alerted by his frantic screams in the last minutes of his life that something dire has happened to him, but they have no idea what it was. (One imdb.com reviewer asked why they didn’t carry video cameras with them so they could photograph the menace.) Eventually two of the people on the M-2 are killed by the menace and a third, Jack Buckley (Ricky Solari), goes out in search of the monster and escapes only when he realizes that it can only move inside the sea of sparkling sand — if he can get to un-sandy ground he can escape. Alas, Major Merritt goes out to try to rescue him and ends up stranded on a rock outcropping in the middle of the sand sea, safe from the monster but with no way of getting back to the ship — which is going to be piloted off the planet’s surface automatically within half an hour. The show’s final suspense sequence shows how Major Merritt drips some of his own blood onto his belt and throws it at the monster to decoy it so Buckley will have a chance to escape; then Merritt fires a nuclear-armed bazooka at the monster — only that has exactly the opposite effect intended: instead of knocking off the monster, it splits it open like a starfish and each piece grows into a new one. “The Invisible Enemy” has its flaws, mainly because Adam West is too uncomplicatedly “heroic” an actor to play a man at his wit’s end, desperately trying to survive (and the John Wayne vocal tics he goes into at times don’t help) and the monster itself is one of those hideous papier-maché contraptions that were also frequently the risible “menaces” on the original Star Trek series (which shared at least two key people with The Outer Limits, Robert Justman and Gene Coon, though neither is credited here), but it was still a clearly professional work and the best piece of filmmaking on the program.