Terror from the Year 5000

Terror From the Year 5000 is of American International's poorer efforts from the 1950's. It is one of those movies that is so bad it's good.

A scientist experimenting with time travel on a remote island in the Everglades manages to bring back a mutated woman from 5200 AD! She starts killing people and after replacing her face with that of a nurse she killed, she heads back to the future.

The cast includes Ward Costello, Joyce Holden, Frederic Downs and Salome Jens as the woman from the future. I've never heard of any of these.

Despite the very low budget, I rather enjoyed watching Terror From the Year 5000 and taped it when it came on BBC1 during the early hours some years ago. Luckily, I still have it on video.

Rating: 2 stars out of 5.

(FYI, I caught this movie on YouTube.)

The average IMDb ranking is currently 2.5 for this movie, which is twice as low as it ought to be. This is not a great movie, it's not even a particularly good movie, but it is not in the same abysmal league as truly bad grades Z 1950s scifi.

Other reviews have noted some of the cool moments in the movie, such as the woman from the future at first speaking Greek, not knowing exactly what language is being spoken in the time frame to wish she has returned from the year 5000. There are a few other such moments, which exhibit more cleverness than the scripts from a good many other super low-budget movies of the era.

That's not to say the script is good. It's too talky, and there are long moments of melodrama which in the hands of a decent script writer could have been replaced by moments of Science Fiction plot and dialogue instead (without adding a dime to the budget). The acting is better than in many similarly low-budget movies, but it's still not good. The one exception is Joyce Holden, who has talent, and mostly succeeds in imbuing her lines with personality.

I myself don't find this movie worthy of repeated viewing, but for genuine fans of 1950s science fiction it is worth a look.

As far as I know, this is the first American feature film about time travel via a time machine. A time machine was featured in the American serial BRICK BRADFORD (1947) and in the English comedy TIME FLIES (1944). Film firsts should be noted and applauded even if the films they appear in are otherwise unremarkable. TERROR FROM THE YEAR 5000 is a somewhat lackluster production with uneven performances and direction. I say that this film is shade a better than most other low budget quickies from 1958 in that its story slightly more imaginative. The time machine was something new to films in 1958, the bit with the hypnotic finger nails is certainly unusual and don't forget the four eyed mutant cat from the future. I thought the idea of having the future women at first mistakenly speaking Greek was a clever idea, since the present people had sent the future people with trinkets that had Greek writing on them. The make up for the future woman is quite poor, no wonder the director mostly kept her face hidden throughout. There is one scene where the scientists leave the island and go to a movie on the mainland. AIP studio heads must of come up with this scene to insert a little promotion. The film they go to see is AIP's I WAS A TEENAGE FRANKENSTEIN. Oh, by the way, I like the 1958 Edsel Corsair that Ward Costello drives.

As a child I fell in love with 'monster' movies immediately upon seeing my first (Frankenstein Meets The Wolfman) on television. Fortunately for me I grew up in the fifties, an era prolific with cheapie horror and sci-fi films. A neighborhood theatre ran them almost exclusively at the time and I attended every Saturday (and sometimes a couple more days per week in glorious summer). Just couldn't get enough of this stuff.

I could take all the giant ants, scorpions and spiders, all the ghosts and haunted houses, the numerous editions of frankenstein monsters and invaders from space pretty well. For some reason, though, nothing frightened me more or stayed with me longer than the rare feminine monsters. Perhaps it was because women were always the loving caregivers (Mom, Grandma, my teachers, my sisters). When sick, or waking from a nightmare we always call for Mom. So, I think the idea of a woman being a vicious, scary thing was such a perversion of all I otherwise knew, the effect on me was especially chilling. I had no problem with the mutilated faces of men as in 'Horrors Of The Black Museum', 'The Black Sleep', 'The Unearthly' and so forth. But the visages of the female victims in 'The Hypnotic Eye' and of the niece in 'Frankenstein's Daughter' always made me squeeze shut my eyes.

'The Astounding She Monster' is a prime example of these fears - a malevolent, radioactive female relentlessly stalking me, her touch meaning sure pain and death. From the age of seven until seventeen, that particular luminescent character showed up in my nightmares. But the single most frightening thing I ever saw was the female terror that came shrieking out of the time machine in this movie, arms pumping in a marching style, coming right at me. Peeling off another woman's face to wear as a mask was incredibly disturbing. Yep - this was the single-most terror of my childhood movie-viewing. I couldn't even bring myself to keep my eyes open for more than half a second when the movie closes with a close-up of this hideously deformed feminist with a wicked widow's peak. Even at the age of sixteen, surrounded by buddies watching it on the late show, my body kept freezing with fear, though I didn't mention it to them.

Going by most of the reviews here, today's audiences, accustomed to the most graphic horror, just find this monster boring. But I'm still scared of this terror from the year 5000. Oh yeah, and the four-eyed cat gave me the creeps pretty good too.

The titular menace in AIP's 1958 "Terror from the Year 5000" ('a hideous she-thing!' as the ads screamed) does not come from another planet but from Earth's future (5200 AD to be exact), a novel idea at the time but quite common since. Like her counterpart in "The Astounding She-Monster," both share the radioactive touch of death, this Future Woman revealing that every fifth child is born a mutation, and that their contaminated blood needs a fresh supply from the 20th century. Triple threat writer/producer/director Robert J. Gurney Jr. previously scripted the AIP sci fi comedy "Invasion of the Saucer Men," and does a pretty good job on the low budget, the lab located in an ordinary house on a coastal island in Florida (location shooting in Dade County), where two scientists have been trading objects from our time with those from the future, until the vain, glory seeking younger one brings back something alive, a cat with four eyes that gets dumped in the lake. Joyce Holden, sadly making her screen swan song, is a breath of fresh air modeling a nightgown and two bathing suits, former leading lady in Columbia's 1956 "The Werewolf," but it's the enigmatic Salome Jens in her film debut that audiences recall as the Future Woman, who alas only appears in the final reel. There's enough intrigue to last its hour long running time however, at least for male members of the viewing audience, topping a double billed in certain markets with either "The Screaming Skull" or "The Brain Eaters."