As a recent subscriber to Shudder, I assumed that everything in their catalog would be appropriate Spooktober viewing. When I got hit by the triple whammy of the title “The Terrornauts,” a fantastic logotype, and an evocative screenshot of a woman on a planet with two obviously-superimposed moons, I was hooked. This was going to be some charmingly old-school sci-fi horror.
During the opening credits, I saw that it was from Amicus Productions, which got me even more excited. None of the Amicus movies I’ve seen so far have been what you’d call good, but they’ve all been fun and charming as hell. That streak ends with The Terrornauts, which is one of the dullest movies I’ve ever seen.
The story involves a SETI-like project where a small group of extremely British scientists are borrowing time on a radio telescope to listen for signals from extraterrestrial life. When they finally do receive a strange signal, they try to transmit a message in response. That’s when aliens take them away, building and all, to a distant asteroid for some nefarious purpose.
If you’re like me (and I know I am), you can hear that and be completely on board. The problem is that the “action,” such as it is, takes an eternity to get started. Literally the first half of the movie is entirely about a couple of scientists having to deal with British bureaucracy and being worried that their project is going to lose its funding. Eventually the movie introduces a very fussy accountant and a very oi I don’t very much loike the look of that one, I don’t! woman who runs a tea service cart, both intended as comic relief. But they’re about as close to actual comedy as carob is to actual chocolate.
When stuff does finally get moving, it’s a decent enough 1960s sci-fi concept (it’s based on a novel called The Wailing Asteroid), with a solid idea of why and how aliens would want to be contacting Earthlings. And a pretty intriguing idea of the lead scientist having found something at an archeological dig as a child, something that led to his wanting to become an astronomer and find a way to communicate with extraterrestrials.
The way that story is delivered is via sub-Doctor Who sets, robots, and creatures, and some models that make Godzilla movies look hyper-realistic. The Earthlings do eventually end up meeting a group of aliens, and even calling them “low effort” is giving them too much credit.
There’s a sequence on the alien planet that, by contrast with the rest of the film, is way too short. Perhaps they could only afford one day of shooting on location, and they had to hurry back to their cheap set? In any case, it means that our action packed climax is a lot of this:
It’s not a horror movie by any definition, but I’m still including it in Spooktober simply because I got fooled into thinking that it would be charmingly dated sci-fi horror. There is about 15 minutes worth of stuff that’s interesting enough to be charming, and it probably would’ve been suitable for a children’s series that was a knock-off of Doctor Who or Star Trek.
I complain about Letterboxd a lot, but occasionally it delivers, and I did see this gem of a review from a user called “slippers”: “One of the best films ever made about terrornauts.”
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