As mentioned previously, in “Impossible Voyages” I’m watching and writing about a run of new (to me) science fiction films to be watched over last year, which has extended to this year (2026). You can read the rationale and ground rules here. In the meantime, we are advancing from 1957 to 1958 with this movie, #36 in this series.
After the high-minded ideas of The 27th Day, we’ve returned to cheap pulpy monsters for 1958. But can cheap pulpy monsters also have high-minded ideas? Well, they can certainly try.
Spoilers Ahead
Terror from the Year 5000 (1958)
Directed by Robert J. Gurney Jr.
The Story: Archeologist Dr. Robert “Bob” Hedges is asked to travel to Florida to confirm the work of a colleague, nuclear physicist Professor Howard Erling, who purports to have developed equipment to allows him to transport objects across time, and claims to have received a radioactive statue from the future. Erling’s assistant Victor is suspicious of Hedges, believing him to intend to discredit their work. Victor also becomes quickly jealous of Hedges’ relationship with Erling’s daughter Claire, to whom Victor is engaged. In spite of the fact that Erling has put a temporary stop to the research, Victor continues with the experiments and eventually brings back to the present day a mutated woman who kills several people before hypnotising Victor with the intention of bringing him to the future, to his his genetic material to save a dying human race. Victor comes out of his spell only to save Claire from the traveller, killing them both.
Starring: Ward Costello as Bob Hedges, Joyce Holden as Claire, John Stratton as Victor, Frederic Downs as Professor Erling, and Salome Jens as both the “Future Woman” and a nurse that she kills and impersonates. Fred Herrick plays Angelo, a servant who is the first victim of the trailer.
Incidentally, Ward Costello is an actor that I realize that I have seen before, as Admiral Gregory Quinn in two early episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation (here and here, if you are interested).
Comments: When I say that Terror from the Year 5000 aspires to have some high-minded ideas, I’m pretty much talking about the ending. After the Future Woman is defeated (at the cost of Victor’s life), Bob and Claire reflect on the fact that even though she did some pretty heinous things, she and her world are suffering, and legitimately need help. Should they even go into the future to try to offer that assistance, even though it might risk bringing other like Future Woman back to attack them? To this Professor Erling offers another way: “The future is what we make it. Whether there will be creatures like her depends on us. On all of us. On mankind. On what we do today…in the present.”
It’s earnest and heartfelt, but way too hokey to take seriously, especially coming at the last minute the way that it does, after the movie has mostly been a run-of-the-mill sci-fi horror flick.
Actually, that’s not quite true. For most of the Terror of the Year 5000, it’s more of a melodrama than anything else. Loads of runtime is spent watching the love triangle between Bob, Claire and Victor develop, and go as badly as you might imagine. Victor’s self-destructive insecurities drives this, but he’s not alone in the blame: Claire seems only too willing to throw herself into Bob’s arms when she is supposedly still engaged to another guy. And Bob doesn’t show a lot of scruples about the infidelity either.
All of this is potentially interesting, but it goes on too long. I found myself wondering when this titular terror was going to actually show up?
Eventually it does, of course, in the form of a young Salome Jens (over 36 years before she starting appearing as the Female Shapeshifter in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine) covered in make-up to make her appear like a mutant from the future.
There are some efforts to make her visually interesting in spite of the movie’s evident low budget–she remains obscured for a big chunk of the time, a sort of glittering shadow only briefly spotted through the brush. Actually at first I thought she was supposed be some sort of living statue (since the first thing to come from the future was a little statue) but that of course was not the case.
Not surprisingly, something called Terror from the Year 5000 becomes more interesting after the Terror comes on screen, but there’s not enough plot or incident to sustain interest for even that limited period of time.
The movie is only just over an hour long but it’s still drags, with the drama being tepid and the thrills too little too late to make sitting through all the other material worth it. It’s not the worst movie that I’ve seen on this series (that’s got to be this or that, I think) but it’s in one of the least memorable.
Although to give credit where credit is due, there is this gruesome image of a dead mutated cat that you get to sell the idea of how bad things are in the Year 5000.
That was certainly something that stuck.
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