“It!” is a very enjoyable but dopey Saturday evening cosmic horror watch. Plenty of thrills and scares to keep you enthralled but posing a great gap in logic. A spaceship exploring Mars is infested by an alien beast which manages to stowaway on the vehicle’s return trip to Earth. Once the requisite crew members start to mysteriously go missing on the ship, it is discovered that the monster from Mars is aboard and preying on Humans for sustenance. There are some creepy, shadowy encounters where the hapless victims are hauled off and stored away as food stuffs. This scenario is reminiscent of the great “The Thing” (1951): a collection of men and women occupying an inaccessible outpost which is dramatically and adversely infiltrated by an alien presence. And the Humans are on the Menu!

The illogical aspect of this tale is the manner in which the astronauts decide to subdue their stalker. The beast is moving through the ship’s air ducts (think “Alien” and the claustrophobic air ducts Dallas scrambles through aboard the Nostromo ship). Various access panels to the air ducts are then booby trapped with grenades to try and blast the beast into submission. Also, pistols and rifles are shot at the monstrosity inside the Earthbound ship. Wow! Talk about walking on the razor’s edge. They run the risk of annihilating themselves first before slaying the intruder. I guess the ships were built a bit sturdier in the old days.

Still, “It!” definitely has its charms and is a very fine view.

“The Concrete Captain” appears as a segment of the “Ghost Story” TV show from the 1970’s. I remember watching a few of these shows when I was a kid and I can safely say that what was once a frightening experience is today a viewing experience of utter boredom. I have read other reviews of this show which describe it as a slow-moving affair and after my recent viewing, I would definitely concur.

This program got its start as the brainchild of noted horror author Richard Matheson and exploitation movie maker William Castle (“House on Haunted Hill”, “The Tingler”, “13 Ghosts”, etc.) With the impressive track record of these two talents being involved, a TV series was greenlighted. Unfortunately, Matheson would write only the first episode and subsequent efforts would see other writers involved and as a result, either by design or not, a slow pace approach to storytelling took over.

“The Concrete Captain” is no exception. A married couple celebrating their anniversary visit a coastal stretch of California. The wife gets a souvenir from her husband of a local landmark designating the final resting place of an old-time ship’s captain. The wife suddenly becomes possessed by the object and directs her husband to a remote old hotel she mysteriously knows the way to and there in begins a series of glimpses of ghostly characters and disembodied voices heard mingled with the continual howling ocean wind. Seems that the long dead captain is trying to lure his “wife” to assist him in freeing him from a tomb he was unfortunately interred in a century before.

That’s the best way I can describe this story because I am not entirely sure if that is what the writer intended. Oh, well. Close enough.

Some interesting special optical effects are used in this episode and the cinematography is stunning and actually quite beautiful. But the scares are few and far between and the whole premise is a little confusing. And slow moving.

An orbiting Soviet space station is rudely infested by an alien intelligence which kills the crew and transmits itself via satellite link to a Russian research vessel trolling the South Pacific. The ship’s crew soon faces the same fate as the Earth orbiting vehicle.

A salvage ship happens upon the floating Soviet derelict to retrieve its bounty but are soon confronted by robots and human/machine cyborgs. A mad scramble to survive ensues and we wait to see who will become victorious in this battle between Man and Machine Men.

Pretty wild stuff. For what it’s worth, Jamie Lee Curtis has disowned this movie as being among her worst.

Still, it is worth a viewing for those who enjoy malevolent villains and big gunplay.