Terror From the Year 5000 (1958)

An independently produced science fiction thriller whose lack of budget is plain to see in every murkily shot frame, Terror From the Year 5000 (1958) was released by AIP in support of either The Screaming Skull (1958) or The Brain Eaters (1958), two other, equally poverty stricken, independently made would be shockers.  Rather like The Brain Eaters, Terror From the Year 5000 has some interesting ideas (both films are also uncredited adaptations of recently published science fiction stories), but its budget precludes it from ever really doing much with them.  The Brain Eaters, though, at least manages to build up an atmosphere of fevered paranoia and has a weird, skewed, feel to it, whereas Terror From the Year 5000 mainly feels flat, with director Robert J Gurney Jr only intermittently managing to conjure any real atmosphere or feeling of strangeness.  The central conceit of scientists breaking the 'time barrier' and establishing contact with a future civilisation, starting with the exchange of objects and culminating with an actual person arriving from the future, has possibilities, but is here executed on such a small scale that it fails to have any impact.  It doesn't help that much of the 'science' on display is patently absurd: there is no way that carbon dating, which relies upon the rate of decay of radioactive elements to estimate the age of artifacts, could be used to date an object as coming from the future.

The film also falls back on the trope of associating physical deformity, particularly facial deformity, with evil, with the radiation scarred woman from the future turning out to be a murderous savage.  It also deploys another science fiction cliche of having her in search of present-day males to provide untainted DNA for breeding purposes, (it at least reverses the sexes in this iteration, as it is normally alien or mutant males seeking nubile earth women for such purposes).  But even by 1958 standards, its scenario of eccentric scientists independently pursuing radical research in their remote private laboratories must have seemed dated - like something out of a 1930s or 1940s poverty row mad scientist picture.  None of this would necessarily matter if the film moved at a decent pace, but the script instead takes forever to actually get anywhere, padding out too much of its running time with a tedious love triangle, before rushing through the most interesting part involving the woman from the future in the last few minutes.  In the final analysis, Terror From the Year 5000 isn't really that bad a movie, but it isn't that good a movie, either, committing the cardinal B-movie sin of being far too slow and uneventful.