Uncredited Remakes

Icons Of Fright has a fun post up called "Ted's" top ten uncredited remakes. "Uncredited remake" is a bit of a canard, because it implies that the "remake" knows about the original. For about 30 years, I'd heard that Alien was an uncredited remake of It! The Terror From Beyond Space!

Well, it was on recently so I finally had a chance to see it and, yeah, there are some similarities. But it's really a thematic similarity with some superficial resemblances that might reasonably be expected to occur in any random "alien monsters kills crew of spaceship" story—which itself is basically a variant of the "Old, Dark House".

If it's debatable whether or not Dan O'Bannon (Alien's screenwriter) saw It! it's even more dubious that Predator screenwriters Jim and John Thomas derived much, if anything, from the low-budget flick Without Warning.

Now, I noted immediately that Predator had the same story as Warning, but of course nobody knew what the hell I was talking about because nobody had seen the older movie. (According to the linked article, it was never released on DVD or VHS, which boggles the mind but seems to be true.) And my observation was tongue in cheek, because it's just a casual story similarity: Alien comes to earth to hunt humans, is stopped by a particularly feisty human. Despite the capsule at the article, there isn't a group of hired mercenaries in the older, cheaper flick, just...Jack Palance!

Without Warning itself seems to have been inspired, visually, by "Star Trek". The alien looks like the big-brained guys in "The Menagerie" and it throws little Frisbee-esque parasitic creatures that look like they're from "Operation: Annihilate".

And when I say "look like," I mean it looks like the crew busted into the prop warehouses at Paramount and stole the FX from the mothballed "Star Trek" show.

Both movies are sort of cornucopias of cheese, though. (Cornucopias of cheese?) Without Warning features Larry Storch as a scoutmaster and may be the feature debut of none other than David Caruso.

The triple-threat of WW, though is: Cameron Mitchell, Martin Landau and Jack Palance, all of whom probably figured they were on the downward sides of their careers. Cameron Mitchell would have been right but both Landau and Palance would go on to win Oscars well after this movie. Landau for his role as Bela Lugosi in Ed Wood, and Palance for his role as Curly in City Slickers.

And Ted thought he didn't have a life.