A few good ideas don’t go very far in Robert J. Gurney’s tawdry Terror from the Year 5000, re-titled Cage of Doom when it was released in the UK. They’re all poorly developed by Gurney, the writer/producer of the equally lamentable Invasion of the Saucer Men (1957), though as Bill Warren points out in his seminal work Keep Watching the Skies! American Science Fiction Movies of the Fifties, his is the first American film to feature a time machine.
Not much happens for the first hour or so. It opens with an echoey and none-more-50s voice-over announcing the imminent smashing of the time barrier before we’re introduced to our first leads, scientist Howard Erling (Frederic Downs) and his assistant Victor (John Stratton) who have made a machine that opens a portal into the future. They receive a small statue through it that they send to archaeologist Robert Hedges (Ward Costello) for examination. Using carbon dating (don’t try to work out the science, it’ll just make your head hurt…), he’s astonished to find that it’s not only radioactive but comes from the year 5200 AD (Terror from the Year 5200 presumably didn’t sound snappy enough as a title). En route to Erling’s Florida laboratory, Hedges teams up with Erling’s daughter (and Victor’s fiancée) Claire (Joyce Holden).
At the laboratory they find that Erling has shut the experiments down but unbeknown to all, Victor (who becomes insanely jealous of the growing relationship between Claire and Hedges) is secretly continuing them. After several more retrievals from the future, Victor increases the power levels, allowing through a screeching mutant woman (Salome Jens) who attacks Erling’s creepy, Peeping Tom handyman Angelo (Fred Herrick) before stealing the identity of a nurse. She’s after that hoariest of 50s pulp SF clichés, healthy breeding stock for a radiation-ravaged future and hypnotises Victor into travelling back through the portal with her.
Gurney sets up his ideas (some of which would be echoed, after a fashion, a few years later in Fred Hoyle’s A for Andromeda, a 7-part television serial made for the BBC in 1961) but quickly grows bored with the meaty science fiction ideas, getting bogged down in a far from interesting love triangle and a mystery that never really resolves itself satisfactorily. Had he stuck to the genre elements and not bothered with the swimming expeditions, leering shots of Joyce Holden getting undressed and bickering between jealous lovers we might have had a better film, though as it is he’s barely able to fill 66 minutes of running time.
And yet at the same time, Gurney is capable of isolated moments of real atmosphere and suspense. Things perk up notably once Salome Jens arrives as the visiting future woman in the last ten minutes. Her character is straight from the most cash-strapped of pulp magazines, using her fingernails to hypnotise people and strutting about in high heels (presumably as resistant to radioactivity as the rest of her costume is meant to be) but she brings a bit of much-needed pizzazz to a script that had long since run out of steam. Her first appearance features the film’s only real special effect, a haze of dots scratched int the emulsion of the film (we later learn that her suit is covered in mirrors) which is awfully cheap but undeniably quite effective.
There are effective moments elsewhere too – the discovery of a multi-eyed mutant cat, an arm reaching out from the time portal to grasp at Victor, the occasionally atmospherically lit shot (courtesy of director of photography Arthur Florman) and the future woman’s ability to steal the face from a nurse using a special a mask. But all too often the film has a weary and slightly browbeaten film to it, as if Gurney was aware of both the paucity of his budget and his inability to overcome it. It limps along from one scene to the next without much conviction the cast barely bothering to bring any energy to their roles and the more interesting elements of the story being forced to play second fiddle to the dreary romantic shenanigans.
No-one is credited for the abysmal score that skips around from typical 50s SF film bombast to cues that seem to have been lifted from a cheap sitcom. IMDB claims that Richard DuPage’s wrote it, uncredited, but to be honest it’s so eclectic yet still undistinguished that it sounds more like a random assemblage of library cues than a cohesive piece of work.
As of June 2020, the Wikipedia entry for the film claims that it was based, uncredited, on a short story by Henry Slesar, Bottle Baby, that had been published in the April 1957 edition of the science fiction magazine Fantastic. In truth the story’s bear no resemblance to each other at all – in Slesar’s story, a tiny female alien arrives of Earth in search of men to have sex with and not a murderous woman from the far future.
Terror from the Year 5000 was produced by American International Pictures who paired it on double bills, first with The Screaming Skull (1958) and later with The Brain Eaters (1958).
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