50's Sci-Fi B movies have to be my favourite bad movies. And even though I had to stay up until 3am to see this, it didn't disapoint.

I have no idea what the title is about. I think it just got pulled out of a hat, because I can't see any relevance to the film at all. They should have called it "Attack of the Improbable Space Omlettes". Anyway.

The year is 1958, and America and Soviet Russia are competeing over how many satellites they can get into orbit. Stock footage of a satellite being equipped and launced, complete with monkey. Unlike other satelites this one is designed to crash-land and be recovered, complete with a "sample of space" in a little vial.

The satellite crashes down in the New Mexico desert, and a soldier plucks of the vial (with his bare hands), and puts it in a big, heavy drum that looks like being magnetically sealed and airtight. This is then dispatched to Mad Scientist ("MS"), who wants to prove that there is life in outer space.

He has a lab set up at home which, even in the 50's, couldn't have been good for anything more than "My First Chemistry Set". His ex-wife is also paying a suprise visit, to try and get custody of their sun no that she's re-married. Her husband doesn't know that she was married before, and seems to be expected to believe that she popped out to do the weeks shopping and adopted a child on the spur of the moment.

Between arguments, MS does his science work, pouring the vacuum from the space-vial into a petri dish. He does this with his bare hands about an inch from his face. After that, science seems to consist of looking at cultures that he has grown in big glass jars and saying "Interesting. If anyone came into contact with any spores from this, they would die very quickly" into a tape recorder.

Ex wife leaves, having gotten a letter, telling the boarding school to give her the kid, and MS promptly gets eaten by the space-fungus (which looks suspiciously like an omlette), which he has named "Blood Rust". Before he dies, he 'phones the local airforce base and gets them to come and burn down his house, to contain the contagion.

They rescue the tape and burn down the house. Then they burn down the jeep they used to get there. Only they couldn't find stock footage of this so they used a toy jeep. Then the people who went there have a decontamination shower, which doesn't look like it would harm any spores that got inside your lungs. They disinfect the tape and play it, hearing ex-wife's voice.

Now, no-one knows that MS was ever married, so no-one knows who to look for, until they find the taxi-driver who took her from there to the railway station. He is decontaminated, but no-one asks who he's spoken to in the mean time.

Meanwhile, ex-wife has made it all the way to Los Angeles without being eaten by space-fungus. She buys a newspaper, discovering that MS is dead and the police want to talk to her, and runs away.

The baggage car of the train she was on is then found to be full of space fungus. Fortunatly, it can now be killed by a flame-thrower on such a low setting that the bags don't burn. Even though it happily survived re-entry. They don't bother tracking down the other passengers on the train.

They get a call from the manager of the hotel where ex-wife has checked in under a false name, and ordered all sorts of new clothes and some hair dye. They discover that she is heading for Hawaii. Her suitcase has space-fungus growing out of it now, even though it didn't an hour ago when ex-wife still had it. There must be something about her perfume that inhibts this stuff's growth.

The hotel amnager is not decontaminated, and nor are the delivery boys who have her contagious money in their pockets. In fact, they aren't even traced.

One of the Internal Security people gets on the plane that she might be on, and interviews all the brunettes wearing tweed coats on the flight. While they are in flight. Over the Pacific. Not exactly the best place to be, if people might randomly start dying.

Anyway, on discovering that none of these brunettes have drivers licences in the name that was used to book the hotel, our brave G-Man goes down into the luggage hold, only to see it swarming with space-fungus. At one point it tries to force the hatch open and get into the main body of the plane, but a couple of people standing on the hatch put a stop to that.

Then they turn the plane around, and head to a military airfield in California, and all the cheerful-looking passengers get bussed of to be decontaminated, presumably ending the terror.

Roll credits.

Rating: 2 Turkeys

Things that make you go "huh?": MS's exobiology lab.

wintermute