Terror from the Year 5000 (1958)

****SPOILERS**** It's not just the mutant human beings of the year 5200 AD that need to be saved but those of us watching this turkey that takes the cake in being one of the worst horror or anything else movie ever released. I have to say that Salome Jens in her motion film debut is as hot as Kryptonite as the woman from the future when she takes on the appearance of the nurse that's sent to the off shore Florida island to care for the stricken from radiation Victor, John Stratton, whom she in fact infected with that deadly illness. It's Victor who played fast and loose with his girlfriend Claire, Joyce Holden, father Prof. Howard Lering's, Frederic Down's, time machine that brought this deadly calamity upon himself.As for Salome or the woman from the future her task was to bring the at first young and viral Victor back to the future to do, in finding no other word to call it, stud duty to replenish the by then dying off human race.You see after thousands of years of nuclear testing the radiation of those atomic teats has mutated the human DNA causing mutations that got to the point where one out of five babies being born were seriously defected and mutated. Now Solome or future women in her being brought back to the year 1958, the year that the film was released, was or is going to change all that.****SPOILERS*** Miss. Jens, a gem of a woman, was seen throughout the entire movie, not counting her impersonation of a nurse, in a tight fitting and sexy looking jumpsuit covered with what looked like dozens of shiny rhinestones who's reflection of whatever light was available made it difficult to see her. In fact Solome was so obviously strange and sinister looking that it was unusual that no one in the cast realized what she was really up to until, for Victor, it was too late. One of Salome's victims was the island handy man Angelo, Fred Harrick, who in what seemed like him trying to pick her up and make conversation with her ended up being radiated to death instead. The final scenes had Victor finally realized that he's being used by Solome, who hypnotized him, to do her not his bidding and caused him to revolt against her and finally put an end to all this back and forth to the future hysterics.

As a child I fell in love with 'monster' movies immediately upon seeing my first (Frankenstein Meets The Wolfman) on television. Fortunately for me I grew up in the fifties, an era prolific with cheapie horror and sci-fi films. A neighborhood theatre ran them almost exclusively at the time and I attended every Saturday (and sometimes a couple more days per week in glorious summer). Just couldn't get enough of this stuff.I could take all the giant ants, scorpions and spiders, all the ghosts and haunted houses, the numerous editions of frankenstein monsters and invaders from space pretty well. For some reason, though, nothing frightened me more or stayed with me longer than the rare feminine monsters. Perhaps it was because women were always the loving caregivers (Mom, Grandma, my teachers, my sisters). When sick, or waking from a nightmare we always call for Mom. So, I think the idea of a woman being a vicious, scary thing was such a perversion of all I otherwise knew, the effect on me was especially chilling. I had no problem with the mutilated faces of men as in 'Horrors Of The Black Museum', 'The Black Sleep', 'The Unearthly' and so forth. But the visages of the female victims in 'The Hypnotic Eye' and of the niece in 'Frankenstein's Daughter' always made me squeeze shut my eyes.'The Astounding She Monster' is a prime example of these fears - a malevolent, radioactive female relentlessly stalking me, her touch meaning sure pain and death. From the age of seven until seventeen, that particular luminescent character showed up in my nightmares. But the single most frightening thing I ever saw was the female terror that came shrieking out of the time machine in this movie, arms pumping in a marching style, coming right at me. Peeling off another woman's face to wear as a mask was incredibly disturbing. Yep - this was the single-most terror of my childhood movie-viewing. I couldn't even bring myself to keep my eyes open for more than half a second when the movie closes with a close-up of this hideously deformed feminist with a wicked widow's peak. Even at the age of sixteen, surrounded by buddies watching it on the late show, my body kept freezing with fear, though I didn't mention it to them.Going by most of the reviews here, today's audiences, accustomed to the most graphic horror, just find this monster boring. But I'm still scared of this terror from the year 5000. Oh yeah, and the four-eyed cat gave me the creeps pretty good too.

Hey, the night scenes were even hard to make out on the 1962 Zenith black and white TV, but it still scared us so much that my sister and I couldn't wait to be frightened by it the following year or whenever it was shown again and it was definitely tops on our scary movie list. I mean come on, Sorry, Wrong Number(1948) was pretty scary back then. But this hideous looking creature stole the beautiful nurse's face and the scene where she confronts the guy in the hospital bed is chilling indeed. This is one horror flick that has managed to stick in my mind for forty some odd years. Its not like it won any academy awards but neither did Hitchcock.

AKA "Terror From the Year 5000", shown on "Chiller Theater" back in the early 1970s... As kids, we called this the "Chicken Lady" movie because we thought the mutant Future Womans shrieks sounded like some kind of chicken (?)... Hey, but the name stuck...for us, anyway...Almost 35 years later and I still recall it as the single scariest *bleeping* movie I ever saw! I Picked up a DVD copy online to watch with my kids... of course now this thing is one giant wheel of CHEESE compared with modern day CGI gorefests and bloodbath flicks. And it is no longer "scary" to me at all; my kids laughed uncontrollably every time the Future Woman jumped out and fried someone with those radioactive Lee Press-On Nails! BUT...For my $$$ still rather see 100 movies like this than drek like "The Hills Have Eyes","The Devils Rejects" or "Saw"...Rather odd to notice now - as an adult - that Salome Jens, aka Future Woman, was ONE HOT BABE without that mutant makeup job!Hellllllllllooooooooooo Nurse Salome!