a.k.a. Beyond the Flame Barrier
company: Gramercy Pictures
year: 1958
runtime: 70′
country: United States
director: Paul Landers
cast: Arthur Franz, Kathleen Crowley,
Robert Brown, Vicente Padula
not on home video

Plot: A scientist goes missing while hunting for a downed satellite in the South American jungle.  His wife, with the help of two surveyors, follows the route of the scientist’s party and discovers that a mysterious force is killing animals and people in the area.  They eventually find the satellite, and the deadly space life brought to Earth with it . . .

This is an odd little amalgamation of exploitation genres – a standard skid-row jungle adventure with an unusual science fiction twist.  The first two thirds of the film are dominated by our three main characters either driving around the California countryside (no real attempt is made to make it look particularly foreign) or wandering through cramped sets filled with jungle foliage.  The traditional issues present themselves – the jeep gets stuck in the mud and the party members are menaced by local wildlife (including a very real snake whose head is manipulated by a rather obvious string).

The men are expectantly rugged know-it-alls who take every opportunity to remind the wife who’s hired them of how difficult and dangerous the trip is going to be.  The wife fights back by being the typical genre woman – wearing a dress to traipse through the jungle, recoiling in terror at the site of anything at all living (iguanas, snakes, tarantulas, etc.), and generally bogging down the pace of the expedition with her sexual inferiority.  While she’s not the worst drawn of 50′s genre women, she’s not much of an improvement over those seen in the likes of FROM HELL IT CAME.

Minimal interest is injected into the human drama thanks to the inclusion of a ramshackle love subplot.  Questions of the wife’s motivations for starting the trip (does she really love her husband or is she just after a hefty inheritance?) go mostly unanswered, though she’s locked in the welcoming arms of Arthur Franz within minutes of discovering her husband is dead.  The love story, if it can be called that, is par for the genre – a weak woman and a bossy man discover they’re meant for each other in the face of some terrible crisis.

It’s the terrible crisis of the picture that really provides the only reason for seeing it.  THE FLAME BARRIER plays on Cold War tensions and the escalating space race, revolving around the failed launch of a satellite (a dead ringer for Sputnik, though larger) and its return to Earth with an ambiguous alien threat in tow.  The menace in this case is of the same enigmatic variety seen in the contemporary Quatermass films and Hammer’s knock-off, X: THE UNKNOWN, though budgetary necessity restrains its threatening blobiness to a cave for the duration.

The build-up to the revelation of the would-be invader is memorable.  Strange sounds echo through the jungle as the party discovers disconcerting clues: a native chieftan left to die as sacrifice to the gods and skeletons that appear burned.  Eventually live people present with symptoms.  A native shows up covered in strange burns only to erupt in flame moments later, his body reduced to a smoldering skeleton in seconds.  The film is at its most effective while its threat is unknown, and manages some memorable if not terribly shocking images.

The revelation of the alien organism, a static blob of organic matter surrounding the satellite and with the dead scientist stuck inside of it, is a real letdown in comparison.  The nature of its danger to humanity is poorly conceived at best.  Early victims show what appear to be acid burns that cause death quickly, but not immediately, while the deadly electrical field said to surround the blob is shown to disintigrate those who come into contact with it more or less isntantaneously.  Any unease resulting from the revelation that the electrical field is growing at an exponential rate is quickly laid to rest, as our two surveyor heroes discover the solution to the problem a scant few minutes later.  Indeed, the only real danger posed by the blob seems to be to those stupid enough to wander into the cave and touch it, like a test chimpanzee that somehow survived the crash landing of the satellite and, in a asinine display of self sacrifice, one of the surveyors.

THE FLAME BARRIER is typical of the underfunded genre programmers that filled double bills towards the end of the ’50s.  The script, by Pat Fielder [THE MONSTER THAT CHALLENGED THE WORLD] and George Worthing Yates, recalls the latter’s work on the Bert I. Gordon vehicle WAR OF THE COLOSSAL BEAST from the same year but is nowhere near as accomplished.  The science fiction aspect never really gels with the paltry jungle adventure that dominates the first two acts, and the drama is too inept to be of any real interest.  Technically adept but visually bland direction from Paul Landers [THE VAMPIRE] does nothing to elevate it beyond merely passable.

This is one of a mountain of cheapie titles distributed by United Artists currently cluttering up the vast MGM library.  While many of these have made it to DVD via the seemingly abandoned Midnight Movies line, THE FLAME BARRIER has had no such luck and doesn’t seem to have ever had an official home video release.  It seems doubtful, especially with classics like THE QUATERMASS XPERIMENT patiently waiting in the wings, that this little clunker will be appearing on store shelves anytime soon.

While I generally lament the lack of a proper video release for just about anything, genre fanatics can rest assured that they’re not really missing much here.  THE FLAME BARRIER is another in a long line of budget-minded programmers that never takes off and leaves prescious little to recommend.  For completists only.