Cult Movie Vault #23: The Flame Barrier (1958)

Total Sci-Fi’s Guide to the Incredibly Strange and Obscure in Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror Movies

The Facts

Written by Pat Fielder, George Worthing Yates
Directed by Paul Landres
Produced by Arthur Gardner, Jules V. Levy
Music: Gerald Fried
Cast: Arthur Franz, Kathleen Crowley, Robert Brown, Vincente Padula, Rodd Redwing
Running time: 70 minutes
Also Known As: Beyond the Flame Barrier, It Fell from the Flame Barrier

The Plot

A scientist goes missing while trying to retrieve a crashed satellite from the Yucatan jungle. The team on his trail discover the satellite has returned with a new, alien horror…

The Lowdown

Following the launch of Sputnik by Russia in 1957 there were a spate of space-related cash-in movies, including War of the Satellites (1958), directed by Roger Corman. With a release date of April 1958, The Flame Barrier was written, cast and shot in just a few weeks in December 1957, and it shows…

You know something is wrong from the opening narration that explains the ‘flame barrier’ exists 500 miles above Earth, protecting our planet from unknown rays from space. At best this picture has its science seriously confused; at worse they’re just making things up!

Carol is searching for her missing husband Howard, who was tracking down a satellite that fell back to Earth in the Mexican jungle. There’s self-interest at work here: she won’t inherit Howard’s fortune until he is declared dead. The Hollister brothers, local geologists, are co-opted to trek through the jungle, find the satellite and the body, all for ten per cent of the fortune.

While the natives announce that “something deep in the jungle has made the Gods angry…” the audience waits for something to happen… There’s much trekking through studio jungle and deserted villages, leading to a brilliant climax that almost makes the trip worthwhile.

The explorers eventually find the crashed satellite, a fully-equipped laboratory and a chimp — a passenger on the experimental satellite — chained to a stake! The satellite has brought a deadly alien blob-like passenger back to Earth, and encased and preserved in the middle of this monster blob is the body of lost scientist, Harold Dahlmann!

This scene anticipates a now very famous cut scene from Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979). Restored to the Director’s Cut of the movie, the pre-release version of Alien saw Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley find Captain Dallas’s body wrapped in the alien cocoon. Dallas is still alive and pleads for Ripley to kill him. While much more gruesome and affecting in colour, the surprising scene right at the end of The Flame Barrier clearly prefigures the one from Alien in intent.

The original script conveyed the potential horror of this scene much better than the finished film: “Encased in this slime, this translucent, almost transparent cellular growth, is the body of Howard Dahlmann, perfectly preserved, hanging suspended, and quite lifeless. The whole makes a giant living pulsating mass of quivering malignant terror!”

The script goes on to describe a scene that doesn’t make the final movie, but would’ve been great: “In the centre of the satellite… now filled with the growth, appears an immense eye staring out!” Alas, the poor chimp is then disintegrated by the weird, cellophane-like alien blob. As well as Alien, the other film this scene most recalls is the all-colour thriller The Blob (1958).

It may not be a masterclass in filmmaking, but in echoing Alien, The Flame Barrier does prefigure one of the genre’s all-time classics.

Cult Cast

Arthur Franz was a character actor who appeared in many B-movies like Invaders from Mars (1953), Abbott and Costello Meet the Invisible Man (1951), Monster on Campus (1958), and Flight to Mars (1951). He often played the hero’s sympathetic friend, although he rarely played the leading role himself. A career on TV followed, with several episodes of Science Fiction Theatre (1955-56), Climax (1954-57), Men into Space (1959), One Step Beyond (1960), and The Invaders (1968). He died in 2009, aged 86.

Kathleen Crowley was Miss Jersey in the 1949 Miss America competition. She was big in westerns (as were many in the 1950s), but also appeared in Target Earth (1954), vampire western Curse of the Undead (1959). She also played Sofia Star in the Adam West Batman TV series (1966).

Director’s Cut

Paul Landres began his career in 1931 as an assistant editor, before becoming a prolific director of westerns and TV shows. Among the 1950s TV series he helmed were The Lone Ranger (1952-53), The Cisco Kid (1950-54), and The Adventures of Kit Carson (1953-55). He followed The Flame Barrier with the Boris Karloff hosted, short-lived series The Veil (1958), and later episodes of animal series Flipper (1965-66) and Daktari (1966-68). He died in 2001, aged 89.

WTF? Moment

The discovery of a skeleton — the flesh burned away by the blob monster — is a great B-movie moment, but it is the discovery of the blob-encased satellite and body of Howard that’s the real WTF? moment, made all the more powerful by the immediately following annihilation of the poor, innocent space chimp!

Behind-the-Scenes

The Flame Barrier was shot entirely on a soundstage with a very limited budget, and screenwriter Pat Fielder admitted that the film was a knock-off project designed to cash in on both a spate of jungle movies and the launch of Sputnik.

What makes the film interesting are the gaps evident in the story and the lack of some basic explanations, which allows the mind to fill in something more imaginative than could be shown. However, the film’s creators put this down to the script not being very good…

Cast Talk

“[It was] very, very hard work… That was a strange picture, a wild picture. When you get into these outer space type things, like Flame Barrier and Target Earth… You just have to have an imagination. I think the people who write these movies were more talented than some people would like to admit. They have great imaginations, and there really is a place for those movies.” — Kathleen Crowley, interviewed by Tom Weaver.