ThedevilChoose When a movie has you begging for it to end not even half way through it's pure crap. We've all seen this movie and this characters millions of times, nothing new in it. Don't waste your time.

Aiden Melton The storyline feels a little thin and moth-eaten in parts but this sequel is plenty of fun.

Janae Milner Easily the biggest piece of Right wing non sense propaganda I ever saw.

Lela The tone of this movie is interesting -- the stakes are both dramatic and high, but it's balanced with a lot of fun, tongue and cheek dialogue.

Leofwine_draca Strong technical production values highlight this passable science fiction offering from the '50s, which is good because it lacks both action and excitement. The budget is a big hindrance in that the special effects of the space-fungus going on a rampage really are dire; a moving sheet with some lumps of rubber stuck to it does not make a threatening menace in my opinion, nor does the sight of a pizza coming out of someone's suitcase. Despite the flaws and lack of any worthwhile B-movie thrills, the film is watchable thanks to a strong cast and their well-developed characters. For once in a '50s film we grow to like and have an interest in the characters involved, whether it be Lyn Thomas's "Typhoid Mary" character, a woman who unknowingly carries the extraterrestrial bacteria upon her, or Robert Ellis as the driver-turned-hero. Strong character turns from Bill Williams - as the stern, deadly serious John Hand - and Paul Frees as the angry and love-struck scientist highlight the rest of the supporting cast to good effect.Unfortunately the title is something of a misnomer, seeing as this is a purely earthbound thriller with little in the way of sci-fi elements. Instead, much of the film opts for a hard-boiled detective story approach with only a few moments in dingy laboratories or with rampaging monsters. The pacing is fast and the music under worked but effective and the dialogue sharp. Never does the film become boring or outstay its welcome, as the short running means the film is compacted down into a series of short, often gripping scenes. The military investigation into the fungus is kept interesting thanks to the aforementioned characters and events culminate in a thrilling episode on a plane, where the virus gets loose. Sadly this is followed by an unexplained conclusion; one moment we see the fungus covering the plane, the next it has disappeared and everyone is walking away into the sunset happily. What?! I guess they really did run out of budget at the end of the film and just had to tie it up as quickly as possible, no matter how unsatisfactory that might be. Otherwise, SPACE MASTER X-7 is an intelligent, non-campy and effective '50s thriller surprising in its maturity considering the cheesy theme.

MartinHafer Dr. Pommer (Paul Frees) is an arrogant and somewhat crazy scientist. He's in charge of an experiment where a space probe (hence the title of the film) is launched to try to capture "space spores". The experiment is a success BUT the spores are deadly. He soon realizes that they could breed uncontrollably and on protein (such as blood or flesh)--yet he continues to work on these spores all by himself in his own private lab--without adequate safeguards in case these spores got loose. And, not surprisingly, they eventually do--consuming the doctor. When this is discovered, the place is burned and fumigated and everyone who came in contact with the place was completely decontaminated....but this might not be enough. A woman, Pommer's lover, was apparently there but has since left. Could she be unknowingly transporting this fungus with her? This so-called "blood rust" has already apparently consumed the surface of Mars--would the Earth, too, soon become the next "red planet"?! I expected that the rest of the film would be an Earth versus the monster sort of thing, but instead of showing giant fungi attacking buildings and civilians, it was instead more of a detective-type movie. Much of the film shows the governmental authorities in their frantic attempts to find this woman. At the same time, she THINKS they are after her about some crime or that the police exposure might tip off the police about her affair--so the harder the authorities try to hunt for her, the harder she tries to vanish! This approach was pretty interesting--a definite improvement over just another monster from space film.Overall, an interesting sci-fi film that made the idea seem almost possible. Good acting and production values carry this film and make it worth seeing....really...even if the fungi looks pretty weird. The only negative is the use of stock footage of the plane landing--the markings aren't even the same as the plane you see in the film and it even appears to be a different model of plane!By the way, Paul Frees, while not a household name, is someone you will probably recognize when I tells you why he's famous. While he acted in quite a few films and wrote music for quite a few more, he's most known for his voice work--such as dubbings of films, TV shows (such as playing Boris Badenov on the "Bullwinkle" show) and the voice of the narrator in the haunted mansions at Disneyland and Disney World.Also, in an odd cameo, Moe Howard of the Three Stooges fame plays a cab driver. He was between contracts and earned a few dollars in this small role.

kc5arb I figure I saw this gem when I was about 11, back when I lived in Queens NY.My memories are similar to the other notations on this flic, except that I was too young to form an opinion about its artistic merits. My real memory was the term blood rust, and the memory of a scene where detectives were finding it in a boxcar. (Ok, its possible I mixed that one up with a scene from "Them". I remembered it as the b part running with This Island Earth, but it may well have been playing with the Fly, as others indicated. The long and this short of it was that this one bugged me, as I could until recently find no movies referenced to "blood Rust". None of the printed compendiums of Sci-Fi movies helped. A recent call for help on another web site finally gave me the Space Master title, which did the trick! A 45 year mystery solved!Now I need to find a copy!

michael.will Behind this bland, forgettable and indescriptive title is one of that decade's more interesting low budget items. "Blood Rust" was probably the script's original name, and this refers to the red coloring of Mars which, as is found out on the return of a space probe, is a fungal overgrowth that could easily thrive on the Earth. THE ANDROMEDA STRAIN, while not exactly a remake, shares both the panicky concept and something akin to realism in its approach. SPACE MASTER's an Edward Bernds quickie, no nonsense drive-in fare with logic secondary to pace, but there's a continual teetering on the edge of DETOUR-like brilliance that makes it, if not a classic, quite exceptional.The strength of writing is ever evident, as the threat to humanity theme is subverted away from the usual conquering hero routine to documentary-like police procedural, the pursuers taking on near anonymity as our attentions, and sympathies, focus on the fleeing "Typhoid Mary". She's finely played by Lyn Thomas, a mature and intelligent 50s beauty in the Jan Sterling mode. We're told just as much as we need to know about her, that she once was involved in an S&M fling (I kid you not, it's ALL THERE in 1958) with arrogant scientist Paul Frees (Richard Deacon doing Clifton Webb, and does he deliver cutting lines!) Their unholy reliance resulted in a child that she now wants back in her new life of respectability. His experiments with the alien fungus result in his hideous death and the government, knowing that she was with him at the time, has to track her down so that she won't infect the world. However, they can't throw the public into panic (cover-up stuff, another first) by saying why they've put out an all-points bulletin out on her, so she goes into hiding and flees so that she won't be framed for his murder! Now I ask you, how often do you run into plot intricacies (as opposed to absurdities) like this during your typical monster movie round-up?At the same time SPACE MASTER X-7 is as frustrating as it's intriguing, because get-it-out-on-schedule Bernds never quite takes that extra step ahead of his time. There's a beautiful scene involving Miss Thomas and a cop the predates PSYCHO, where you're rooting for her to get away and the world's fate be damned, and though this perversion of empathy carries on the irony of it is somehow lost in the climactic shuffle. Said climax, stunningly prepared for in both mood and pacing, aboard a threatened air liner complete with children on the threshold of death, is shied away from in terms of intensity when it could've become a Hitchockian runaway carousel. One feels, by the movie's end, that something truly magnificent just didn't quite break free from the shackles of its period's conventions.I think this one's ripe for a remake and hopefully by someone with brains and taste. It certainly has a plot, very friendly to updating, that doesn't sit still. One thing that gets this film footnoted out of the collective amnesia is the presence of Moe Howard as a cab driver. He's funny as can be but plays it straight, as a regular Joe who finds himself in the midst of things, and makes one wish that, like brother Shemp, he and the rest of those Stooges would've done a little more dramatic character work.