AIP and 2.5 statue 5200 ad Florida swamps future---medallion asking for helpCurrently, "Terror From the Year 5000" has an abominably low score of 2.5. This would indicate that this is a truly horrible film...but it isn't. Now I am not saying it's a good movie, but the picture clearly is suffering from "Mystery Science Theater 3000" syndrome. In other words, when a film is made fun of my the show, huge numbers of the viewers of the show go online and bombard IMDb with scores of 1. If you look at the bottom 100 films on IMDb, you'll also see that nearly all of the American films from the 1950s, 60s and 70s were skewered on that TV show as well. Often, much worse films manage to stay off the list simply because of exposure. So, if you are looking for a film as wretched as "Plan 9 From Outer Space" or "Robot Monster", well, you should keep looking.The film is about a weird experiment going on in the middle of nowhere in Florida. Why this odd location? Because the project requires so much energy it would tend to interfere with the equipment of folks living nearby. And what IS this huge power draw for....well, to make contact with folks from the future! Eventually, they are able to bring objects from the year 5200! And, a bit later, they get a medallion that is begging for help! So is this future trying to contact us? And, is this a good thing? Now I am not going to say that this is a great film. The 'monster' is silly but there are much worse examples from the era. Overall, an okay movie but certainly not an awful picture. The acting and direction are competent...not really good, but competent.

Terror From the Year 5000 (1958) ** (out of 4) AIP Sci-Fi has scientists from the present day trading items with someone from the year 5000. Everything's going fine until they send back a deformed woman who goes on a killing spree. The monster here is certainly the best thing with its rather ugly appearance but for some strange reason she doesn't show up until nearly the one hour mark. The film has a nice ending but things start off way too slow for its own good. There's a nice sequence where the film promotes and spoofs I Was a Teenage Frankenstein.

The movies title is a bit misleading in that there isn't much terror in this movie. In fact, there isn't much of anything going on till the last maybe 20 minutes of this flick. A museum curator gets a mysterious statue and is asked to test it for its age. Somehow he finds out it comes from the future. I don't know if I am right on this point, but I don't believe you can tell if something comes from the future...only how old something is. Well, he also finds out it is highly radioactive so he goes to this professor's house where the statue came from. There the professor and his extremely stupid assistant are doing, of course, time travel experiments. Since the statue was radioactive the professor wants to stop the experiments for the time being, but the stupid assistant wants to keep going. His fiancé eventually goes with the curator and the assistant summons a mutant from the year 5000, which kills people for no reason and then convinces the assistant to go with her to the year 5000 and help out their people. She steals a nurse's face before this and uses it as a mask as she is a bit mutated. All in all a pretty lousy sci-fi flick that has so many inaccuracies it is pathetic.

One wonders if the people who make films like this really care if audiences like them or not.So let's see...we've got a museum curator who gets a statue in the mail along with a request to do radiometric dating on it. If he were competent in the field he would send it back since radiometric dating is unlikely to produce a meaningful date on a manufactured metallic object. But he goes ahead and does it and somehow determines that the piece is from the future (5200 AD). Never mind that radiometric dating doesn't work like that and couldn't give a future date for anything. He also is told later that the piece is dangerously radioactive. Well, again, if he were competent at the radiochemistry needed for the dating, he would have found THAT out right away. But ANOTHER scientist has to tell him that after the fact.The piece is the product of a scientist and his financial backer working alone in the Everglades. If everything that comes though the time machine is so hopelessly radioactive, why aren't they both dead, or at least very sick? If the statue is so dangerous, why do the scientists who produced it (and who know it's radioactive) leave their amazing discovery lying around, and don't notice when it turns up missing? And if the apparatus used for this time travel is so powerful that it screws up TVs, lights, and motorboat engines, how is it possible for the young backer to be using it without anyone else's knowledge? And why 5200 AD? Don't the scientists have any control over the time period they explore? What's so interesting about 5200 AD as opposed to other times? Why not a hundred years in the future, or a billion years for that matter? Why not go backward in time?Nothing much happens in the middle of the movie so it branches out into desultory explorations of jealousy and voyeurism, only to drop these themes when it comes time for "science fiction" to rear its head again.And then the Terror shows up - an ugly woman. Somebody's got some issues with women I think! She speaks Greek from a few letters on a Phi Beta Kappa key, then conveniently switches to modern English when that doesn't work. She can hypnotize you with her sparkly fingernails. Oh, yeh, and she can kill you and steal your face. Which she does to the lovely and talented Salome Jens (the only actor in this wretched mess to deliver a well-crafted performance). From here on the script backfills furiously in a hurried attempt to generate meaning in this meaningless heap of trash before the budget runs out.Time travel is an enormously complicated plot device for a science fiction film; few have done it well. "Terror from the Year 5000" is not one of them. It tries to cover its obvious shortcomings in pointless and unexplained plot diversions.But again, it's unlikely the makers cared. Thank God it didn't wreck Salome Jens' career at the outset.