Tor Johnson-Lugosi I have no idea why other reviewers are upbeat about this one. First, it barely qualifies as sci-fi; it's mostly a dry melodrama. The plot involves scientist Paul Frees who discovers an alien fungus that grows in his lab and kills him passively (looking mostly like a hunk of wet canvas). But the majority of the movie involves his estranged wife, supposedly a carrier of the fungus; she is constantly on the run, believing she's criminally involved with his death. We never ever see the monster in action, we only glimpse it a few anticlimactic moments. The stuff shows up in a freight car, in her apartment, but illogically, she is never affected by it; nor do we ever see it attack anyone. The film ends with stock footage of an airplane making an emergency landing.And that's all you get. If you want better fare along these lines, try MUTINY IN OUTER SPACE. This one's totally forgettable.

dougdoepke Space fungus menaces planet earth. Okay, everything else was menacing the besieged 1950's planet, so why not a creepy fungus. Well, it's actually a bloody slime from outer space that spreads like a dirty carpet, and unless trackers can catch up with the shapely blonde Typhoid Mary (Thomas) carrying it, we're all one big toadstool. I'm trying hard, but I just don't recall this epic from 1958, and I rarely missed one of these drive-in specials. According to IMDb, TCF didn't syndicate the film, which is why, I guess, it's gone unseen for 50 years.Actually, the movie's pretty well produced for its kind. The location shots lend at least some credibility to the wacky plot. And catch those early versions of protective Hazmat suits in the train yard scene. Williams and Ellis do well as the bloodhounds, but why Ellis remains a lowly Pfc with his officer-level credentials seems odd. Also, I really like the unheralded Lyn Thomas as the nervous blonde. Note that brilliant screenwriter Dan Mainwaring, e.g. Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), Out of the Past (1947), collaborated on the screenplay. I'm guessing that promising trapped-in-the-airliner concept came from him. Too bad the full potential of those scenes is not realized by director Bernds. At the same time, the movie ends all-too-abruptly, as though the production suddenly ran out of money. I get the feeling that with better backing and a more perceptive director, this drive-in programmer could have turned into an uptown smash on the order of Alien (1980).

aiiee-1 I just finished watching this on 'Fox Movie Channel'. I have no idea when it might be on again, but it is now in rotation! And as everyone else said, it was the most terrifying movie when I saw it with 'The Fly' at age 9, but now it seems a bit different :). I remember the plane sequence where the bloodrust propagates throughout the plane as being a lot longer. Anyway, I do think it was fairly well written, and the narrative style helped make it more terrifying at the time.I also agree that The Fly was not as scary, but the scene where the fly calls out 'help me' was extremely 'memorable' as well.The ending in 'Spacemaster' did seem to come too soon, the movie seemed to go by quickly so, to me, that's a sign that it was well written and did not drag by.

jim riecken (youroldpaljim) When I was kid, I used to sometimes see stills or brief mentions of this film in science fiction movie books or in the pages of "monster" magazines. But for some strange reason this film never turned up on TV, even though other science fiction offerings made by Fox from the same period often did. No one I knew had seen it except for older people who saw it when it was first released in 1958 to theaters. Having seen it recently on video, I can tell you that SPACE MASTER X 7 is no "lost" classic, but its a not bad low budget drive in feature with a slightly unusual menace and director Edward Byrnes deserves credit for trying hard to make a serious (sometimes he tries to hard) adult science fiction thriller. Done in a semi-documentary style, Byrnes sometimes slows down the films pace but overall its not a bad job.One area of interest to film buffs is the films casting. We have Paul ("man of a thousands voices") Frees in a surprisingly large on screen role as a "heel" scientist who accidently unleashes the "blood rust". Of course the person often mentioned in this film is Moe Howard of the Three Stooges, in a rare character part as a cab driver who helps the feds track down a woman who was exposed to the deadly alien fungus. This film was made when the stooges career was in limbo; between the time Columbia dropped the stooges because it was no longer interested in making shorts, and the time before they boys returned to the screen for feature films. Director Byrnes began his film career directing 3 Stooges shorts, and was good friends with the boys, so it was he who probably got Moe a part in the picture.