It Came from Beyond the Sea?

After the TCM showing of The House of Seven Corpses, Ben Mankiewicz said Faith Domergue starred in “non classics” like This Island Earth, and It Came from Beyond the Sea.

Really? It came from beyond the sea? I thought it came from beneath the sea. (Maybe we were misinformed by the movie title? Perhaps it really did come from beyond the sea, and they lied to us all this time!)

And really? This Island Earth is a non-classic? Well, it’s classic enough for it to be the MST3K: The Movie movie! That qualifies for classic in more than one genre, according to the people I know!

Maybe Ben didn’t grow up like the rest of the boys his age, watching Ray Harryhausen movies and loving them all, so maybe he doesn’t know that It Came from Beneath the Sea is a classic. But then how does that qualify him to tell us about movies he doesn’t really know about?

I like Ben Mankiewicz fine, and I hope this was just a flub, or a line misreading. Or maybe it was that he read a miswritten cue card. But when I watch TCM, the only times I hear the intros make real mistakes is during the horror and science fiction stuff, and if that’s the case, maybe they should get someone else to do them, just so people like me (horror nerds) don’t notice.

And look, I make a lot of mistakes, too. But generally it’s typos and stuff. And I’m not the spokesman for the greatest network ever on television either, so nobody really seems to notice when I do it. But TCM should give us accurate information, and when it comes to horror and science fiction, they don’t always; and that’s a shame.

I have said it before, and I will say it again: Greg Mank, Tom Weaver, Tim Lucas, et. al.: hire them for the horror and science fiction movie intros and outtros: they literally wrote the book on the history of these movies. Who knows more than them?