I finally got my hands on Blindpassasjer, a norwegian science fiction-series from 1978. It was broadcasted in three episodes, each with a nice cliffhanger. It's reminds me a lot of those classic british TV-dramas from the seventies (for example Nigel Kneal), and has the same visual style and feeling. It's like Doctor Who - but a bit more stylish (in my personal opinion).

We follow the spaceship Marco Polo from it's journey from the planet Rossum - a farmer-based planet ruled by primitive robots. But something is of course strange with the planet, and that's something that will be revealed later in the series.

During deep sleep an unknown entity, a "biomat", sneeks aboard the ship and kills one of the crews, stuffs the person in the garbage disposer and takes it's identity. When the crew wakes up and discovers that someone is aboard the ship it's already to late. One of them is the "biomat"... an perfect replica of a human being... Now they have twenty hours to discover who it is, or else the spacestation Nexus will blow them up. Everything to stop infection...

It echoes of The Thing and Alien, but it's more of a whodunit set in space. The special effects are uneven, of course. Some of it looks great - especially the miniatures and the sets, but the visual effects and the graphics are very, very primitive. But I don't care of course, it's all about the story.

The cast is a few of norways best actors, and Björn Floberg is probably the most famous of them. Henny Moan, who plays "Leda", also starred in one of the biggest horror classics from Norway, the 1958 De Dødes tjern (aka The Lake of the Damned).

There's a few great twists and eerie sequences, one of my favorites is when one of the characters goes to an unknown spaceship that they found floating in space, and with a videokamera examin the ship and the dead bodies in there.

It's out on norwegian DVD, no subtitles though. But for collectors it's well worth picking up.

IMDB

How delightful to see this little oddity being brought up!

I really liked this and was pleasently surprised by how good it was. It creates some good suspense and benefits from having a pretty strong story - it's inspired by The Thing as you mention but it's interesting that this came out before Alien!

Bjørn Floberg is indeed great. He's a very underrated actor who also delivered a fine performance in the Norwegian horror film VILLMARK a.k.a. DARK WOODS (2003). In general, the acting is little theatrical - just like all Norwegian stuff from that era - because no one had yet figured out that the stage and the camera require different acting styles. It's not too much of a distraction, though.

The people behind BLINDPASSASJER (or 'stowaway' as it translates to) returned in 1982 with another sci-fi/mystery mini series called TA DEN RING ('Take that ring'), which is set on Earth. This one isn't on DVD yet but hopefully it will be soon. The lack of subtitles on NRK's DVD of BLINPASSASJER is baffling as they always subtitle all TV programs so that the hairing impaired can follow them, so why not their DVDs too?

Now I'm interested guys..though I guess I'm going to have to brush up on my Norwegian! Seriously though, this truly sounds interesting just from Fred's description alone! Thanks for the heads up Fredzilla!

My pleasure

First I was a bit skeptical about the inhabitants on Rossum, but the idea worked very fine and wasn't by far as silly as I first excepted it to be. But it's a good script and good actors taking care of the ideas.

I have a lot of relatives from Norway, so I understood the most of it. But I did it the way a friend said: just pretend it's a very strange swedish accent and you will understand it. And it worked

"Ta Den Ring" seems very interesting! Let us know if you see a DVD coming out!

BLINDPASSASJER aired on Swedish television in the 1980s (with Swedish subs) and bootlegs of this broadcast were doing the rounds until the Norwegian DVD came out after repeated fan requests. TA DEN RING is a more complicated matter - I at least am not aware of any boots and it doesn't appear to have been shown on TV since the 1980s. A DVD would be most welcome! I'll be sure to post here if I find out any more about it.