IT CONQUERED THE WORLD (1956)
Article #1709 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 11-18-2005
Posting Date: 4-16-2006
Directed by Roger Corman
Featuring Peter Graves, Beverly Garland, Lee Van Cleef

A scientist halps an alien from Venus come to the Earth under the belief that the alien will help save mankind from itself. He fails to see that the alien is bent on conquest for his own reasons.

Beulah (as the vegetable-shaped creature of this movie was named by creator Paul Blaisdell) is one of the silliest monsters from the science fiction movies of the fifties. As such, the monster does garner quite a bit of affection, and I have to admit that I love it myself. Nevertheless, I wonder how much better the reputation of this movie would have been with a more convincing creation (or if, as originally planned, it had not been trotted out in the open for all to see). The movie is actually quite strong, largely because of a script with far more depth than is usually found in low budget movies of this period; the philosophical discussions about the power of human emotion and the folly of trying to get outside forces to solve our problems for us have a real bite and relevance to them. Given this sophistication, it’s no surprise that the script was actually written by Charles B. Griffith instead of the credited Lou Rusoff; it shows the same sophistication of many of his other scripts for Corman (THE UNDEAD, BUCKET OF BLOOD, NOT OF THIS EARTH, etc.) . The movie also has some sharp and fascinating editing at times; I love moments like the one where a shot of a soldier cleaning his gun cuts to a shot of one of the scientists cleaning his own gun as well. The performances are also quite good, though Beverly Garland takes the prize as the traitorous scientist’s wife, a rather difficult role which she pulls off extremely well. The movie is also shot through with real tragedy; of the four major characters in the story, take note of how many are alive in the final reel. Outside of the monster, the other main thing that I would change in the movie would be to remove  character of the Mexican private; Jonathan Haze is extremely unfunny in the role, even with the help of a great straight man like Dick Miller. Haze would do a better job in LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS a few years later. Still, despite the flaws, this is a quite powerful low-budget science fiction feature.

INVISIBLE INVADERS (1959)
Article #1708 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 11-17-2005
Posting Date: 4-16-2006
Directed by Edward L. Cahn
Featuring John Agar, Jean Byron, Philip Tonge

Invisible aliens from outer space invade the earth by taking over the bodies of the dead.

This movie’s main claim to fame anymore is the similarities it has with Romero’s NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD; the scenes of the dead men (the aliens don’t possess the bodies of dead women, for some reason) in various states of decay wandering around does indeed recall those of the later movie. Still, this movie lacks many of the qualities that made the Romero movie a classic, but I suspect the budget of this one was even lower than the one of that one. After all, we’re talking about an alien invasion story with only about ten speaking parts, filled out with tons of stock footage, familiar locations (the bunker is hidden inside Bronson Caverns) and with budget-minded monsters. Still, I can’t be too hard on it; it does manage to work up a chill or two, and some scenes are memorable enough, even if the story drags (particularly in the second half). It does have one other noteworthy aspect; it’s the only cinematic union of horror and science fiction actors John Agar and John Carradine. And anybody who has seen “Police Squad” should have a little laugh when Carradine dies thirty seconds after his character is introduced before he’s had a chance to say a word.

THE INVISIBLE BOY (1957)
Article #1702 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 11-11-2005
Posting Date: 4-10-2006
Directed by Herman Hoffman
Featuring Richard Eyer, Philip Abbott, Diane Brewster

When a scientist has his boy trained to play chess by a supercomputer, the boy suddenly develops the ability to rebuild a robot that came from the future. However, when the boy hooks up the robot to the computer to remove his prime directive, things take a sinister turn.

The first two times I watched this movie I was not impressed; despite the fact that someone at MGM rightly thought enough of Robby the Robot to use him in another movie, this was certainly no FORBIDDEN PLANET. Yet, Bill Warren’s essay on this movie in KEEP WATCHING THE SKIES did make me rethink my views on the movie; he makes a good argument about the sophistication and the complexity of the plot, and watching the movie with that in mind, I agree with him. The movie really does an excellent job of putting the pieces of the plot together.

However, I still feel the movie has some real problems. The movie’s comic tone doesn’t really mesh with the darker tone that comes in during the second half of the movie. The comedy is variable; for me, the high point is the scene where the boy leads the newly reconstructed robot around to the scientists only to be greeted with indifference, while the low point is when the boy spies on his parents in their bedroom. When you consider that this movie is to some extent a children’s movie, this last scene makes me feel downright queasy, as does a later scene where the boy is about to undergo horrible torture; this latter scene reminded of a scene in another boy-and-his-robot movie, TOBOR THE GREAT. The movie is also hampered by indifferent direction and variable acting. And one scene has always annoyed me; the scene where the army tries to prevent Robby from entering the spaceship only to have him vanish from their sight (after they attack him with a flame thrower) only to appear magically behind them might be appropriate in a fantasy, but I expect something more believable in a science fiction movie.