SUPERSONIC SAUCER (1956)
Article 1933 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 6-30-2006
Posting Date: 11-27-2006
Directed by S. G. Ferguson
Featuring Fella Edmonds, Donald Gray, Gillian Harrison

Some children, forced to spend the holidays at their boarding school when they can’t afford to go home, encounter an alien from Venus who travels by turning himself into a flying saucer.

The only user comment for this movie on IMDB at the time of this writing made notice of the same thing I did while watching it, and that is that the movie bears a certain resemblance to a Spielberg movie made a quarter of a century later called E.T.. I suspect it’s just coincidence myself, but some of the resemblances are striking, and there’s no doubt that the alien (a creature swathed in a white robe with no mouth, and big woeful eyes that can cry, move and spin around) is as unique-looking as E.T. was. On its own terms, the movie has a message, and that message is – Be Careful What You Wish For – because if you’re not, you’ll end up encouraging helpful but naive extraterrestrials to ever increasing levels of inadvertent criminal behavior (from petty larceny to arson to grand larceny), which will attract the attention of desperate but bumbling criminals who will kidnap the alien to try to encourage him in his criminal pursuits (for their own profit, of course), and you’ll just have to follow his telepathic signals (and get him to use his ability to make people go backwards in fast motion) to rescue him. All in all, this is a pretty silly children’s movie, but I have to admit that one of the gags is pretty good: it involves one of the alien’s powers and a long staircase. Believe it or not, I found myself oddly entertained by this one.