The Space Children (1958)

Redundant and unnecessary.

Great movie. Not sure what people expected but I found it highly entertaining.

It's a feast for the eyes. But what really makes this dramedy work is the acting.

While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

The Space Children has engineer Adam Williams arriving with wife Peggy Webber and sons Michel Ray and Johnny Crawford to work and live at a government rocket facility. The USA is about to take a giant leap frog ahead of the Russians in the arms race. The next big launch is to orbit a hydrogen bomb in space directed and controlled in orbit by our Defense Department. The Russians or anyone else gets out of line and they get their's. Of course there is reason to believe the Russians are also pursuing the same type of orbiting weaponry.A strange object, part brain, part rock lands on earth and it has a mysterious affect on the children. By children I don't mean just Ray and Crawford. Johnny Washbrook, Sandy Descher and others join in some kind of collective consciousness, a lot like the Village Of The Damned and strange things start happening around the base, including the death of Russell Johnson who is far from the wise professor of Gilligan's Island. Instead he's the mean stepfather of Johnny Washbrook and no one is really mourning his loss.What's going on is not something I'll reveal. I will say that this film also has elements of The Boy With Green Hair and Amazing Grace And Chuck. It's a sincere film with a nice message, but poorly executed and directed.

This film has an abysmal 2.7 rating on IMDb. It's not really that bad, but it is a pretty big disappointment coming from a director who made The Incredible Shrinking Man the year before. This is a smaller, less ambitious film for sure. A meteor lands in a cave on a beach and its alien essence possesses a bunch of children (I think - it's kind of vague what kind of influence the thing has on the children) who then help it stop their fathers from launching a nuclear warhead into space. It's pretty cheesy, but not badly acted for this kind of movie (the kids in particular are far from awful). The sets are very cheap looking. At one point a flashing light causes the shadows of the actors to appear on the matte painting of the sky in the background. It's more forgettable than detestable.

As a late-comer to the heated debate about this movie, let me make my position clear. I am a Jack Arnold fan.For me, Arnold's contribution to Fifties SF movies is greater than any other director. But he was heavily dependent on his screenwriters. When the screenplays were good he turned in some of the best SF movies of the decade: It Came from Outer Space; Creature from the Black Lagoon; Incredible Shrinking Man and, to a lesser extent, Tarantula. When they were poor (Revenge of the Creature; Monster on Campus) all he could do was make the pictures watchable: he couldn't make them good.Apparently, Space Children was his personal favourite amongst his SF movies and the one on which he lavished most care, but it definitely falls in to that second category. It is watchable, but no more.It establishes a good atmosphere. Arnold invests an ordinary stretch of coastline with the same eerie ambiance as the Black Lagoon and the desert locations of It Came from Outer Space and Tarantula. He also gets good performances from his juvenile cast. As a group, they are the least objectionable movie kids of the Fifties.The problems all lie in the screenplay, which is derivative, half-baked and repetitive. The screenplays for Revenge of the Creature and Monster on Campus were simply trite, mechanical and by-the-numbers. This screenplay is actually incompetent and there is ultimately nothing Arnold can do to salvage it.It is a movie with a message, but that message is thoroughly hackneyed. The mysterious (usually alien) stranger who uses almost magical powers to save us from our own follies is an idea that has had many outings over the years: Things to Come; The Day the Earth Stood Still; Stranger from Venus; The Cosmic Man; Strange World of Planet X and even Plan 9 from Outer Space. Space Children adds nothing new to this somewhat self-righteous, preachy sub-genre.The SF content is completely haphazard, so we never really know what is going on. For example, when the alien lands it causes power cuts that extend as far as the rocket launch site, so it not clear why the alien needs to enlist the aid of the children in the first place (anyway, why not work through adults?). The nature of its connection with the children is also somewhat vague. Does it possess and coerce them, or merely enlist their voluntary aid? The visuals often suggest the former, but the intent of the story implies the latter. Then again, what help does it require? What do the children actually do to stop the launch of the missile? If it is telekinesis, why do they have to break into the launch site? Why does the alien grow in size during the course of the movie?The SF content is so incoherent that the story can only really be viewed as fantasy. For example, the alien's use of children rather than adults is not dictated by the logic of the story: it is basically a poetic device. But even fantasy needs its own rules if the story is to grip. This movie has none, so it feels like random a sequence of events.The dramatic structure of the movie is weak. It starts well enough, with the arrival at the missile base, the landing of the alien, its discovery by the children and its first communication with them. After that, it just meanders all over the place. There is no steady build up of tension and no real climax. Things happen, but for no particular reason.For example, there is apparently a second alien arrival, but we only see one alien. We have to assume that, for some reason, it departed and then returned again.There is a pointless sequence where Bud takes his father to the cave, they retrieve the alien and carry it off to their cabin - only to return it to the cave the following day. This adds nothing to the story and only contributes to the sense that the movie is just an endless succession of people going backwards and forwards to the beach.The business of the adults finding out what is going on, but being unable to tell anyone about it, is also redundant.The death of the drunken father is so poorly handled we don't really know what has actually happened. The implication is that the alien has killed him, but this undermines the notion that it is essentially benign. Probably what was intended is that the shock of encountering the alien caused him to die of natural causes (there is some dialogue with the doctor that lends weight to this interpretation) but here, as elsewhere in the movie, even the simplest plot points are fudged.The truth is that all these scenes are mere padding. The picture seems so aimless because, having set up the basic situation, it is just marking time until the thwarting of the rocket launch and the final revelation. Take away these irrelevant scenes from the middle of the picture and there simply wouldn't be enough footage for release as a feature film.It is hard to see how this relatively straightforward story could have been written any worse. What did Tom Filer and Bernard Schoenfeld do to earn their money?Despite all these reservations, the movie is by no means a complete dud. It defects are mitigated by merits that other low budget SF of the era didn't have. Arnold tries his best to make a silk purse out of a sow's ear, but cannot quite manage it. Nonetheless, I am glad I finally have it on DVD to complete my Jack Arnold collection (even if it is a soft, second or third generation copy).However, if I was trying to convince people that Arnold's SF films should be taken seriously I would be very wary about showing them this movie.

The children of some US rocket scientists come under the spell of a strange alien being that seems to want them to sabotage the nations defense!Another B thriller from director Jack Arnold (who directed the classic Creature from the Black Lagoon in 1954), this one is a bit more intelligent than the average drive-in sci-fi fodder. The Space Children is actually an anti-war film kind of in the tradition of The Twilight Zone, the story does indeed resemble a story that one would see on the classic TV series. Arnold lends some steady direction, creating an occasionally eerie atmosphere (who could ever forget that spooky final image of an ill-fated Russell Johnson?) and a decent alien creation. Kudos go to a chilling music score.The cast isn't half bad, the youths of the film being especially good.A worth-wild watch for those who like the films of this era.** 1/2 out of ****