Killers from Space (1954)

Touches You

Great Film overall

good back-story, and good acting

The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

KILLERS FROM SPACE is a typically cheap and cheerful science fiction B-movie of the 1950s, notable for featuring MISSION IMPOSSIBLE actor Peter Graves in an early role. It's best known as the movie that features a bunch of goofy aliens hanging around in a cavern who possess these crazy ping-pong ball eyes which look absolutely ridiculous, so it was a hoot for me every time they appear on screen. The film's plot is lightweight and everything's rather cheap and silly, but Graves certainly seems commited to his performance which helps things a bit, and you have to love those aliens. It's no INVADERS FROM MARS, but you could do worse.

Before he landed his lucrative gig on TV's "Mission: Impossible," Peter Graves spent years acting in low-budget, black-and-white sci-fi dreck. KILLERS FROM SPACE is a good example: cheesy script, an all-white cast, bargain-basement acting, static camera work, gobs of stock footage, riotous-looking aliens, and Atomic Age paranoia that now seems quaint.The plot: Dr. Douglas P. Martin (Graves) is in Soledad Flats, Nevada, monitoring A-bomb tests by air. When a test goes wrong, his survey plane crashes in the desert. The plane is wrecked and the pilot incinerated, but Martin is nowhere to be found. He turns up at the Army base, intact but for two things: a fresh surgical scar on his chest and a lack of memory regarding what happened to him. It turns out, there are space aliens occupying a cavern beneath the Earth's upper crust. The sun on their planet is dying, which necessitates relocating all one billion of their race to a new planet: ours. To ensure minimal interference from us humans, the aliens have bred an army of gigantic reptiles and insects they will unleash on the Earth's surface. After they've explained all this to Martin, the aliens erase his memory and cut him loose (instead of doing the smart thing and killing him).Item: Dr. Martin's survey plane is called "Tar Baby 2." Did that racist phrase mean something different in the '50s?Item: the wall map in Dr. Martin's office has the Santa Fe Railroad logo in its bottom left corner. Is it the same map that Ed Wood used in "Plan 9 From Outer Space?"Item: Dr. Martin's memory returns only after he is involved in a car accident. The film never explains why. Item: the aliens have big, bulging eyes and Groucho Marx-like eyebrows. And their suits reminded me of The Phantom.Item: Dr. Martin was killed in the plane crash and is only alive now because the aliens operated on his heart (hence the scar). It's never explained how his body stayed intact in a crash that reduced his pilot to ashes.Item: when the alien scientist hands Dr. Martin a set of calculations (on what looks like a sheet of tinfoil), they are written in Earth numbers.To his credit, Peter Graves remained stoic throughout this turgid 71-minute exercise. Still, it's amazing he ever had a respectable acting career when he starred in so much crap.

Aliens take control of the mind of a scientist and use him to steal military secrets as part of a nefarious plan to take over the world.This very cheap science fiction movie was directed by W. Lee Wilder, the brother of the much more famous Billy. It stars Peter Graves who of course would go on to considerable fame as Jim Phelps in the inventive TV series Mission: Impossible. It's one of those old sci-fi flicks that appears especially ridiculous today. But despite what you might reasonably expect, this one is surprisingly mundane for the most part, although it is certainly enjoyable enough hokum to be fair. Its single most significant aspect is easily its alien villains. They are supremely silly creations, dressed in jump-suits and sporting ping pong ball eyes. Aside from them, there isn't really a lot to note in this one but it should still appeal to 50's sci-fi devotees, at least to some extent.

This film is wonderfully cheap, awkward, and earnest. The director has a few successful scenes where a creepy mood is achieved, and there is a kind of plausibility throughout if one is able to accept the concept of an entire universe contained on studio back lots with virtually no money. I don't know why, but the scifi and horror films of this cheap, primitive, paranoid era were more fun than those made nowadays.Besides its innate aesthetic value, this film is notable for an early featured role for the great Peter Graves, who died about a month prior to me writing this review. Mr. Graves' performance here is certainly not Oscar-worthy, but if one imagines the circumstances under which this film was undoubtedly made, he acquits himself well.Another noteworthy thing: this film features a storyline in which alien space travelers abduct a USAF pilot and perform mysterious and creepy surgery on him, leaving him with a strange scar and the gap in his memory that ufologists call 'missing time.' Missing time and secret alien medical procedures have become a cliché of modern UFO mythology, but this is the earliest film I have seen to feature these concepts.The aliens are bug-eyed creatures who dress in outfits of uncanny similarity to the costume worn by 1930's newspaper comic strip hero 'The Phantom.' Their base of operations is a typical low-budget movie cave of the type favored by the villains in Republic chapter-plays, and their equipment looks mostly like various disemboweled floor-model radios and old DuMont TV sets. Despite the limitations, the scenes containing these elements are the most effective in the film.Lovers of old-school, low-budget scifi and horror will likely enjoy this film, although perhaps not to the degree I did. Nonetheless, it is certainly worth a look if are the right type of aficionado.