Target Earth (1954)

Thanks for the memories!

A Masterpiece!

This story has more twists and turns than a second-rate soap opera.

This movie tries so hard to be funny, yet it falls flat every time. Just another example of recycled ideas repackaged with women in an attempt to appeal to a certain audience.

This film starts extremely well as its cast gradually assembles on the deserted streets of Los Angeles (filmed on Sunday mornings) standing in for Chicago and at first resembles Lippert's 'The Earth Dies Screaming' (1964), made ten years later in Britain. Unfortunately, in the case of 'Target Earth' it's when the robot first appears (Chicago is supposed to be full of them roaming the streets, but we only ever see the one) that things go rapidly downhill as they spend most of the rest of the film indoors cowering from 'them' (the robots in 'The Earth Dies Screaming' were much scarier, and they had two of them). Considering that director Sherman Rose had several years as an editor behind (and ahead of) him, Target Earth' is surprisingly slackly paced, with very few close ups, and doesn't employ even a modicum of creative cutting back and forth to suggest that there is indeed more than one invader.Hero Richard Denning curiously persists right until the end in thinking that 'they' are some sort of human life form rather than robots - or at least wearing spacesuits - which renders somewhat redundant his theory that 'they' come from Venus, since "as far as I know it's the only planet that might be capable of supporting human (sic) life. It's covered by a heavy layer of clouds, that means plenty of water, oxygen and hydrogen in its atmosphere." (Actually we now know that Venus has a constantly churning atmosphere composed mostly of carbon dioxide and nitrogen, has a surface temperature of 872 °F and air pressure of 9.3 MPa, roughly equivalent to the pressure found at a depth on Earth of 3,000 ft underwater.)It's always good to see Virginia Grey and Whit Bissell, although Grey is largely wasted until she shows that she's the one with the cajones at the end; and the cutaways to Bissell, Arthur Space and other military top brass - like his role in 'Invasion of the Body Snatchers' - seem like an afterthought that doesn't really mesh with the main narrative.

Nora King , a young woman in Chicago has survived a suicide bid via a barbiturate overdose . Stirring from what would have been her death bed she knocks on her neighbours door and no one replies . She finds no one seems to be in her apartment block . Wandering the eerie deserted streets of the city she is startled to find another survivor called Frank Brooks Okay you've seen this type of set up before . Protagonist wakes up , thinks " Oh hold on something isn't quite right here " and finds that the entire population has been rendered blind / turned in to zombies / Daleks have invaded the world / insert your own scenario here etc etc . . It's not an original idea but it's a brilliantly effective hook that draws the audience in to the story which is why it's a common occurrence in horror and science fiction . Off the top of our heads we can name a very long list of books , films and TV shows throwing up this scenario Where this very low budget film works best is during the deserted city scenes . I know everyone quite rightly raves about Boyle's dead London scenes in 28 DAYS LATER but stop to consider how the problems and pressure were eased by the director shooting that film on digital video . With TE let me just repeat this is a very low budget movie and camera technology in 1954 would have been very primitive in comparison to now . Even more astonishingly the trivia section of this site states the production team didn't have permits so did what we would now describe as " guerrilla film making " and shot on location in Los Angeles very early on Sunday mornings . There's not too much in the way of panning long shots but at the same time these location shots are far more convincing than in bigger budget movies such as THE OMEGA MAN where you're constantly aware of cars driving by in the distance . As Nora meets with Frank they wander around Chicago bumping in to other occasional stragglers my attention was held one hundred per cent As you might guess for a low budget SF B movie the film can't really sustain this . Chicago has been evacuated because an alien invasion has taken place the night before . Even if you ignore the implausible idea that a large city of this kind can be evacuated in such a short period you can't ignore the fact that the film doesn't have the budget to make this invasion from Venus credible in any way and is confined to one robot . Worse than that this robot just happens to look like it was constructed out of cardboard by a group of primary school children and does tend to drag the film down after its effective first third . Likewise from a narrative point of view we have distracting cutaways to a military base where the military reference to the recent invasion and you're painfully aware that these scenes exist only to give away exposition . Might it not have been more efficient having the survivors run in to a military patrol who say something along the lines " Oh you're a handful of survivors we haven't evacuated and therefore you don't know what's going so here's the plot that needs to be explained to the audience etc etc ?This is a film that this pulp science fiction in its most low brow form and yet some of it works brilliantly , so much so that for the early period you think you're going to be watching some sort of lost classic . Such a pity TE can't sustain its early promise . One can't help thinking that maybe the production team might have gone back to the drawing board and deleted all the rubbish about cardboard robots from Venus and come up with a premise of survivors battling to stay alive in a world where civilisation and the rule of law have been consigned to history , but I guess audiences always flock to stories that have a nice happy ending ? Even if the events leading up to the end are very silly

"Tank Battalion" director Sherman A. Rose' black & white, science fiction horror thriller "Target Earth" concerns an alien invasion of Earth with huge, hulking robots constructed of surgical steel combing Los Angeles after the authorities have evacuated the city. Producer Herman Cohen points out in his audio commentary track that the desolate shots of L.A. were lensed on Sunday mornings when the streets were bare of humanity. The monster robot--only one is seen whenever it is shown--looks like it was modeled after the alien robot in director Robert Wise's landmark sci-fi thriller "The Day The Earth Stood Still." Rose and his writers introduce audiences during the opening half-hour to a handful of survivors in Los Angeles who were overlooked during the evacuation. Frank Brooks (sci-fi leading man Richard Denning of "Hangman's Knot") stumbles across Nora King (Kathleen Crowley of "Sabre Jet") in the street when she encounters a dead woman's body and turns around to find Frank looking at her. Initially, Nora is afraid, but she calms down long enough for Frank to convince her that he doesn't represent a threat. "Target Earth" unfolds with Nora awakens after the city has been evacuated. Later, we learn that she tried to commit suicide by taking an overdose of sleeping pills after her male friend died in a car crash. As Frank and Nora are scouring the city, they run into Vicki Harris (Virginia Grey of "The Women") and Jim Wilson (Richard Reeves of "Riot in Juvenile Prison") in a restaurant boozing it up. The two couples get together run into Charles Otis (Mort Marshall of "Skullduggery") and Otis tries to get away from the robots by fleeing through the city streets during the daylight hours. Predictably, the robot zaps Otis dead with a death ray. Meantime, the two couples take up residence in an abandoned motel and stay on the top floor. Rose and scenarists William Raynor, James Nicholson, and Wyott Ordung concentrate on the survivors for a half-hour and then they shift the focus to the top military brass coordinating the attack against the aliens while the scientists probe the remains of a robot to determine the best way to destroy it. Basically, for the remainder of the action, Rose cuts back and forth between our survivors and the military. Eventually, the survivors confront another survivor, a gun-toting killer named Davis (Robert Roark of "Killers from Space"), and he muscles his way into their habitat. Meanwhile, Tom, Chief research scientist (Whit Bissell of "Side Street") and his researchers discover that they can use an oscillator to destroy the robots with sound waves. Up until this epic discovery, the military has hurled their most powerful weapons against the aliens to no avail. Although it was a success when it was released in 1954, "Target Earth" seems bland compared to mega-budgeted movies such as "Independence Day." There is a spooky quality to the bare city streets during the opening half-hour, but around 28 minutes later, the first robot appears and zaps Otis, and the film settles into the formulaic rut of a war movie with the military scrambling to figure out how to obliterate the robots. No, the aliens who control the robots are never seen and Earth never receives an ultimatum from the alien invaders. Rose winds things up with a cliffhanger type ending. "Target Earth" is mandatory viewing for sci-fi fans who want to study the films of the 1950s.

Since it was co-written by the man behind ROBOT MONSTER (1953), I really wasn't expecting anything from this one (whose SE DVD I bought dirt-cheap from VCI outright). However, the film proved worthy of some attention – though failing to keep up the initial momentum, despite a brief 75-minute duration.The plot starts off with a typical 'Last Man On Earth' scenario (albeit restricted in this case to just one big American city, and the reason it's deserted is due to evacuation rather than decimation). Eventually, a handful of people (including a constantly squabbling couple) band together in a hotel; we gradually learn their individual reasons for being left behind – which would actually be replicated in the much later THE QUIET EARTH (1985) – and, amidst fighting one another (especially the bossiness of an armed criminal on the run), they heroically withstand the alien invasion (consisting of a single solitary robot!) which is threatening the planet. Ultimately, the military springs into action – scientist Whit Bissell having finally hit upon a particular sound wave which can 'kill' the clunky automaton(s), also able to shoot a deadly ray a' la Klaatu from THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL (1951) – and rescues those still standing (obviously the hero and heroine).The male lead is once again played by Richard Denning, whom I had just watched in THE BLACK SCORPION (1957): amusingly, as in that film, for all his ruggedness he's made up to be something of a dope as well, since Denning cluelessly purports to defend himself with a mere firearm (at the end, when he's told the alien was actually a robot, his character displays genuine amazement – duh!). In the end, though no classic, the film is extremely typical of its time and reasonably entertaining while it's on (with, as I said, the best moments coming at the very beginning via the eerie depiction of deserted city streets).The extras are perhaps over-generous for such minor genre fare: that said, I haven't listened to its late producer Herman Cohen's Audio Commentary – while I was already familiar with the tribute featurette to him from its inclusion on VCI's own edition of HORRORS OF THE BLACK MUSEUM (1959).