It is entirely possible that this is the first science fiction movie I ever saw.\u00a0 I seem to remember seeing this on tv as a pretty young kid (maybe seven or eight years old).\u00a0 For that reason, it had a huge effect on my perspective on entertainment.\u00a0 Of course, watching this movie after all these years is a shock from seeing just how ridiculous the whole production is.\u00a0 But at the same time there is a fondness based on the nostalgia it inspires in me, even after all this time.<\/p>\n
(Spoiler Alert \u2013 Skip down to last paragraph to avoid spoilers and read recommendation)<\/strong><\/p>\n David MacLean is a young grade school boy whose father is an engineer at a local factory doing top-secret government work.\u00a0 He\u2019s also friends with the local astronomer Dr. Stuart Kelston.\u00a0 David has a small telescope in his bedroom.\u00a0 One night he is awakened about four thirty in the morning by what looks and sounds like a thunder storm but as he watches out his window, he sees a flying saucer land in a sand pit located adjacent to his family\u2019s property.<\/p>\n David runs into his parents\u2019 room and tells them the story.\u00a0 Out of a desire to find out what had scared his son George MacLean goes outside to the sand pit to investigate.\u00a0 And the aliens open up a hole in the sand pit and capture George.\u00a0 When George does not reappear by daylight Mary MacLean calls the police and reports her husband missing.\u00a0 Two patrolmen in a squad car show up and while searching the sand pit area they are also captured by the aliens.<\/p>\n A little later George returns to his house and we immediately see that he is no longer the same man.\u00a0 Whereas previous to his disappearance he was a friendly husband and father, now he is a surly abusive man who backhands his young son for insisting that he saw the space ship land.\u00a0 Also, David discovers that George has a small X shaped wound on the back of his neck near his shirt collar.\u00a0 After a few minutes the two patrolmen appear at the house and they obviously behave just as George is.<\/p>\n And this pattern repeats as through his telescope David sees a little neighborhood girl Kathy Wilson being captured.\u00a0 Later George pushes his wife Mary into the sand pit.\u00a0 And off camera, the town\u2019s Chief of Police also ends up captured too.\u00a0 With all these people now controlled by the saucer-men, their diabolical plan begins to unfold.\u00a0 They are trying to sabotage the nearby factory that is building an atomic powered rocket along with the other plants that are supplying components.\u00a0 Kathy Wilson\u2019s father; Dr. William Wilson is a physicist who is designing the atomic rocket (although how a physicist becomes a design engineer is beyond me).\u00a0 So, she attempts to kill her family by burning down their house.\u00a0 George works in the factory creating the rocket engine so he and his wife attempt to assassinate Dr. Wilson with a high-powered rifle.\u00a0 And the two police officers successfully burn down the engine plant.<\/p>\n At first no one believes David when tells his story and the Police Chief has him imprisoned in a jail cell awaiting his parents\u2019 appearance and probably his subsequent death.\u00a0 But the desk sergeant is disturbed by his obvious fear and calls a medical doctor to look at him.\u00a0 Dr. Patricia Blake listens sympathetically to David\u2019s crazy story and when she finds out that they both know the astronomer Stuart Kelson, she calls him up and is told that David is a very honest and serious child.\u00a0 And when his parents arrive to get David, she notices that they really are behaving abnormally and so she makes up a story about David having symptoms of polio to prevent them from dragging him away.<\/p>\n Now Dr. Blake takes him to Stuart Kelston and we get a crash course on the latest theories on Martian biology. \u00a0And somehow Kelston intuits that Martians have gotten wind of the atomic rocket project and they are here in their flying saucer to sabotage the project.\u00a0 And Kelston trains his enormous observatory telescope on the sand pit across town just as George MacLean pushes General Mayberry, who is in charge of security for the whole rocket project, into the sand pit.<\/p>\n Kelston springs into action.\u00a0 He calls the Pentagon and a Col. Fielding orders a mechanized brigade of tanks and other weaponry to descend on this little town.\u00a0 Orders are given to arrest the MacLeans, the Police Chief, the two patrolmen and General Mayberry.\u00a0 Only David\u2019s parents are captured alive and are sent to a hospital to attempt to remove the control devices in the back of their necks.\u00a0 The army surrounds the sand pit and eventually finds the saucer and use explosives to open up a tunnel leading to the ship.\u00a0 Fielding and his men descend down and attack the \u201cmu-tants\u201d that serve the super-intelligent Martian.\u00a0 The servants are about seven feet tall covered with green skin and have bug-eyes.\u00a0 They shamble around so slowly it\u2019s amazing they get anything actually done.\u00a0 The master is this little homunculus in what looks like a glass bell jar that the mu-tants carry around.\u00a0 He\u2019s got a humanoid face on top of a body that\u2019s an immobile lump with a few tentacles sticking out here and there.\u00a0 He seems to have been spray-painted with bronze colored paint.\u00a0 He controls his servants by telepathy which we observe as him furrowing his brow.\u00a0 At some point, David and Dr Blake are captured when a hole randomly opens in the ground below their feet.\u00a0 And they have to be rescued by the army and Dr. Kelston (he seems to be in love with Patricia Blake).<\/p>\n The last scenes are of the whole human team running away from the sand pit as the space ship begins to depart with a bomb that the army planted in it about to explode.\u00a0 In the last scene David wakes up and runs into his parents\u2019 room to discover that the whole thing was a nightmare.\u00a0 He goes back to his room and falls asleep.\u00a0 But at four-thirty he\u2019s awakened by noise and sees exactly the same sight of the saucer landing in the sand pit.\u00a0 The End.<\/p>\n My thoughts on this movie.\u00a0 Where to begin?\u00a0 Okay, so the whole movie drips with 1950\u2019s cold-war paranoia.\u00a0 Every character portrayal is over the top and the dialog is pretty hokey.\u00a0 The astronomer\u2019s explanation why the Martians are aware of this atomic rocket project makes no sense at all.\u00a0 And the idea that a local astronomer can summon an army by calling the Pentagon is pretty hilarious.\u00a0 As for the aliens, the costumes and the scenery in the tunnels are laughably bad and the space ship looks like a 1950\u2019s set designer\u2019s idea of a 2000\u2019s manufacturing space.\u00a0 The special effects, mainly, an infra-red \u201cray gun\u201d is pathetic.\u00a0 On the other hand, the personality of the boy; David is sympathetic and Dr. Blake comes off as a compassionate woman which is always attractive.\u00a0 And the whole action of the army in their \u201cwar\u201d against the aliens is ridiculous.\u00a0 The colonel leads his troops into the tunnels and he\u2019s firing machine guns at mutants instead of his gunners doing that.\u00a0 But it\u2019s a great bit of nostalgia.\u00a0 The terrible special effects and the vintage military clips from WWII training footage is wonderful.\u00a0 And all the B-movie and television actors like Leif Erickson, Hillary Brooke (The Abbot and Costello Show), Barbara Billingsley (Leave it to Beaver), Robert Shayne (Inspector Henderson on the Superman Show) and Richard Deacon (Mel Cooley on the Dick Van Dyke Show) are so familiar and comforting.\u00a0 I highly recommend this movie for anyone who loves schlocky old sci-fi.<\/p>\n