THE MAN FROM PLANET X

d. Edgar G. Ulmer (1951) 

An interesting attempt at making a film about an alien invasion on a tiny budget and with only a few painted sets and some scale models to help set the scene, The Man From Planet X is notable for two things: it's supposed location, and the X Man himself, who is an amazing and surprising creation.

The film is supposedly set on the 'Scotch' island of Bury, a place of fog and moors and fishermen with stick on sideburns and a variety of accents. Bury will be the closest point on Earth when the newly discovered Planet X's orbit brings it close to our world for the first time. As such, some scientists and a journalist have gathered there to more closely observe the arrival of X, little realising that the mysterious sphere is populated, and that the inhabitants are mainly interested in decamping from their place to ours.

Which brings us to the X Man, the 'fantastic gnome': a small, rather feeble humanoid in a cumbersome space suit that is reminiscent of a deep sea diving outfit. The alien's face resembles crude, ancient figurative art, with stretched and elongated features, something like Humpty Dumpty's face etched onto sandstone. It's both creepy and rather sad, especially as the X Man seems permanently terrified. It takes a little spark of genius to imagine a life form that is recognisably a 'person' but also completely alien: the really clever part is that the X man appears to be made out of geological rather than biological material.       

We learn that Planet X is icing over, and will soon be unable to support life. The funny faced envoy is not unreasonable in the first instance but, once he's been beaten up and the military have been called in he gets a lot more aggressive, using a mind control ray to get the help he needs from the locals to trigger a full scale invasion.

Mankind triumphs in the end, of course. The army blow the X Man and his rocket to bits and so Planet X swings out of orbit without making contact, disappearing out into the farthest reaches of space on a trajectory of frozen doom. Hurrah, we should all be very proud of ourselves.  

THE ATOMIC SUBMARINE

d. Spencer Gordon Bennett (1959)

For a long while The Atomic Submarine goes around in circles as we watch the bickering crew of the state of the art USS Sharkfish scour the Arctic Ocean looking for the cause of a series of maritime disasters. When their quarry is revealed as a flying saucer, however, things start to gather pace, culminating in a small group of sailors boarding the alien craft and establishing contact with its pilot. Most of the men end up dead, horribly burned by a heat ray or crushed between automatic doors, but 'Reef' Holloway (Arthur Franz) survives, establishing a psychic link with the invader, a hideous creature who resembles a clump of seaweed with tentacles and has one enormous, all seeing eye. This unprecedented close encounter of the third kind prompts the following exchange:

Alien: We meet face to face.

Holloway: That’s a face?

Alien: Point of view is everything.   

The alien snottily explains via telekinesis that his race want to colonise the Earth and need human specimens to experiment on, and Holloway's life has been spared so that he can be vivisected. Holloway has other ideas, of course.

Holloway: To navigate, won’t you have to see your way?  

Alien: Obviously.

(Holloway pulls out a Very pistol and shoots the alien, blowing out its eyeball)

Holloway: Could be rough!

The triumphant submariner then makes his escape as his blinded foe throws his fronds around in agony, viscous gunk glooping from its brand new hole. The previously rather smug alien has learned an important lesson about human beings: never under estimate their survival instinct, or their capacity to cause pain. It’s a short period of reflection, though, as the UFO is almost immediately destroyed by a ground to air missile: job done, Earth saved. For now.

Please note: this is not a proper submarine film, so do not expect any popping rivets, sweaty faces or corpses and oil being jettisoned to the surface to fool enemy battle ships. I'm still quite miffed about that, actually.

NOT OF THIS EARTH

d. Roger Corman (1957)

‘Do not run from me, Nadine, I am going to dispatch you’

As you might have guessed, I watch a lot of films with aliens in them. Occasionally they are benign, but mostly they are predatory and with conquest on their minds. The necessities of low budget film making render a full scale alien invasion virtually impossible, of course, so the idea of a lone envoy, an advance scout is a recurring motif. The sole alien has the fate of the Earth in his or her hands or, rather, it is up to us to thwart his or her plans before the Earth is taken over.

In Not Of This Earth the extra-terrestrial is a pockmarked middle aged man with an archaic turn of phrase and a house in the suburbs. Mr Johnson (probably not his real name) has sensitive ears, and his eyes are permanently covered by impenetrable black shades. He’s here because there has been a nuclear war on his planet, Davanna, and now everybody is dying of a disease that is turning their blood to dust. His mission is to find out whether human blood is a compatible substitute. If it is, they will invade; if it isn’t, the world will be destroyed.

To be honest, Mr Johnson is a bit of a horror, being a murderer and a vampire and having gloopy pupil-less eyes that, when turned on a human being, burn out their retinas and parts of the brain. When he’s not killing teenagers, winos or vacuum cleaner salesmen and draining their blood, he’s kidnapping people and sending them through a dimensional portal to be experimented on, or giving a female alien the blood of a rabid dog. He's far too evil to be wholly successful and so is thoroughly defeated. 

The fact is that you can’t just come down to Earth and start stirring without expecting human beings to fight back. We may be primitive, perhaps, and lack mind control and killer eyes, but, by Christ, we’re feisty, and it’s just a matter of time before we find a way to fuck you up.

THE ASTOUNDING SHE MONSTER

d. Ronald V. Ashcroft (1958)

A young, pouting woman with extraordinary eyebrows, dressed in a skin tight iridescent metal catsuit and shimmering with radiation, arrives from outer space on a mysterious mission. Finding herself in a secluded forest, she stalks towards the only occupied place for miles around, a cabin occupied by a geologist and his dog. On the way, she kills a fox, a snake, a black bear and the members of a criminal gang who have kidnapped an heiress. Her silvery fingers are deadly, and the merest touch from her means radium poisoning and instant destruction. It's a bad situation, especially as she seems unstoppable by conventional means, i.e. she is shot about thirty times and it makes no difference, but these are Americans, so they just keep on firing into her.

Eventually, the geologist is able to whip up a cocktail of acids that kill the murderous alien and dissolve her away, leaving behind nothing but a trail of animal and human corpses and a medallion that contains a message from the President of the United Federation of Planets (or something like that) saying hello to the Earth and asking if we need any help with anything. It seems the young woman was merely an galactic emissary on a good will mission, a revelation that makes no sense at all unless the President of the United Whatnot of Whatever is an idiot, as sending a kill crazy person dripping with death to the middle of nowhere with a message of interplanetary importance was always bound to end in abject and embarrassing failure.

Super cheap, majorly clunky, the film only really jerks into life when the shiny un-smiley alien psycho lady is on the prowl but that's okay, as she's on the prowl for fifty minutes of its sixty five minute running time.  

I MARRIED A MONSTER FROM OUTER SPACE

d. Gene Fowler, Jr (1958)

Despite the sensational title, this is quite sombre, serious stuff. In it, an advance party of aliens arrive on earth and take over the minds and bodies of some of the male inhabitants of a small town. What do they want? Well, their own females have all died in the wake of a nuclear war, so they are after wives and girlfriends, which somehow seems much worse and far more presumptuous than simply zapping everybody to death and taking over the planet.

The aliens here are a fantastic conception, with hideous tentacled faces that are reminiscent of Lovecraft's cephalopod-like Cthulu. Their space suits seemingly provide them with an artificial atmosphere, and glow and vibrate so that they are hard to see, like a hallucination - or a nightmare. The aliens have the husks of their kidnap victims back in the mother ship, hanging mindlessly in the air, hooked up to some sort of transmitting device that allows the aliens to inhabit a facsimile of their bodies and access their memories and thought patterns - and their wives, especially their wives*. 

Even so, the aliens make unconvincing humans, at least as far as their wives are concerned: they can't have kids for a start (their scientists are working on this), dogs and cats hate them and, incredibly for 1950s America, they don't touch alcohol, not even cocktails. Naturally, they don't last long and are ultimately hunted down by a good old fashioned angry mob and killed, collapsing and coalescing into a pool of dirty bubbles as they die.

The final shot is of hundreds of saucers leaving the earth's atmosphere and moving on to the next galaxy: defeated, ugly men, still desperately looking for love.

* In the outwardly prim and proper 1950s, 'marriage' is synonymous with sex. The inference is quite clear: these fucking aliens are fucking our fucking women.

THE 27th DAY

d. William Asher (1957) 

'People hate because they fear, and they fear everything they don't understand, which is almost everything'.

Aliens abduct five people from as many different countries: an English woman, an American journalist, a German scientist, a Chinese refugee and a Russian Soldier. Aboard the mother ship, a rather suave alien spokesman tells his guests that his planet is dying and his people would quite like to move to Earth but, as they are a fair and peaceful people, an invasion is out of the question. He goes on to say that as humans seem pretty intent on destroying themselves, anyway, the aliens have come up with a plan. Each of the abductees is given a box that contains three capsules holding enough combined power to kill every human being on Earth quickly, quietly and cleanly without the destructive power of a nuclear war. The alien simply requests that if the people of Earth do decide to blow themselves to bits in the next 27 days, then could they please use the capsules rather than bombs to facilitate human extinction, as this will leave the planet intact so the aliens can move right in. After 27 days, the aliens will have to make other arrangements, perhaps look to rent some temporary accommodation.

Not blowing up the Earth for 27 days seems fairly straightforward, of course, even at the height of the Cold War, but the Aliens immediately up the ante by appearing on every TV in the world and giving out the names of the abductees and some tentative details of the incredible power that they now possess. There's nothing like a bit of extraterrestrial intervention to put mankind into a tail spin, of course, so everything goes mental: there are riots in Cornwall, panic in Los Angeles; the Chinese lady stabs herself, the German professor searches for a solution, the Brit and the Yank fall in love. The Russian soldier, poor devil, is almost tortured to death by his own evil communist overlords, so eager are they to find out the secret to killing every American. Damn Russians*. 

The ending has not one but two very gratifying twists, a more than satisfactory ending to an unusual and intriguing film about how fundamentally rubbish humans are - and how ultimately marvellous they can be once the get past all the bullshit.    

* In contrast, the US government are shown as a benign, supportive group of people who have only humanity's best interests at heart. Yeah, right.   

KRONOS

d. Kurt Neumann (1957)

When a huge asteroid crashes into the ocean, a crack scientific team are called out to investigate. What they don’t know, however, is that the asteroid is actually a UFO, and that the director of their scientific laboratory has been taken over by aliens, a race of people who have expended their own resources and are now travelling the universe seeing what they can steal from other planets. The aliens live by consuming energy: electrical, atomic, they’re not bothered, they just need lots of it and they don’t care where and how they get it.

To this end, they unleash an enormous, incredible machine onto the world, tall, black, metal, like a modernist sculpture of two water cisterns welded together. When the aliens are hungry, Kronos (as it is dubbed by one of the scientists – he knows his mythology, but can’t spell) rises up on hydraulic metal legs and more or less pogoes over to the next available power station and sucks it dry, crushing screaming peasants in his path. 

Can it be stopped? Well, yeah. For Dr Who fans, the solution is so obvious it’s amazing it takes the scientists and their computer SUSIE (Synchro Unifying Sinometric Integrating Equitensor) so long to come up with it: they reverse the polarity of the neutron flow.