THE ATOMIC CITY

d. Jerry Hopper (1952)

The Atomic City starts with footage of test explosions and Hiroshima and of the men and women who live and work at the Los Alamos Atomic Research Site, their faces blacked out ‘for security reasons’. Obviously, they don’t really want to be developing weaponry with the capacity to destroy the world and everything on it, but, while the ‘spirit of aggression is not yet dead in the world’ they simply have to do it.

When leading scientist Frank Harrington’s son Tommy is kidnapped, Harrington knows immediately what the ransom will be: secrets. He and his wife try to handle things without informing the authorities but, very quickly, the Harringtons learn that they themselves are under constant observation, and even their best friend is an undercover FBI agent who has infiltrated their family in order to keep a close eye on them. What follows is a taut, well scripted story with some surprising flashes of violence and cruelty: a communist courier is killed by a car bomb once he delivers his message; Dr Harrington extracts a confession using his fists; the boy, Tommy, is bricked up in a cave in the Jemez mountains* and left to die (this last one is hard to take, he’s a nice little feller) .

The Harringtons are only interested in getting their son back, of course, but, for more or less everybody else the stated priorities are, in order of importance: maintain security; catch the spies; save the kid. Cold or not, it’s still a war. In the end, they manage to more or less do all three, but not until after a great climax in which Tommy is left hanging from a cliff face.  Even though you know it will work out in the end, it’s genuinely breathless stuff, particularly as Tommy is just so gosh darned cute.    

* This area is a designated national park, and the mountains, caves and the ruins of Pueblo American civilisation here are used to provide a fascinating and unusual backdrop to the action.  

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 FLIGHT THAT DISAPPEARED

d. Reginald Le Borg (1961)

Resembling an over extended episode of The Twilight Zone (there's half a compliment there, anyway) this film tells the story of three people who meet on a flight to Washington and realise that they are all on the way to the same meeting, a meeting that might actually lead to the extinction of mankind. For the record, they are a nuclear physicist, a rocket expert and a theoretical mathematician and between them their heads hold the ingredients of a super weapon which would make the H Bomb look like the cordite strip from a Christmas cracker.  

As they fly towards the American capitol, however, something strange happens. Despite the pilot's best efforts, the plane keeps rising and rising, even after all four engines cut out. At a height of ten miles, the plane becomes frozen amongst the clouds, and only our three boffins are left conscious. They make their way onto a mist shrouded patch of land (in the sky!) and are met by a group of ticked off looking people representing the as yet unborn generations of Earth. Yes, it's a trial, an unusual court where people who may never exist are passing judgement on people for something they haven't actually done yet. 

Just as the trio of scientists are being sentenced to an eternity in stasis, an older white haired man emerges through the fog and challenges the verdict. I think he might have been God, he certainly didn't look like a human rights lawyer. In any event, the three are returned to the plane which is allowed to continue its journey.

At first, the three assume it was all a bizarre dream (perhaps not surprising given how many cigarettes, cups of coffee and glasses of scotch they had imbibed on the flight) but, when they get to Washington and informed that they are over 24 hours late, they admit that something truly cosmic has happened and throw all their notes into the nearest waste paper basket, presumably to be immediately picked up by the nearest commie spy masquerading as an airport cleaner.  

FROM HELL IT CAME

d. Dan Milner (1957)

The image of some creature lumbering out of the woods or jungle to threaten us is a primal fear, a reminder perhaps of harder, wilder times. No wonder that it features in so much of our folklore and mythology and, of course, our films. Where would our films be without screaming girls clutched in the horrible hands of hideous creatures? Nowhere, that’s where.

From Hell It Came is a South Sea Islands variation on the theme, and here the monster is the Tabanga, a malevolent tree stump. The film makers hedge (no pun intended) their bets a little by giving the grim faced tree multiple origins, and it is variously described as a mythical monster, a murdered Prince returning from the grave to exact revenge and a direct result of nuclear testing, but all of that is just incidental detail. What matters most is that the Tabanga is remarkably angry for flora, and immediately sets out on a murderous rampage.

The killer tree is notable for its permanent scowl, its indiscriminate and versatile approach to violence, and for the fact that it resembles something that they might put in a kids playground at a Halloween themed Wetherspoons. It eventually ends up in ‘the quicksand at the edge of the jungle’, a fairly predictable conclusion given that everyone in the cast says ‘the quicksand at the edge of the jungle’ at least once, just in case we miss the fact that it’s there. One primal fear down, 35,000 to go*.

* An arbitrary number, as thinking of primal fears was starting to freak me out. 

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.