Charming and brutal

Best movie of this year hands down!

A Major Disappointment

an ambitious but ultimately ineffective debut endeavor.

If you like old, bad sci fi movies like me then this is a very enjoyable "classic" from that genre. It has it all, bad actors giving really stupid dialog, giant insects and reptiles, aliens with a plot to take over the earth, stupid actions by stupid characters, flying machines. What more could you ask for? Best watched with a big bowl of popcorn and friends to share all the laughs with.

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.

"Killers From Space" seems to attract a lot of negative reviews but I'm not sure why. It's not that bad, as cheesy, sleazy, poorly acted, and egregiously written science fiction movies go.The first thirty five minutes, in fact, have nothing to do with aliens or space anyway. It's a anti-communist spy plot. The remaining eighty minutes or so owe something to "Plan Nine From Outer Space." A scientist, Peter Graves, manages to survive a calamitous airplane crash after an atomic bomb test. He shows up in perfect health and evidently unchanged except for a new surgical scar over his heart. He's all set to go back to work. But the other high muck-a-mucks in the atomic bomb business claim he's acting strangely. That's an example of poor writing because, in fact, he's his usual self -- earnest, loving towards his wife, and friendly. Someone points this out to Graves' superior, played by Frank Gerstle, the only other recognizable face in the cast. Gerstle's riposte: "How do you disprove that scar?" I, for one, don't know. How DO you "disprove a scar"? Another interesting dilemma arises when the Air Force colonel sternly orders Graves to go home and relax. How can you relax when someone is ordering you to do it? That's known as a double bind. The logical paradox would have been clearer if the colonel had ordered Graves to be spontaneous. If Graves were then to be spontaneous, he would be following an order to do so and would therefore not be acting spontaneously.But enough of these rational caprices. Graves discovers that he's been saved by aliens who retrieved his body from the crash site, then hypnotized into digging up all sorts of classified information and delivering it to the aliens in the cave where they're hiding out, preparing to take over the world. Graves demurs. "You're asking me to betray three billion people." The writers didn't do any homework. In 1954, the world's population was a bit less than one billion. Today it's about 6.3 billion. (In 40 years it's estimated at 12 billion, something to think about when it comes to taking over the world.) The aliens are dressed in black sweat suits with hoods and have ping pong balls for eyes. That's pretty curious in itself. The director was Billy Wilder's brother and the story was written, I think, by Billy's nephew. Couldn't they have done better with the aliens? It would have been an improvement if, instead of trying to make them look strange and failing, they had simply used ordinary actors in ordinary period clothing.But -- even that problem is small compared to another that the film must prompt in the mind of any thoughtful viewer. Where did these aliens learn to speak English? Did they learn it from watching other cheap movies about aliens from space? It's a reasonable question because they speak the same in every such movie. There are only American accents to begin with, devoid of any regionalisms. No alien has ever said anything like, "I weren't listening," as a resident of Appalachia or Yorkshire might. No, their English is always standard and even includes a few multi-syllabic words. Yet none of them has learned to use CONTRACTIONS. "You are very clever," they say. or, "We have anticipated that." They always separate the pronoun from the verb. Whatever their information source, it was not a class in colloquial English.It's a tawdry film. It's the kind of thing that writers and directors might have pumped out overnight on a major dexedrine binge, recklessly and heedless of logic or art. It could have been better, and maybe even less expensive, had any of the elements shown any talent. As it is, there's not a touch of originality in it.