Wednesday, January 30, 2008

Invisible Invaders

1959 B-grade sci-fi flick in which invisible aliens from the Moon come to Earth to take it over by inhabiting the bodies of the dead, with a very 1959 sci-fi anti-nukes pro-world peace message.

In a word: amazing!

Best parts:

-After the alien-zombies contact Dr. Pemmer to tell him they're going to kill everyone on the planet unless they surrender and then he gets his daughter's "just friend" to go to the press with this story "This old retired scientist just told me that his dead friend's body walked into his living room and told him he was really a moonman inhabiting a corpse and demanded that we all surrender or they're gonna kill us all!" Instead of the press just ignoring him (like they don't get calls like that a hundred times a day?) every single paper apparently made huge front page stories making fun of the crazy old scientist. I wish the press really operated like that...
-The first disaster was a plane crash, which was portrayed via footage of a plane crashing directly into a gigantic 'X' painted on the side of a hill. Here's a hint: don't paint gigantic white 'X's on the sides of hills. Pilots are irresistibly driven to crash into them.
-Throughout the whole movie there's a voice-over narration which overexplained nearly everything thin the movie. Whenever something happened that wasn't re-explained by the narrator it was almost a surprise. Probably not exclusive to this movie, but quite charming nonetheless.
-The scientists decide that the aliens' only real weapon is their invisibility: that's why they have to take over our dead people and use our weapons against us. Um... seems to me that maybe the fact that they also have spaceships and are capable of "entering a dead body through the pores of the skin" would also count somewhat as weapons. But, then, I'm not a scientist...
-Lots of easy pickings, actually, of hilarious bits in this movie. My absolute favorite part, though, came when the intrepid quartet of humans had trapped an alien in the chamber (labelled above it in big white letters: "CHAMBER"), after the alien threatens them again saying they can't win and resistance is futile and all that, the army guy yells at him over the intercom, "Listen, friend! We're the ones who've trapped you!" I love that he called the alien "friend"! These things flew across space just to take us over and kill us all, but even that can't break the 1950s leading-man veneer of friendly speech! (Of course, GWBush has many times in the past referred to terrorists as "folks" so maybe this isn't that bizarre...)

Really, though, the best part of the whole movie, and this is not something I'm making fun of, was that at the end, when they finally figured out how to make the Invaders visible by shooting them with a sound gun, we're shown a couple of shots of them shooting the sound gun at animated corpses which then crumple to the ground and, after a few seconds, the translucent lumpy bodies of the aliens emerge from their bodies, stumble around a bit, and then collapse into little balls of mush. These shots were almost haunting, since what they actually looked like, aside from the context of the story, were little animations of men suddenly dying, their souls then emerging from their bodies but apparently weighed down by something. Unable to ascend or really go anywhere, the souls just collapse into a pile of glop. Wow.

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