The film was Killers from Space, a 1954 science-fiction film from producer-director W. Lee Wilder (Billy Wilder’s brother), and while he wasn’t anywhere nearly as formidable a talent he did make some surprisingly good low-budgeters, including this one and The Big Bluff), written by William Raynor from a story by W. Lee Wilder’s son Myles (that’s keeping it in the family!) and one of the first, if not the first, science-fiction film to use the premise of a protagonist whose mind and consciousness are taken over by aliens for use in a plot to conquer the earth — before The Quatermass Experiment, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, It Conquered the World, et al. The film starts with a lot of stock footage of the nuclear weapons tests then going on in Nevada — including shots of the regiments of soldiers about to be marched into Ground Zero (many of whose bodies would become ticking time bombs killing them with cancer 20 to 30 years later) — and a plane flying overhead as part of the Air Force’s preparations to observe the test. Only after the weapon is detonated, the two people aboard the plane, a pilot and scientist Dr. Doug Martin (Peter Graves, top-billed and the only person in this cast who had much of a subsequent career), see a huge white ball of energy on the ground and their plane is irresistibly drawn to it.
Unable to work the controls to get away, they crash and the pilot is killed instantly, but Dr. Martin returns to the base in what seems to be perfect health except for a crosswise scar under his heart that looks like Piet Mondrian started sketches for a new painting on his chest. The first half-hour of this 70-minute film is a quite effective suspense thriller, as Dr. Martin breaks into the office of his colleague Dr. Kreuger (Frank Gerstle) and steals top-secret information, though even before he actually does anything the base command and FBI agent Briggs (Steve Pendleton) are suspicious of him precisely because he returned from a plane crash that killed the other person in the plane while leaving him unscathed except for those two surgical scars. At certain points along his flight his actions are controlled by two giant white circles with black dots in the middle — they’re apparently supposed to represent eyes but at times it looks like he’s being mind-controlled by giant Life-Savers candies — and when he’s caught in the middle of one of the familiar Bronson Canyon Western locations sticking a piece of paper under a rock (I joked that his spy contact worked, as a cover, as a stunt man for Republic), he’s brought back to the base hospital and given an injection of sodium amytal, which it’s explained will make it impossible for him to lie by eliminating his imagination (which would have rendered him qualified to write quite a few “B” movies, though not this one).
Then Graves, under the drug’s influence, tells the doctors, FBI guy and base commanders what happened to him — he was kidnapped by aliens who wear black hoodies with sashes around their waists that make them look like traffic control cones, and though their faces are emblazoned with two huge, bulging eyes that look like someone painted black dots on golf balls, the rest of the makeup on their faces makes it look as if Our Hero has stumbled into a convention of Boris Karloff impersonators. The aliens have built a huge power generator with which they are enlarging normal earth life forms — insects, tarantulas, lizards (shown, natch, by microphotography of real insects, tarantulas, lizards, etc.) — with which they intend to depopulate the Earth so they can move the one billion people on their own planet here and take it over. Realizing that they’re getting their power from the nuclear tests and are storing it in devices underground, Dr. Martin tries to get the government to schedule another test immediately, which he believes will overload their circuits, collapse their power source and render them helpless. Unable to do that, he figures out another way to disarm them — cut off the power grid servicing the area for eight seconds, thereby taking out their source of control power (though why technologically advanced aliens would be dependent on earth energy sources to power their infernal gizmos is a mystery Wilder père et fils don’t bother to explain). Despite the usual plot holes and signs of cheapness (for the first 10 to 15 minutes it looks as if Wilder has come close to achieving Ed Wood’s dream of making a movie entirely from stock footage), Killers from Space is actually an excellent movie by the standards of the genre and the time: it’s well staged, suspensefully directed and reliant on tight, dramatic action rather than special-effects gimcracks (which wouldn’t have come off well on Wilder’s low budget anyway), and it’s also well acted even though Graves is the only person in it who had a long-term career. — 1/4/11
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Later on Dr. Martin starts doing strange things under the influence of two giant rings that appear on the screen, and he’s caught depositing a note under a desert rock, obviously for someone to pick up — remember that this movie was made just after the Rosenbergs were executed and the U.S. was caught up not only in the Red Scare generally but the fear that our most secret weapons were being stolen by “atom spies” who were leaving messages for each other and their Kremlin handlers in similar out-of-the-way hiding places — and he’s taken back to the base hospital and given sodium amytal. We’re told this is a supposed “truth serum” drug that strips the user of all his imagination (so I unfairly joked to Charles that the film’s writers had obviously been on it), and under it Dr. Martin narrates a seemingly preposterous flashback in which he tells the base staff that when the plane crashed he was kidnapped by four aliens with huge bug-like eyes. The aliens are the advance guard from a planet their two billion-plus people have had to abandon because their sun is going supernova — at first they just jumped to worlds in their own solar system farther from their sun (represented by clips from the futuristic scenes of H. G. Wells’ film Things to Come), but later they realized that they would have to find another planet somewhere that they could colonize. They locate their apparatus in the familiar environs of Bronson Canyon — about which I once wrote a mock classified ad that went something like this: “CAVE TO LET. Perfect for criminal gangs or interplanetary visitors seeking headquarters for a nefarious plot to destroy all humanity. Your deposit cheerfully refunded if your plot succeeds” — and in an engaging twist in the script by William Raynor and W. Lee Wilder’s son Myles, they decide to power their apparatus by draining off the excess energy released by America’s own nuclear tests.
While the aliens held Dr. Martin captive they hypnotized him into going along with their plot, and when he tried to escape he was confronted by giant-sized lizards, insects and other dangerous beasts, artificially enlarged by the aliens’ technology, which they intend to loose upon the world and destroy humanity, whereupon the aliens will kill them and take over our planet. There’s an exciting climax in which Dr. Martin, realizing that if he can turn off the entire power grid in the area for about 10 seconds he can cause enough power feedback on the aliens’ system to blow itself, the aliens and the horrible monsters they’ve made from earth’s own species up to smithereens, breaks into the local power station (surprisingly easily — there’s a door heavily marked “RESTRICTED AREA” but nobody bothered to lock it, so Our Hunky Hero just walks right in) and grabs a gun from one of the security people who tried to stop him, then holds the guy working for the power company hostage and forces him to shut down the power. By this time the command staff at the base from which the nuclear tests have been conducted have arrived on the scene, and Dr. Martin tells them that if after 10 seconds of no power the aliens’ installation hasn’t exploded, he’ll surrender peacefully — but after just eight seconds the installation does blow up, there’s a huge mushroom cloud over the desert, but the prospect of alien conquest has been averted and Martin and his wife can go back to their bizarrely sexless marriage. (One wonders where the inevitable little Martins are going to come from.) Killers from Space is actually quite a good movie for the budget and the rather disreputable genre; it has its risible moments — like the oversized eyeballs and absence of eyelids on the part of the aliens and the furry costumes they wear —but for the most part it’s an attention-grabbing thriller that proves that W. Lee Wilder could direct, if hardly on the imaginative psychological level of his more famous relative.
