Invisible Invaders (Premium Pictures, United Artists, 1959)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The last film in our program of invisibility movies from TCM was Invisible Invaders, made in 1959 by a company called Premium Pictures releasing through United Artists. The producer was Robert E. Kent (famous for being able to sit at a typewriter and churn out the usual Hollywood clichés while narrating the events of the baseball game he’d been to the previous evening), the director was Edward L. Cahn (former MGM shorts stalwart in the 1930’s reduced to making cheap-jack features like this in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s) and the writer was Samuel Newman. The cast featured two people I’d actually heard of before, John Agar and John Carradine, along with a lot of people I hadn’t, and the plot is essentially what Edward D. Wood, Jr.’s Plan Nine from Outer Space would have been if Wood had had a mini-budget instead of the micro-budget he actually did. The plot begins with scientist Dr. Karol Noymann (John Carradine) accidentally blowing himself up and killing himself while working in his lab developing a mega-weapon, the “Super H-Bomb.” (The original hydrogen bomb was actually nicknamed “The Super” by its inventor, Dr. Edward Teller, when he was researching it in the late 1940’s and early 1950’s.) The moment I recognized him and realized what was about to happen to him I joked, “John Carradine is in this movie – and he gets blown up in the first minute?” Actually, he does and he doesn’t; after he’s dead he gets revivified and shows up at the home his old friend, Dr. Adam Penner (Philip Tonge), shares with Penner’s daughter Phyllis (Jean Byron) and fellow scientist Dr. John Lamont (Robert Hutton). Dr. Adam Penner has just resigned from the Atomic Energy Commission because he rebelled against the program to build the Super H-Bomb, and the revived Dr. Noymann (whose first name becomes “Carl” in the closing credits) explained that he’s actually an invisible man from outer space. He comes from a race of beings from another planet who 20,000 years before colonized the moon and obliterated all its native life forms. Newman’s script not only refers to the moon as a “planet” (it’s actually a satellite) but cheerily ignores the fact that without any atmosphere the moon couldn’t have supported native life at all (though maybe we were supposed to assume that the moon had once had air until its sinister colonizers abolished it because they didn’t need it – but then how did they breathe themselves?).

The invisible invaders from the moon have been using it as a home base to conquer the rest of the universe ever since, and now they’ve decided that it’s Earth’s turn to come under their total domination. They use their powers to turn the Earth into a ruined planet via a lot of stock footage, some of it from World War II newsreels and some of it from documentaries, newsreels or feature films (including a bizarre clip of the final scene from the Robert Mitchum/Arthur Ripley film Thunder Road, made by Mitchum’s company, DRM Productions, for United Artists release in 1958). I had the same thought during this movie that I’d had decades ago when Charles and I watched an hour-long edit of Abel Gance’s Fin du Monde (The End of the World) (1929): that the producers had written every film company in the world that did a newsreel and said, “Please send us everything you have on disasters.” The U.S. government, which somehow has managed to maintain a communications infrastructure even while the rest of the world is being destroyed, summons Dr. Penner, Phyllis and Dr. Lamont to live and work in an underground bunker so they can figure out how to kill the monsters while in a relative degree of safety themselves. (The bunker came equipped with a gas station and I was amused that the station pumps were emblazoned with the then-required warning, “Contains Lead [Tetraethyl],” before the modern smog converters made it necessary that cars use unleaded gas.) To drive them there, the government assigns Marine Major Bruce Jay (John Agar, once again adopting the halting vocal intonations and stance of his close friend John Wayne to try to make us see him as butch), and though we’ve previously assumed that Phyllis was married to Dr. Lamont, it turns out they were only roommates and not romantically interested in each other, so we should have known she’d end up with butch, clean-shaven Major Jay instead of Dr. Lamont with his “roo” moustache.

On their way to the bunker there’s an attempt to waylay them by a farmer (Hal Torey), whom I first thought was a zombie controlled by the invisible invaders. He turns out to be a farmer who was run off his land by the bad guys and, like a character in H. G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds, he’s got his gun out and is ready to flee to safety no matter how many people he has to take down to do it. Ultimately Major Jay kills the farmer in self-defense, and then the farmer’s body is indeed taken over by one of the invisible invaders (shown by piles of animated dirt the invaders are presumably kicking over in their paths). The invaders are demanding the total surrender of Earth’s population in 24 hours, but they don’t get it and are getting more and more impatient with the delays. In one of the film’s cleverer scenes, one invader takes over the broadcast booth at a hockey game, kills the color commentator, and forces the main broadcaster to send the message that the invaders demand the total surrender of earth (though since they intend to annihilate the human race whether we “surrender” or not, there’s no particular reason for us to capitulate). While trapped in the bunker, the Fantastic Four deduce that because the moon’s gravity is only one-sixth that of earth, the invaders can’t use their own metal weapons because they won’t hold together in earth’s environment. They are destroying the world only by using our own earth weapons against us. They also realize that while the creatures are impervious to bullets, they have a fatal weakness: sound. Certain sonic frequencies aimed at them not only incapacitate them but ultimately kill them and turn them into foam (after a few tests of this, the bunker starts to look like a particularly foam-driven craft brewery). Dr. Penner invents a ray gun that shoots sound waves and sends Major Jay to use it – though Jay is dressed in an ordinary haz-mat suit and Phyllis and Dr. Lamont have to go out in their truck with no protection at all. Eventually the world is saved for boring old humanity, there’s a stock shot of the United Nations headquarters in New York City as the stentorian (and unnamed on imdb.com) narrator who’s been annoying us throughout the whole movie explains that the need for the nations of the world to come together to defeat the space aliens has convinced them to make permanent peace, and Major Jay and Phyllis end up in a clinch. Invisible Invaders basically has the same plot as Plan Nine from Outer Space – aliens from another planet revive the corpses of dead Earthlings and use them as an army to take over – and though its production values are far higher than those of Ed Wood’s messterpiece, somehow it simply isn’t as much fun. For all Wood’s fabled incompetence as a director, at least his films have a crude energy that makes them entertaining; in the more “normal” but less energetic hands of Edward L. Cahn, Invisible Invaders just seems dull.