X-Entertainment: 'Killers From Space' Movie Review

Killers From Space, from 1954, would likely be considered a 'cult' movie by most. I'm not entirely sure there's enough in the movie to lend it such a buzzword distinction, but if you're in the mood to watch something terrible, look no further. Watching bad movies is a sport in of itself -- the trick is determining if the 'bad' is the fun kind of bad or not. The flick we're looking at today is vaguely about space aliens with huge plastic eyes and black tights siphoning our electricity and planning to invade our planet. Read that last sentence again - the 'huge plastic eyes' part is how the film succeeds in being watchable.

Indeed, within the movie's many experiments with twenty-minute stretches of no action and a large interest in boring the fuck out of you, these big-eyed space aliens are your one and only payoff. Horror flicks from the 50s were beasts of a different kind, and they've gotta be judged in a certain way. For us, the fans of stupidity, all we're really looking for in a 50s horror entry is an excuse to pretend we're Tom Servo. I didn't find Killers From Space anywhere near as engaging or hilarious as some of the other films we've looked at here on the site, but if the scene where an alien uses a movie projector screen to show other aliens doing weird dances on top of rocks is any indication, it certainly passed the test of being the fun kind of bad.

Plus, it stars Peter Graves. Pretty notable Hollywood guy, but more in a 'you're supposed to know what he's done' way than an actual 'you know what he's done' way. The best synopsis of his career that I could offer is this: he was in Airplane, Mission Impossible, and used to cameo as the reverend's gruff military father on 7th Heaven. I'm sure he's on the Walk of Fame, but it's certainly not for anything I've seen him in. The cast is rounded out by a bunch of people who absolutely must be dead by this point, so if you'll excuse me, I'll skip the rest of the history lesson. Because of the film's age and rarity, my only goal is to give you a closer look at something you're probably going to see lampooned in some other movie down the line.

Actually, that's not entirely true. I did have a secondary goal. Kinda wanted to show you a picture of a surprised chicken. There you go. I'm batting a thousand so far.

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I should mention right off the bat that Killers From Space meanders almost to a criminal level, so for the sake of my sanity, I'm not going to talk about any of the scenes that don't directly lead up to alien encounters. Graves plays Dr. Douglas Martin, a government scientist fine tuning atomic bombs. For whatever reason, scientists that fine tune atomic bombs occasionally have to take to the air in fighter jets, and it doesn't take long for things to get screwy. Martin sees a blinding orb of light in the clouds, causing his plane to spiral out of control and ultimately crash back down to the surface in a blaze of fire and glory. His copilot was found dead, and while Martin's body hasn't been recovered, everyone assumes he shared the same fate. Untilllll....

Martin stumbles onto the base, groggy and very much not dead. His coworkers and fellow scientists are obviously befuddled, having seen his plane go down and all. Martin insists that he walked to the base himself, and has no recollection of the accident whatsoever. His doctor is skeptical, especially after noticing the surgical scar currently gracing Martin's chest. "But I've never had a surgery!" I'm assuming you can guess where all of this is going; I think the producers of Killers From Space would've benefited from showing the movie in reverse just to spite all the would-be critics who could call the action thirty minutes before seeing it unravel on screen. As an added bonus, the film looks like a Benny Hill skit in reverse. I found it much more pleasant to watch that way, but admittedly, you would miss out on such brazen and thought-provoking lines as "You can't let your people invade Earth. There's people living there!"

Though he claims to feel fine and wants to get right back to work, everyone insists that Martin takes a few days off to recover. After all, the dude just exploded and stuff. So, he's forced to take a short leave of absence while they wait for the results of his various health tests. I'm not sure why there's a waiting period at all - all his doctor did was look at his pupils through one of those giant novelty monocles. I think they just wanted some safe time to raid his office for steamy letters and proof that he's really a woman. Fortunately, the movie's odd charm is about to pick up. It might not seem it from this review, but it actually took a good 40 minutes or so to get up to this point. If given the choice of watching those 40 minutes of the movie again or having my balls nibbled by a lemur, I'd take Killers From Space. But only because I'm afraid that I'll end up liking the second option.

In the middle of the night, Martin is awakened by a strange power that materializes in the form of two huge floating eyes. He's not happy about it, evidenced by the rather barbarian method in which he rubs his eye crud away, hoping the demon stare was just a bad dream. It wasn't, and from here on out, Martin just absolutely loses his mind. Against government rules, he raids and steals classified files, and attempts to deliver them to a big rock in the vicinity of where he crash-landed earlier in the movie. His coworkers, now more like pissed-off people who just happen to work in the same office, catch Martin in the act and stop him from delivering the files to whatever rock he was trying to deliver them to.

I just realized that I've completely left out Martin's wife from this review. Yeah, he's got a wife. She doesn't really offer much to the film aside from lighting every male's cigarette and looking pensive about her husband's goofiness. In her defense, I'll give her this much: necklines like that are the very reason God invented oversized broaches shaped like starfish. I wish I could tell you more about Mrs. Martin, but I'm suffering from a complete lack of interest. If it helps, she had hair so amazingly jet black that it might've very well been dried oil shaped like hair. What?

Martin's crew decide to take the law in their hands by sedating him and getting a verbal confession on tape. They use some kind of truth serum to get him to not only spill his guts, but to do so in such a groggy, medicated state that they'd find amusement in his confession regardless of content. It's here that we begin to learn the truth - Martin wasn't searching for those files under his own volition, but rather of an unearthly power that ordered him to do so. He explains the story of what went on after that fatal crash, something he wasn't able to do previously because nobody hypnotized or drugged him. I'm not so sure his compatriots were quite ready for what they were about to hear, and in truth, neither was I. With a short runtime of just 71 minutes, all of Killer From Space's notoriety stems from this one extended flashback sequence we're about to take a look at. Are you ready, friends? Ready for big-eyed, bodysuit wearin' aliens who like to mutate grasshoppers to supernatural sizes? GET THE POPCORN, MOMMA - WE IN FOR A TREAT!

Recalling the experience, Martin tells the story of his post-crash adventure. Waking up in some sort of plastic cave on a surgeon's table, he finds himself in the surprising company of three space aliens with huge immobile eyes. The spacemen in black bodysuits looks about as menacing as a salad in a black bodysuit. After noticing that the aliens were implanting a gooey, pulsating blob into his chest, Martin learns that he actually died in the plane crash, and the aliens resurrected him to carry out their evil deeds. Why didn't they just steal a live human? I've got no idea - I guess they were looking for an excuse to perform makeshift surgeries using Jell-O in conjunction with heart transplants. Might be a favorite pastime up on Pluto.

I must say, for a guy who was just in a plane crash and died and got brought back to life by buggy-eyed space aliens who gave him a new heart, Martin is handling all of this pretty darn well. I've shown more emotion about the color of my urine. What I'm really curious about is this: did anyone in the 1950s go to the ol' double feature and think Killers From Space was a good movie? I mean, I know that times were different and all, but this one's really a stretch. If Roger Ebert was reviewing flicks back then, could his proverbial thumb possibly be held upwards? And wouldn't he be a lot thinner since they hadn't invented Raisinettes yet? I guess people were floored by this new movie thing called 'special effects.' As terrible as they are in this flick, they were still something to behold. Now personally, I wouldn't consider putting tanning goggles on a fat guy and calling him a space alien a 'special effect,' but what do I know? I wasn't even born till half these guys were underground.

Martin finally meets up with the lead alien, who looks pretty much like all the other aliens. We learn a lot about these strange beings - they can speak in every language from every world, and like to illustrate their points with the aid of an elementary school library's projector shining movies on a Pearl Art paint canvas. Now this...this was something else. Whenever Captain Alien has to show Martin something, whether being a picture of their homeworld, movies of their soldiers, or plastic dinner plates cleverly disguised as flying saucers, he'll push a few buttons to make a portable heater zap movies onto the projector screen. After completely disclosing to Martin their intentions of invading Earth because their nomadic and evil society ran out of precious electricity, he effectively offers up 20,000 different solutions detailing how to stop them. Pretty stupid thing to do if you're talking to someone who lives on the planet you're plotting to rape and pillage.

Wait, it gets better.

So, how exactly would they take over Earth? Well, get this: the aliens have secretly been breeding our planet's tiniest creatures into sizes of the Biggie Combo variety, and they plan to unleash this barrage of super-sized insects and reptiles onto our society until they've eaten every last damn one of us. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH. That's, by far, the best movie plot I've ever watched unfold. If you think the stupidity ends there, then you're just being naive. Somehow, it gets worse.

Martin, showing absolutely no concern over what he was just told, instead decides to play Devil's Advocate to their master plan: he wants to know how the aliens plan on living in a world full of giant demon bugs that eat people. Hey, it's a fair question. If someone told me that they were planning to send four live tigers into my apartment so they'd eat everyone inside and get the fine place on the open real estate market, I'd be much more concerned with how these dastardly folks plan on coexisting with four live tigers than the fact that the aforementioned four live tigers just ate my loved ones. Stupid Martin.

Captain Alien explains that his race has developed a special kind of massive heat ray which, upon the big bugs' completion of eating all the humans, will be used to melt all the animals so they won't be a problem when the place is finally colonized. He argues that the burning flesh of dead giant insects and toads will provide nicely as fertilizer for their new homeworld. No, I'm serious, he really says this, right down to the fertilizing cherry on top.

IT GETS WORSE.

The captain extends an offer to Martin - if he'll go back to Earth and retrieve the secret documents they need to complete their mission plan, they'll spare Martin's life and let him live on one of their settlements. Martin feigns agreement, but Captain Alien knows he's lying since he's got him attached to a giant lie detector machine. Hol-e-shit. So, instead of relying on Martin's good word, Captain Alien summons KING Alien to make things right. King Alien, by the way, is just an enormous head floating in space with the power to hypnotize people. Despite the fact that his image is only being broadcast on a silly projector screen, King Alien manages to entrance Martin and force him to do their bidding.

Oh yeah, almost forgot. Before that whole hypnotizing scene, Martin made a bold attempt to escape the cave. He succeeded, but was cut off by all the giant crickets, beetles, and iguanas. This leads to some fantastic scenes where Martin is filmed looking frightened in front of a giant movie screen with a short film about the tarantula playing on it. Absolutely brutal, but this was definitely the good kind of bad.

And with that, we're back to the present. If you'll recall, Martin said all of this, while drugged, to his capturin' coworkers. After he comes to, Martin's saddened to find that nobody believes his story. He had a plan all worked out, too. Let's hear it...

See, Captain Alien made a big mistake by giving Martin a backstage pass to their big battle plan. Since their floating society depends on electricity for everything in life, and since they're siphoning this electricity from the town's very own power station, Martin theorizes that their ship will explode simply by cutting off the power for a scant ten seconds. Makes sense to me. Still, nobody really believes any of Martin's tall tales, and have no intention of sending the world into a frenzy by cutting off it's power without warning. Martin argues that the fate of the world is at stake, but really, that's an overdone cliche. I say the same thing when I'm craving pizza after all the restaurants already closed.

Not to be defeated, Martin escapes the lab/office/whatever and heads to the power station himself. Everyone else isn't far behind, and at the climactic moment, Martin wards off his friends by threatening to shoot one of the station workers. He wants - nay, DEMANDS that all the world power's be shut off immediately. I find the notion that a single power station could possibly control the entire world's electricity very, very interesting. Regardless, his pals finally oblige and let him hit the dangerous red button. As the world's power comes to a screeching halt for ten full seconds, everyone waits in anticipation for a sign of truth in Martin's theory. Then? BANG.

Everyone looks out the window and into the sky, and sure enough, some giant ship had just exploded. And guess what? THAT'S IT! The movie ends right here, feeling more like halfa movie, not that I'm complaining.

Overall: Well, I won't deny that the fun factor picks up in the middle. It other films, that wouldn't be enough, but since Killers From Space only runs a little more than an hour, it's not that annoying. Still, it took me three tries to take this one in without falling asleep. To give you an idea of what that means, I should tell you that documentaries on the birth and life cycles of ducks are very capable of holding my interest. It's a great film for hardcore fans, since virtually all of these 50s horror flicks set up a template for the next few decades of bad movies. If you want a summed up critique, let me channel my inner Randy Jackson and say that Killers From Space didn't really, I dunno, really didn't, uh it didn't really move me. But pretty good still, dawg. 5 out of 10.

Oh, and here's a picture of a poster. The poster is based on Killers From Space. See, it makes sense because that's the movie I just reviewed. Continuity, folks.

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