Invasion of the Saucer Men (1957)

It has been a very long time since I last covered a 50's Sci-Fi on here, in fact we have to go all the way back to July 2021 and to Robot Monster to find the last, which is ironic because one of the reasons I set this blog up was to start watching more dodgy 50's Sci-Fi... It's kind of in the name... I've covered all the worst ones but thankfully there are still a whole plethora of them out there that I can stumble upon and subject myself to even if they aren't as terrible as the worst of the worst, and this week I'm starting with 1957's Invasion of the Saucer Men. For... no particular reason really other than I thought the name was amusing and I really felt like getting back into them. And so uhh... here we are.

Acting on reports of a flying saucer landing in a field, Lt. Watkins (Douglas Henderson) manages to convince his superiors that it's worth checking out, despite no-one seemingly being that bothered, and rounds up a couple of chaps to go checking out. Meanwhile not far from said landing point, secret lovers; Johnny Carter (Steven Terrell) and Joan Hayden (Gloria Castillo) are on their way back from Lovers Lane / Farmer Larkin's cow grazing pasture, having gotten a bit handsy in the car, when they accidentally mow down one of the saucers occupants. It's dismembered hand then punctures the tire of the car causing Johnny and Joan to seek refuge at Larkin's whilst they phone the police. Meanwhile Lt. Watkins with Colonel  Ambrose (Sam Buffington) arrive at the landing to discover the saucer completely intact and seemingly still active. Watkins asks Ambrose "do you think it could have come from another planet Sir?" and that's about when I realised that this movie might also be a comedy... At Larkin's place, when he doesn't answer the door, Johnny and Joan just barge right in there, and then use his phone to call the police?! The police though, refuse to believe Johnny and then the power dies rendering the phone useless. Larkin (Raymond Hatton) returns home and is rightfully angry to find Johnny and Joan just hanging out inside his pad and initially believing they ran over one of his cows he threatens them at gunpoint before kicking them out his place and heading out to check on his livestock. Meanwhile, "Investment Opportunist" and heavy drinker Joe Gruen, having spotted the saucer from his car, is on his way to the landing site when he stumbles upon the mangled corpse of the alien Johnny mowed down earlier. He too just barges his way into Larkin's house and uses his now working phone to phone his pal Art (Lyn Osborn) to tell him all about it... Larkin's phone bill must be through the roof? He then returns to the scene of the accident to recover the body but before he can even dislodge the carcass from the fender, he's attacked and presumably killed by the invaders pals. Back with the Saucer, and having not got a reply from shouting at it; Watkins, Ambrose and the Army try shooting at it instead because America. Johnny and Joan return back to their car to discover the Police have arrived and despite not initially revealing it to the pair, the Police believe Johnny and Joan to have hit Joe, not a little green alien, with no body around as evidence and the kids smelling heavily of drink. Back with Watkins and Ambrose, after shooting it and getting nowhere, the Army decide to try and cut their way into the Saucer with a blow torch but all this does is cause the Saucer to explode which briefly distracts a poor, snogging couple on Lovers Lane. The explosion briefly distracts the Police, long enough for Johnny and Joan to jump out and window and steal the Chief's car, and driving back to the accident, they get out the car to search for evidence but finding nothing, head back and decide instead to return to Lovers lane. On the way, unbeknownst to the pair, the previously mentioned dismembered hand has crawled inside the car and proceeds to attack Joan. The pair jump out and trap the hand inside, before making a plan to find Art, Joe's room-mate and seek his help in convincing the Police. They rock up at his place and Art is remarkably cavalier about finding out his former roomie is now RIP and he agrees to go with the kids to look at "the claw". Meanwhile, despite being as loud and large as a nuclear bomb, the Saucer explosion appears not to have killed Watkins and Ambrose and they go about hiding the evidence that there ever was a Saucer... and on Larkin's farm, it's a little bit difficult to figure out what's actually going on but I think the aliens get into a bit of a scuffle with one of the farms resident bulls before needling it to death with their fingers. Arriving at the abandoned Police Car, Art, Johnny and Joan find the hand and discover it has an aversion to light when, after shining a spotlight on it it smoulders and vanishes to ashes. Before they can get away from the scene though, they are ambushed by the aliens and are unable to fend them off when Joan's car's battery dies. Making a run for it on foot, Art is attacked and needled but in the melee Johnny and Joan are able to get away as far as Larkin's farm where - get this - they borrow his phone! Again! And call the Police but they want nothing to do with the pair now, having cleared them of Joe's murder when the autopsy reveals he died of a heart attack brought on by extreme intoxication...? Johnny and Joan decide to round up the gang at Lovers Lane and lead them to the spot where the Saucer used to be. The aliens, meanwhile have the same idea, making their way to the craft to discover it's no longer there. Arriving on the scene, Johnny and the Gang surround the aliens and simultaneously activating their headlights, the aliens burst into flames and vanish, leaving a now conscious but severely drunk Art behind. Johnny then explains that the aliens killed their victims by injecting them with pure alcohol, but Art - being a seasoned alcoholic survived their attack. However before he can go into too much detail, Larkin and his gun arrives on the scene, announcing that they got his bull drunk and now he wants them all off his land. The End.

Well this was certainly different... I will at least give it that. Wasn't quite what I expected going in... In fact it wasn't at all what I expected going in. I kinda get the feeling this started out intending to be a serious sci-fi horror movie but about half way through production I think the feeling kinda started to settle in that maybe it was a really silly and goofy idea, so they just thought fuck it and rolled with it and it instead morphed into this kind of slightly comedic, slightly science fictiony kind of movie that you ended up getting. It wasn't great to be honest. For reasons I will explain shortly, but it was at least short and at least mildly entertaining enough that I didn't get bored and clock out. But yeah, pretty unremarkable.

To start off with, the whole thing is shot at night, and I'm watching a supposedly "remastered" version, but there was moments when it was a struggle just to try and digest what was going on. It didn't help that it was shot cheaply and therefore the practical effects are dialled right back. The scene with the bull attack for example was so confusingly produced that I didn't really know what was going on. There was also a good handful of scenes poorly lit so it was hard to make out detail. I guess for a 50's film it was produced decently really given that it was shot at night and all on film, but it was a struggle sometimes to fully understand just what it was you were watching.

Storyline-wise as well it was a bit of moot point. I mean, it was a pretty crappy invasion. Aliens landed, one of them immediately gets wiped out by a car, the others bumble around, kill one guy who was drunk anyway, before getting their ship blown up and themselves vaporised by a bunch of kids. In terms of a threatening, menacing monster these guys rank pretty lowly. I also absolutely did not understand the whole "injecting you with alcohol" stuff until Johnny explained it at the end, went right over my head, and to be honest it's a pretty goofy, pretty dumb gimmick.

The acting was kind of a mixed bag too to be honest. I thought Steven Terrell as Johnny and Gloria Castillo as Joan were mostly fine, Frank Gorshin as Joe Gruen also was pretty decent if not a bit over the top, but the others were just vanilla stereotypes and largely unforgettable. It took me a little bit but when the two Army guys; Wilkins and Ambrose started overacting at the scene with the Saucer, it was then I realised that actually, they weren't taking this seriously intentionally although they were still just very stereotypical roles to be honest.

You also never really get a proper look at the aliens, and that's probably intentional, which was disappointing. You did get a handful of quick cuts and very brief shots of them so you got a kind of idea of what they looked like, but with it being shot in the dark, and with any scenes they were in featuring them well obscured or in the distance you never got a proper good look at them and that is half the appeal with these movies: seeing how the monsters are depicted. Feels like it was cheapened out to a degree and they didn't have to worry about spending loads of cash on decent costume design.

It was pretty clear that this was shot on a tiny budget. Most of the movie is basically Johnny and Joan having conversations and the pretext to those conversations is that they have stumbled into a very unsuccessful alien invasion. There isn't really much of a focus on aforementioned invasion and instead it's mostly about Johnny and Joan trying to prove it to the Police. It was largely unremarkable movie to be honest, didn't really excel in any particular direction and whilst it wasn't necessarily a bad movie there wasn't particularly anything else that really stood out either. It fashioned itself as a comedy but it wasn't particularly funny and it fashioned itself as a sci-fi but it rarely featured any actual aliens. I can't imagine this making much of an impression on anyone really at the time, even for 1957, and it didn't really make much of an impression on me. 1 out of 5?