Earth vs. The Flying Saucers (1956)
This is one of those classic sci-fi movies from the 1950s complete with great title. The real question is whether it's actually any good to sit through or does it just sound like it's good to sit through. Well, for the most part, it's not really particularly any good and it's not really laughably bad. Much of the movie is boring, though you are rewarded with some pretty good saucer attacks at the end of things.
The movie opens with some guy droning on and on about the UFO problem the world is having, describing this and that over footage of people in airplanes ducking gigantic saucers and meetings of military leaders hunched over tables trying to figure out what to do about these dang saucers. Then that great title comes up on the screen and we're finally off to the races with the story.
Dr. Marvin and his wife have just been married a mere two hours ago and are now speeding off to their honeymoon destination which just happens to be a cozy little love nest named Operation Skyhook. Operation Skyhook is some project headed up incompetently by Dr. Marvin and involves shooting satellites into the sky.
En route, he is recording notes on an ancient reel to reel tape recorder and says to his bride that he "has a hot date with a three-stage rocket" that night. He must be one of those dudes like Sting (the singer, not the wrestler) who practices tantric-type love stuff or something, because I'm unfamiliar with the "three stage rocket" and am assuming that's the name for some weird position or something he's aiming to try out on the new Mrs. later.
After getting buzzed by a big flying saucer, they get to Operation Skyhook and we find out that this little project the Doc is in charge of is sending its twelfth satellite up into space that day. These are observation posts that let us check up on what's happening in outer space. It turns out though, that the Doc has lost contact with all eleven previously launched birds and that these things have pretty much all crashed. He decides to mount a camera and microphone on the next one so that he can see if there's some kind of problem in space once the thing reaches orbit.
What kind of mission commander is this? How do you launch eleven satellites, lose contact with all of them and then come up with the bright idea to monitor it's flight on-board on the twelfth one? Who's funding this guy? Wouldn't someone higher up want answers after you lost the first couple of multi-million dollar satellites? In fact the Doc's reaction to the news that all his satellites keep ending up a crumpled pile in the Australian outback is to say "when a rocket is blasted off, it should circle the earth for a long time." Ohhhh. I'm not a rocket scientist or anything, so maybe someone out there can tell me exactly what he means by that.
Dr. Marvin and his wife go into a soundproof room to monitor the rocket after launch. Outside on the base, a soldier sees a UFO, but someone says "it's probably just a buzzard." Who writes this stuff? A buzzard? I can't believe the government didn't try to cover up the UFO they captured at Roswell by telling us it was just a buzzard. If they had only done that, I might have believed them. "Hangar 18? That's just a buzzard farm."
One of these "buzzards" lands at Operation Skyhook and some space aliens get out and wobble around a bit and the army attacks them. The aliens retaliate by blowing up pretty much everything they can get their deadly tentacles on. Okay they weren't really bugged eyed monsters or anything. They were these really lame dudes in these bulky metal outfits that they lumbered about it in. They also weren't very tall. So at this point we were getting our arse whupped by some midgets wearing barrels.
Also, just to keep the plot interesting they kidnap a general who just happens to be Dr. Marvin's father-in-law. But Marv's wife is such a ninny we're kind of glad to see it happen. The aliens say that they've talked to Dr. Marvin, but all Dr. Marvin heard were some crazy sounds that he recorded when some buzzards were attacking his car on the way to Operation Skyhook for his honeymoon.
Meanwhile, deep underground, Dr. Marvin and his wife are trapped beneath the rubble of the destroyed Skyhook base and the tape recorder starts to play real slow because the power is fading and then they hear that the noise was really language recorded at a higher speed. Lucky for them, they got trapped down there with their recorder and that the power weakened just while they were playing that part of the tape!
It turns out the aliens just wanted to say whassup, but we went and attacked them so now it is ON! Somehow, the Doc and his wife are rescued and go to Washington to tell their story to a skeptical military. What did they think destroyed their base? A flock of buzzards? The Doc makes an appointment to see the aliens against the military's orders so his wife tattles on him and the military tries to stop him, but they all end up on the beach for a meet and great with the aliens. Inside the spaceship there is a lot of blah blah about the aliens wanting to take over without a fight and it turns out that they've stolen the brain of the father-in-law and have turned him into a zombie. You can tell because he bugs his eyes out and his hair isn't combed.
The next portion of the movie is spent with Dr. Marvin trying to figure out a way to defeat the aliens before their deadline for surrender passes. They've given us something like 56 days, which is how long the rest of the movie feels like as we endure one boring scene after another with the totally inept Hugh Marlowe (World Without End) as the totally inept Dr. Marvin. This guy never had me convinced he was a scientist anymore than a flying saucer could be mistaken for a buzzard. I kept wondering if I had dozed off during a scene where the aliens sucked his personality out of him.
So we get endless scenes of him theorizing about an ultrasonic gun to combat the magnetism the saucers use to fly and we have to watch him test it and then they try to use it on a saucer they see outside and somehow a forest fire gets started by the saucers and you have an awful scene of actors pretending to run in front of the projected image of the burning forest. You could sense the aliens were growing weary at this point because they just dump the general out of the spaceship while flying above the forest fire and he turns into a s'more and I was laughing and that tattletale wife of Dr. Marvin bawls for about a second, but seems fine in the next scene.
At one pointless point during this part of the movie Dr. Marvin puts on the helmet of an alien that was recovered and declares that he can see better with it. The movie then shows us his view which we're supposed to take as better because it is somewhat blurry and wavy. There really wasn't reason for this scene, they just tossed it in there to pad the thing, and I'm just tossing it in here to pad this thing.
The last bit of the movie involves the earth battling the attacking saucers and provides the scenes for what this movie is known for. These are the scenes where Ray Harryhausen managed to have these saucers destroy and crash into landmarks like the Washington Monument and the U.S. Capitol building and I must say that these are very well down and are still impressive to this day. It's kind of a forerunner to Independence Day, but here you just had this dude using models and stop motion animation. The saucers look just like you imagine a 1950s flying saucer would look and the scenes where the actors are in the same shot as the flying saucers seem adequately done.
Dr. Marvin runs around Washington shooting down the saucers with his ultrasonic gun and things blow up magnificently. Eventually, they get the last saucer blown up (I'm not sure what happened to the saucers in other parts of the world, but Dr. Marvin doesn't live there, so who cares, right?) and we find our hero and his squealer bride on the beach celebrating the fact that they we laid the smack down on these interstellar wusses!
All in all, a pretty turgid affair, that was disjointed in presentation. Long stretches where nothing was happening, but meetings about what to do with the saucers interspersed with Dr. Marvin running all over the place and periodically getting into battles with the saucers. It should have been evident to those dopey aliens that Dr. Marvin had an attitude problem and I don't know why they continued to wait until the deadline passed to attack. Marv wasn't exactly covert in his ultrasonic gun activities.
The lack of any characters with any personality hurt this effort, because I didn't care if Marvin beat the aliens or not, I just wanted to see his wife run over by a saucer. Characters kind of came and went here and there. They had a gimp scientist that materialized and seemed to be a friend of Marvin's, but the aliens vaporized him and that was the last we ever heard of him. The only character development in the whole movie was at the end when Marvin was battling the aliens. He was suddenly wearing his leather flight jacket and had his action hairdo going (somewhat rakishly mussed) as if to show that he meant business with his big nasty ultrasonic gun.
This one's just too tedious to sit through, even for some nostalgic matinee-style thrills. Some of these classic science fiction films hold up and are still fun to watch, like War of the Worlds and Invaders From Mars, but some like this one only manage to get by on a couple of noteworthy scenes and a great title.