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 Only some kids "hanging out at Lovers' Point can stop The Invasion of the
Saucer Men." Two kids that are planning to elope accidentally run over an
alien "on the road to Lovers' Point." The police don't believe their story,
but do find the body of a drifter under their car. The couple returns to
Lovers' Point in search of evidence to clear them in the death of the drifter.
The aliens are "venomous invaders - whose needle-claws inject an intoxicating
but deadly dose of alcohol." The young couple enlist the aid of their friends
to defeat the saucer men. 1957, 69 minutes, VHS
After seeing pictures of these giant-headed, bugged-eyed aliens, I knew that I
had to see this movie. Combine that with the aggressively cheesy title and I
figured that here would be one of your quintessential alien invasion of movies
of the fifties. And for once in my cruddy little life I was right. There's a
reason this movie was such a pain in the behind to hunt down and that's because
everyone who has ever seen it, knows that the goodness that is a movie about
aliens that kill you by making you drunk, is just too sweet to ever part with.
I finally procured a brand new factory sealed copy of this gem after much cloak
and dagger business along the waterfront of my small midwestern town. I was a
bit reticent to rip off the shrink wrap and forever alter my copy's mint
condition status, but I just had to know how that guy with the funny looking
haircut on the front of the box got into a situation where one of these
saucer-men was strangling him. The movie fired up and I was glad to see that
it all started one dark night near Old Man Larkin's farm. His cow pasture
also served, much to his chagrin, as Lovers' Point to the town's way over-sexed
teenyboppers. The guy on the front of the video box with the burr haircut was
narrating things and told us that what had happened to him in Hicksburg (that's
right, the town is really called Hicksburg!) one night was really unbelievable
or strange or whatever adjective you would attach to being almost killed by
aliens that got you really wasted. The narrator is Artie Burns, who is one of
the cleanest cut grifters, hoods, con men, or whatever he was supposed to be
you will ever see. His buddy is Joe Gruen. He's played by Frank Gorshin (the
Riddler on the Batman TV series) and is what passes for a known name in this film. They are staying
at this rooming house and Joe decides that he's going to take the car and go
looking for some Hicksburg booty. Artie, being the true hood he is stays at
home and goes to sleep. While out driving, Joe sees something strange and
comes upon a flying saucer that has landed in the woods. He hightails it back
to town to let Artie in on the ground floor of his latest scheme which involves
somehow making money from the fact that he saw a flying saucer land in the
woods. I don't suppose you would be surprised if I told you that this saucer
landed right next to Lovers' Point, would you?  While Joe was busy planning on making his first million by somehow tricking
whatever intelligence was smart enough to build a ship capable of interstellar
travel to sit still and let him display them for fifty cents a head, Johnny
Carter is waiting for his date, Joan Hayden to show up. While he's waiting, he
and his bad actor friends notice something strange in the sky, like lightning
or something, but think nothing of it. Joan arrives and Johnny and her drive
off in his car to Lovers' Point. When they get there, Johnny sees all the cars
parked and declares that "it's really busy tonight." Nothing like trying to
get the lady in the mood, I always say. They find a place to park and neck for
awhile. At some point in all this action, Old Man Larkin's prized bull comes
along. He's pretty cool with the whole teenagers using his backyard as passion
pit scene, because he likes the free beer they feed him. He puts a scare into
them, but he just wants a nice cold Keystone. They give him one and then they
decide to leave. I really don't recall why, but they drive off without their
lights on. Along the way, the almost run into a military jeep (they've figured
out there has been a saucer landing and are checking it out). Johnny and Joan
muse that that was a close call, but don't stop to wonder why Uncle Sam is
beefing up his military presence at Lovers' Point). Johnny figures that it
isn't too far to the main road, so they can keep driving with their lights off
(don't want Old Man Larkin getting P.O.ed, though I would think he'd be more
concerned with the battalion of special forces guys prowling around his prized
heifers than the fact that Hicksburg has the easiest babes in the state).
Well, when you mix horny teens, some cheap beer, no headlights, and three foot
high aliens that like to run out into traffic, you're just asking for the type
of trouble
that groups like MADD (Martians Against Drunk Driving) were formed to prevent.
The next thing you know you see one of these little buggers in front of the
car with its hands up and then it's SPLAT! and Johnny is going to need a real
good car wash. Johnny and Joan go check it out and think that maybe he ran
over a kid, but are mortified to see that it is some ugly little monster. Not a
good way to start an invasion.  Johnny and Joan go back to Old Man Larkin's house to call the cops, but they
aren't buying their story. Johnny and Joan are sure it's just because they're
kids and adults never listen to dumb old kids. That would continue to be a
theme throughout the film and would lead to the senses-shattering showdown with
the aliens being destroyed when the kids drive the cars into circle and shine
their headlights on them! Even though Joe is an adult, he has failed to
convince his pal Artie that little green men have landed and are prepared to go
on tour with him, so he heads back out for proof or something. But what of our
poor little dead monster? Who will speak for him? It turns out that even
though he got his big slimy head smushed up against the fender of Johnny's
Packard, he still has a severed hand with an eye attached to it (I'm not real
sure that power makes up for the fact that we could defeat them by just driving
over the top of them, but you take what God gives you, I suppose). This hand
walks around and needles come out of its fingers and puncture the tire of
Johnny's car, before they go off and call the cops. Later Johnny and Joan see
a bunch of the little aliens around John's car with some type of hammer and
they're pounding and denting his fender. This seems a bit odd to them until
some more details surface. Joe has gone and gotten himself killed by alcohol
poisoning when he has a run in with these creatures. The cops have recovered
his body beneath Johnny's car and suspect that Johnny was drunk driving and ran
the guy over. That's just like adults to go and jump to conclusions and assume
the worst about young people when all Johnny did was drive drunk and run over
an invading alien! Johnny suddenly realizes what the aliens were up to when
they were performing their impromptu body work on his car. They were framing
him for Joe's death. Those crafty little devils knew that once the cops found
the dead body under Johnny's car complete with dented fender (I guess their
little buddy getting squashed didn't do enough damage to the car) they would
charge him with some type of manslaughter and a DWI! You get the feeling that
these aliens aren't the most disciplined of invaders and are easily sidetracked?  Johnny and Joan are hauled down to the police station and are shown the body of
Joe. They stick to their story that it was a little alien monster they ran
down, not a refugee from Batman's rogues gallery. Joan's dad is city attorney
so he tells them that the only person who will care that they ran over Frank
Gorshin is his roommate down at the boarding house and that he'll go talk with
him in the morning and maybe be able to talk him out of caring that his pal was
turned into road pizza by a couple of wasted yutes. Johnny and Joan decide
that that kind of talk means they better jump out the window and flee in the
chief's police car. Man, that Johnny is full of good ideas! They look up
Joe's buddy, Artie (the narrator) and tell him about how they ran over a
monster and not his friend. He believes them since Joe had been telling him to
clear out the fridge in their room so that they could store a dead alien in
there that he was collecting from the road. Joe never returned, so Artie
figures he should go with these crazy kids to see what's what up at Lovers'
Point. Once there, they go to one of the many cars Johnny and Joan have
abandoned in the forest (they are now in Joan's car). Inside is that hand that
punctured the tire of Johnny's car. It tried to attack her while they were
driving another car (must be the cop car) and they abandoned ship. Now they
try and take a picture of it and it disappears in a puff of smoke. The army
also has been having trouble with that sort of thing. When they used their
torches to try and break into the spaceship, it blew up. The military really
doesn't have much more than an ancillary role in this film and what presence it
does have is pretty much comic relief (as opposed to the rest of the comic
relief in this film). It's actually a nice breath of fresh air that a movie
from this era portrays the military and its role of covering up UFOs as being
quite foolish. The commander is a self-important boob that says stuff like how
great it is to know that they are only ones that know about this and that their
unit is really special, prompting his smart mouth underling to say something
like, "do you think this is the only unit covering up secret stuff the
government is
involved in?" That's a pretty sly commentary on both the stupidity of thinking
the military could handle such a situation in the first place and that if they
could that that was they only thing they'd be covering up. Usually in these
fifties invasion flicks the military is trying to save the day or they're part
of the mindless mass of people under the alien's domination. Realizing that the dumb old adults will never believe them (and never having
come into contact with the army platoon that was just across the pasture,
Johnny and Joan decide to get the rest of the gang at Lovers' Lane together and
they all drive to where the aliens are making Joe intoxicated. They all turn
on their headlights and the aliens disappear, having an aversion to light (good
thing they landed at night, huh?). It's an interesting bookend to director
Edward L. Cahn's other monster from outer space flick, It! The Terror From Beyond Space. Taking a decidedly more light hearted approach to this silly material, then
he did in the ultra-serious Alien-forerunner, It! The Terror From Beyond Space, he manages to infuse the right half-serious tone to a movie where the titular
monsters are involved in a savage battle with an alcoholic bull. He doesn't go
completely overboard into parody and Johnny and Joan play it straight
throughout, but there is this undertone throughout the film, that the movie is
on the joke, from the utter lack of concern Artie has for Joe's demise to the
smart aleck soldier that keeps ribbing his superior officer. That's not to say
that it's laugh out loud funny or anything, but the sheer lunacy of what is
transpiring is sometimes breathtaking (these aliens are so top heavy, that when
they're running around, you can see them wobble and wonder if they are going to
fall down). Cahn also apparently knew that sooner or later the joke would
cease to be funny and he smartly keeps things ripping along and this invasion
clocks in at a drive-in double feature friendly 70 minutes or so. It is a
welcome relief from the gloom and doom red scare movies like Invaders From Mars and the boring ineptness of such yawners as Devil Girl From Mars. Sit back and relax and watch the drunken horny youth of small town America
save the planet from little green men that spend a good deal of their invasion
time framing people for crimes they didn't commit and battling farm animals.
You won't soon forget the experience.
Reviews © 2004
MonsterHunter
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