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 Invisible people from the moon have come to Earth to conquer us and are dead set on using dead bodies to do it. It's up to a "scientist, a sergeant, and a sexy gal" to save all of us from the invaders' scheme. 1959, 67 minutes, DVD
A movie like Invisible Invaders really benefits by being placed on a double feature DVD with a movie like Journey To The Seventh Planet since once it finishes after its sixty-seven minute running time, you're thinking to yourself "at least I still have the real movie left to watch on this disc." Journey To The Seventh Planet is likely cringing when it hears that since it puts quite a bit of pressure on it to save the day especially considering that it's a Danish movie with John Agar shoehorned into things. Its cover art though shows a couple of chicks hanging around a giant green brain while three astronauts look on, so I'm sure it has nothing to worry about. That said, there's really no way to overstate how feeble Invisible Invaders is. Even genre stalwart John Carradine is smart enough to get blown up in the opening frames, reappear briefly as a zombie (he's very convincing as a dead guy with wooden acting skills), then disappear entirely from things (to no doubt go and shoot footage to be inserted into the Swedish movie Terror In The Midnight Sun which would then be turned into the slightly more American Invasion Of The Animal People.)
I already can't remember how it was the Carradine got himself blown up. He was standing around in his lab mixing chemicals and there was a big poof of smoke and before you can say "when there is no room in hell for really cheap movies starring both John Agar and John Carradine" Earth is under siege from a bunch of really invisible invaders. There's a little more to it than that of course (though at sixty-seven minutes, not a lot more) and once our cast of about three people and a couple of extras stand around at the graveside service for Carradine's scientist character, strange doings begin to happen in the graveyard.
An alien appears (from the legs down only) and then turns invisible and leaves marks in the dirt as it moves towards the grave. The bushes in the graveyard also move around by themselves further enhancing the effect that there is in invisible menace among us instead of a stage hand just out of camera range pulling on the bushes. Thus begins the most diabolically dumb plan to take over the Earth ever conceived by a superior alien intellect! But first, we need to meet the wimpy scientists that John Agar's Major Bruce Jay is going to have to humiliate into helping save the planet, despite their distinctly left-wing, old world European tendencies toward appeasement.
Dr. Adam Penner is a man who believes that the governments of the world shouldn't be working on nuclear weapons and should instead be working together in an effort to bring peace to the planet. I'm sure your invisible masters from outer space will appreciate that, you traitor! You know, when we outlaw radioactive weapons of mass destruction, only invisible invaders will have radioactive weapons of mass destruction! Or at least, reanimated corpses intent on burning down lots of Earth buildings. Penner announces his radical views to the military and quits whatever job he had, much to the relief of the women in the office who were grossed out by his saggy jowls.
Penner spends his first night on unemployment being visited by a zombiefied John Carradine. Carradine announces that he is really an invisible invader who is inhabiting this dead Earth man's body and that his race of aliens who live on the moon have determined that since we have entered the nuclear age, we will be destroyed unless we surrender in twenty-four hours. You see, these moon men fancy themselves as dictators of the universe and claim to have wiped out other threats to their invisible hegemony. Since they were invisible, would it really matter whether anyone else had any power? No one would even know that they existed unless they went around invading planets with dead bodies. But that probably wouldn't make for a very interesting run as dictator of the universe would it?
Thus it was that the invisible invaders from the moon first revealed that you do in fact need oxygen for your brain to function properly, even if you are an alien lifeform that can turn invisible at will and possess dead people. If you were trying to generate some buzz for your pending alien invasion, would you really leave it all in the hands of a guy who just quit his job because he disagreed with this great country's policy of peace through strength and deterrence? Wouldn't this guy just be regarded as a laughingstock or crank? Yes, as the faux newspaper headlines quickly point out in the next scene. (I did get a chuckle from the newspaper that had a giant blank square on their front page with a caption beneath it reading something along the lines of "first picture of invisible invaders!")
The aliens quickly realize the error of their ways when their alien invasion is laughed off, so figuring that if you want an alien invasion to start off right, you need to do it yourself, they begin taking over the bodies of people and using them to announce the alien invasion. And where do they decide to make this big announcement? At the United Nations? On all the cable news channels? At the Golden Globes? Nope. They take over the press box at a hockey game and in between calls of icing and announcing that someone left the lights on in their 1973 Maverick out in the parking lot, they declare the invasion is officially on! My God! There must have been seventy people in the crowd! And you know that at least half of them were wasted on Molson or LaBatt's!
Eventually, they just decide to begin the invasion even though its beginning was only carried on ESPN2. There's some scary blather about how the dead are going to wipe out the living and the next thing you know, zombies are stumbling around and apparently burning down buildings and blowing up dams. I say apparently because all you really see is a bunch of stock footage of stuff burning up, buildings collapsing, and firefighters pouring water on raging infernos. I thought I was just watching my local news during sweeps or something.
Is there no man who will stand up to these living dead firebugs? Is that John Agar rushing onto the set just after defeating the evil doll maker in Attack Of The Puppet People? Though he's undercover as Major Bruce Jay, there's no mistaking his quick ability to learn lines and concoct wild schemes that see him going toe to toe with a zombie in a radiation suit with a fire extinguisher strapped to his back! Finally, a real red-blooded American with the can-do kind of attitude who not only has time to save the world from invisible invaders, but also to put the moves on Dr. Penner's daughter while they're hiding out in the underground bunker hatching various plans!
Major Bruce is assigned to help Dr. Penner and Dr. John Lamont to find a way to defeat the aliens. Dr. Lamont is played by Robert Hutton who just got done standing around in few scenes in The Colossus Of New York as the moralistic pal of the crazy scientist. Here, his Dr. Lamont is a lily livered scientist who Major Bruce has to tell off and who is such a coward that even his sort of girlfriend, Phyllis Penner, is visibly disgusted with his lack of backbone. We can understand her old man being a wuss since he's an old man, but Dr. Lamont should be made of sterner stuff (though I think his little mustache is a dead giveaway to the contrary and I'm quite sure that Major Bruce probably had that scoped out as soon as he saw it, what with his special forces training and all).
Major Bruce decides that what they need to do is capture an alien so they can figure out how to defeat it. This involves the creation of a special acrylic spray that will harden into plastic and seal the alien in the corpse it's inhabiting because the aliens must be absorbed through the pores of the dead bodies. Like they had to explain that to me! After giving it the old college try with the fire extinguisher, Major Bruce decides that they need a way to dump even more acrylic juice on these suckers so he invents a clever way to do that. He digs a big hole in the ground, fills it with this gunk and then puts some brush over top of the hole and lures a zombie into falling into it! Didn't I see Gilligan trap a bear that way on the island once?
Once they get the plastified corpse with the alien inside hauled back to the lab, the boys have to try and figure out what to do next. Luckily it isn't long before Dr. Lamont's yellow streak rears its cowardly head and he attempts to let the alien loose so that he can cut a deal with it. Major Bruce gets into a physical altercation with Lamont (who doesn't do that bad a job in the fight considering what wimp he is) and in the course of the brawling he-man action something gets thrown against a bunch of electrical equipment and everything starts blowing up. This hurts the alien and everyone quickly determines that their weak spot must be sound waves!
I have no problem ignoring the total lack of logic to any of this since it means that Major Bruce is going to have invent a big sound gun and have Dr. Lamont drive him around in a van while Major Bruce lies on top of it shooting aliens and the alien spaceship with the supersonic weapon they cobbled together from parts lying around the bunker. No quicker does all this happen, then we finish up at the United Nations where Lamont, the Penners, and Major Bruce are hailed as heroes, the aliens having been defeated (economically off-screen) once Major Bruce radioed all about his sound wave gun to H.Q. In fact, the movie ends so fast, they don't even bother to address the burgeoning relationship between Major Bruce and Phyllis. This movie was so low budget, they couldn't even pay John Agar enough to put his hands on Jean Byron! (Sorry guys, that's hazard pay!)
You don't need me to tell you that this movie didn't make no sense. That fact pretty much lumbers around stiffly its sixty-seven minutes like the corpse of John Carradine. There's so much wrong about what's happening on screen that I'm only going to bother with the main problem with all of this. If you were a race of invisible beings bent on taking over the world, why would choose to achieve that goal by possessing the bodies of dead people so that you can wreck buildings and public utilities? Why not just stay invisible and do whatever you wanted to everyone? We know they can materialize on Earth because we saw the legs of that creature at the graveyard before it turned invisible. Or better yet, if you think you can be dictator of the universe, why bother with Earth at all? And why would you be stupid enough to wait until we had nuclear weapons to take us out? Why not attack back when we were cave men or a thousand years or ago or even only a hundred? Director Edward L. Cahn was capable of some decent science fiction movies like It! The Terror From Beyond Sapce and fun bad ones like Invasion Of The Saucer-Men, but this one is just moronic nonsense that feels even more dashed off than is usually the case with these types of things. Maybe that's because it was. Cahn's filmography lists this as one of seven movies he directed in 1959. (He made nine the next year and twelve more the year after that!)
Reviews © 2004
MonsterHunter
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