Ages and ages ago on “Chiller Theater” – I think that was the title, a late night anthology series of horror/sf movies, the host was definitely called “Veep” --I saw part of an even older SF movie before my parents came home and sent me to bed, horrified that my Grandmother was letting a young child watch such a scary movie.
Yesterday I noticed “It came from outer space” in the listings, and thought I’d finally get to see the whole thing… but it turned out not to be the one I was vaguely remembering. (Pretty decent for a sixty year old movie, though!)
So let’s see if the fabled SD collected SF mind can come up with the right title for me. Here’s what I remember:
At the start a young boy sees a fireball/meteor come whooshing in. There’s some sort of evil aliens, and they capture people by making pits open up beneath them, sucking them down under the sand. Said people later reappear, acting strangely, and there’s some sort of marking on the back of their necks, a scar from having something inserted, maybe? One of these taken over people was the boy’s teacher, I’m pretty sure.
The fifties version generated a LOT of nightmares; people being sucked into sand pits and being replaced by emotionless drones, and the whole thing’s being observed from the perspective of a ten year old boy…
The eighties version was bad, verging on “so bad it’s good.” Louise Fletcher squandered all her Oscar goodwill devouring the scenery as the Fourth Grade Teacher From Hell. Kind of liked James Karen’s take, though…
I might have been 10 when I saw Invaders from Mars. I could tell it was old and hokey with cheap effects, but it actually was a good story for that genre.
I was in my early teens. I had read about it in *Starlog *magazine and they spoke of it glowingly as being a classic. When I finally watched it on late night TV I was hugely disappointed. Total 50s cornball cheese. Not just bad effects, but the whole thing was simply another ‘Body Snatchers’-esque red scare parable (and not a good one like Invasion of the Body Snatchers was).
As soon as I saw this thread title I thought I should post with help identifying this exact movie. It was one of my father’s favorites, and I could never find it.
I was 8 or 9, so in the late 50’s, and I didn’t have any perspective of other body snatcher parable movies to refer to (hadn’t seen IotBS yet). And I was alone in the house (in the afternoon). Yes, it scared me pretty good.
eta: and yet, even I knew that “mew-tants” was a weird way to pronounce that word.
No, the aliens were not humanoid in the least. Their mind controlled DRONES were human, though, although from Louise Fletcher’s behavior, I dunno about her. All the other drones were just kind of robotic yes-master types, whereas Fletcher was gleefully eating frogs and scenery and acting kind of laughingly maniacal…
Chiller Theater, that freaky six fingered hand rising up like the nightmare from Deliverance. I used to watch it with my sister, and looking at the list below, think I now know where my love of Godzilla movies comes from.
And yet my strongest memory of the movie was that all the green Martians (not the humans turned into drones) walking stiffly through the scenery had very visible zippers running up their backs.
I just watched the 1953 version. There was also a 1986 version that had a surprising number of real actors in it - Timothy Bottoms, Karen Black, Laraine Newman, Bud Cort, Louise Fletcher.
OK. Well … maybe those aren’t all real actors.
But the 1953 version had this one terrible flaw. The kid they picked to star in the picture could not act for beans. The phrase “chewing on the scenery” comes to mind. They could have picked any random young boy of that age and they would likely find someone who could act better than that kid. That was really too bad because with a decent child actor, that film would have been a whole lot more believable than it was.
Interesting thing is that same kid played the police chief in the 1986 version. He would have been around 40 years old at that time. I wonder if his acting skill improved in that version of the film.
Not only the kid from the first film showed up in the remake – if you look closely when they’re going through the school basement in the remake, you can spot the “Martian Intelligence” in his glass globe among the junk in the background.
The remake was directed by Tobe Hooper, noted horror director (The Funhouse and others, who Steven Spielberg had drafted to direct Poltergeist a few years previously.
The 1953 original was directed by William Cameron Menzies (production designer for numerous films) , and is highly regarded. As I’ve related on this Board many times, I once attended a screening at the Dryden Theater in Rochester, N.Y. – an art cinemas attached to Eastman House, where they sell no refreshements, nd people come Dressed Up, because they are serious cinephiles. These people were hooting in derision at the screen when the astronomer started going on at length about the "mew-TANTS’. There may be much in the film that’s good, but there’s much that’s pretty awful, too.
The film freaked me out as a kid, I admit. I caught it on a Sunday afternoon showing on TV.
The other thing I note is that they have a three minute (IIRC) countdown to the explosion at the end. It feels intolerably padded with flashbacks, but if you time it, by gum, it takes exactly as long for the explosion to happen as they said it would. It’s the only case I know of in a film where the countdown was accurately held to in Real Time.
Since the OP’s original question has been answered, may I slightly hijack the thread and ask about another old SF film with a slightly similar scenario? (Rather than start yet another thread.)
This was another late 50s / early 60s era SF movie I saw on a “Chiller Theater” type show. It was definitely in Black & White. The only scene I definitely remember must have been from late in the film, and it was a “base under siege” scenario.
A small but plucky group of disparate survivors are holed up in a remote lighthouse, and seem to be the only remaining holdouts of an invasion of puppet master type aliens. The survivors observe the normally-invisible aliens briefly turn visible - the aliens appear like small blobby creatures. However if the aliens attach themselves to the nape of a person’ neck, then that person becomes their docile slave. (Think the brain slugs from “Futurama.”) One of these aliens tries to attach itself to the neck of the female (as usual, there’s a single young female among the survivors.) The men wrestle it off her neck.
Realizing the aliens are besieging them, the humans frantically begin boarding up the lighthouse, hoping to keep the aliens away from them.
That’s all I can remember of it. Does this ring any bells?
(Full movie.)
