Invasion vom Mars (1953)

Invasion vom Mars: Directed by William Cameron Menzies. With Helena Carter, Arthur Franz, Jimmy Hunt, Leif Erickson. A young boy learns that space aliens are taking over the minds of earthlings.

“This one scared the hell out of me when I first saw it as a kid; I remember them showing it in the evening on BBC2 back in the 1980s. Looks like a lot of other reviewers were similarly traumatised. Watching it now, as an adult, itu0026#39;s easy to laugh at what is a shoddy, low budget production. Scenes are repeated, special effects are wobbly to say the least, the aliens are silly rather than menacing, and the paucity of the production is apparent in every respect.u003cbr/u003eu003cbr/u003eAnd yet…thereu0026#39;s something oddly menacing about this film. Itu0026#39;s partly the Cold War paranoia-inspired plot about nice, ordinary people being taken over by a sinister foreign menace. Interestingly, this is the earliest version Iu0026#39;ve seen on that theme, predating INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS by a couple of years. The paranoia is cloying and really raises the hackles, even as an adult, and even allowing for the cheesy over-acting of the child star.u003cbr/u003eu003cbr/u003eThe more overt aspects of the story, which take place towards the climax, are also profound, and in this case the imaginative nature of the production outweighs the budgetary constraints. That alien leader, little more than a head in a goldfish bowl, is oddly disturbing and an image thatu0026#39;s stayed with me for my whole life. Itu0026#39;s easy to forgive the problems in a film like INVADERS FROM MARS when it contains such classic, timeless material and I do think this is one of those u0026#39;50s-era B-movie alien invasion classics.”