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This is director Jack Arnold's first science-fiction effort and one of the earliest to use a desert setting. Richard Carlson is very believable as an astronomer who, along with his fiancée (Barbara Rush), witnesses a meteor crash-landing that turns out to be a spacecraft. No one in the small town believes him until disappearances occur. At one point, Carlson discovers his closet has been ransacked and wardrobe stolen!

Arnold uses Theremin music to great effect, the photography is eerie, dialog (by Ray Bradbury) poetic, and the alien is a large crawling mass with one bulging eye that leaves a snail-like trail in its path. Incognito as humans so as not to terrify earthlings with their unique physicality, the aliens are NOT bent on destruction - an interesting precursor to Steven Spielberg's expensive "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" (1977) - even its main titles are also at the end.

In an unconscious insight into social behavior, a scene has Carlson speaking to the sheriff (Charles Drake) while watching a spider on the desert ground ("...Why are you afraid of it? Because it has 8 legs, its mouth moves from side to side, instead of up and down? What would you do if it came towards you?"). The sheriff squashes it. This holds true for animals, as well as people (who have different coloring, etc.), avoiding, ridiculing, harming or destroying, sadly. The classic Twilight Zone episode "Eye of the Beholder" (1960) is a fine example: most of the "monsters" in these science-fiction/horror films just look different than humans, we might be "monsters" to them. This is low-key, intelligent, satisfying drama. Russell Johnson, Joe Sawyer, and Kathleen Hughes co-star.

This modest science fiction film from Ray Bradbury's short story "The Meteor" is perhaps the most-imitated film in the history of cinema.. The screenplay for this feature was written by Harry Essex, with direction by veteran action-film expert Jack Arnold. It is set on the edge of the desert, and involves in its storyline the crash of a mysterious meteor. Investigating it, a scientist living nearby discovers it is an alien spacecraft; he glimpses an ugly amoeboid creature like an octopus with a giant eye. Its next efforts cause a landslide which hides the spacecraft under a landslide, so no one else can see what he saw. The next development, when no one believes him, is that local people, law-enforcement and others, start acting like zombies; his wife believes him, but when the folk start coming into town he knows he needs to do something. Heading to the site again, he contacts the alien minds who tell him they only wish to escape Earth, where they do not belong. He gives them the help they require and the ship takes off the next day, heading home and leaving hi,m, and us, with a genuine mystery and an important question about parochial attitudes and out fitness to extend man's reach into the Galaxy when this urge has not been conquered. The production in B/W is a very good one for a "B" film, I assert., Joan St. Eigger did the hairstyles, Rosemary Odell the costumes, Russell A. Gausman and Ruby R. Levitt the sets, with Bud Westmore handling the unusual makeup challenges. The very fine art direction was done by Bernard Herzbrun and Robert A. Boyle, with luminous cinematography by Clifford Stine. In the solid cast are Richard Carlson, Barbara Rush, Charles Drake as the Sheriff, Joe Sawyer, Russell Johnson and Kathleen Hughes. it is arguable that Richard Carlson talks too much about the mysteries of the desert in this film, as n allegory for the dangers of the unknown, the wild, the as-yet-untamed--for space itself; but the dialogue is good-enough, the situations genuinely eerie and the style of the film, its crisis and its and pacing far-above-the-expected. In lesser hands, this production could have been less effective; this has become a classic example of how to handle several sci-fi situations. It earns the stature of being fundamentally scary; yet it is also thoughtful and interesting at the same time, by my standards. This is sci-fi noir of a very high sort.

First of all let's get rid of that absurd notion that science fiction films of the fifties were merely a sub-conscious attempt to personify the threat from communism - this is a hackneyed idea, and far from the truth.

This is a thoughtfully crafted film, which like other good science fiction films of this era starts out portraying the aliens as monsters, only to reveal that they are benevolent and superior (how does this fit into the "Red Menace" theory?).

The screenplay was penned by Ray Bradbury and is full of very good dialog and ideas, especially the notion that we are not ready to meet such advanced civilizations. The scenes in the high desert are very atmospheric and creepy, and although the renderings of alien technology at first seem somewhat adolescent, there is a genuine sense of wonder when the internals of the alien ship are revealed. Something missing from today's, blase, computer generated, over the top, excesses.

The 3D is a useless appendage, and not worthy of discussion.

If you like science fiction pre-scifi channel and post-golden age, rent this movie and enjoy the atmosphere.

I caught this movie in 2D and b/w, on the AMC channel this Halloween weekend. Prior to now, I'd never seen nor heard of it.

Set in and around a small town in the Arizona desert, it tells the story of an amateur astronomer who was trying to get to the truth behind a large, fiery object that fell to earth in the desert. Was it a meteroid, as the Army had proclaimed after its investigation, or a crashed space ship? Though he caught a glimpse of the latter, the evidence was buried in a landslide in the crater before anyone else got there.

Ray Bradbury's believable story is the now-common question of how we deal with things we don't understand, or are "ugly".

I thought it played well, had decent special effects, etc., for a film made for 1950s audiences' sensibilities and movie-watching sophistication.

One scene included a shapely, flirty young woman who really had nothing to do with the story. It wasn't until I heard this was a 3D movie that her presence on screen made any sense.

Jack Arnold directed this screen version of Ray Bradbury's short story, `The Meteor', about a crashed spaceship in the mid-western desert. The alien crew kidnaps several inhabitants of the local town and assumes their form. A writer of science articles (Richard Carlson) who lives on the outskirts of the town witnesses the crash, although he thinks it's just a meteorite. When he goes down into the smoking crater, he sees the open hatchway of the spaceship and an alien creature within it, but when the alien closes the big hatch it starts a landslide in the crater which covers the ship. Afterwards none of the local authorities will believe Carlson's story about a buried spaceship filled with alien invaders.

A moody and beautiful movie, with fine music by Henry Mancini. Many fans of Jack Arnold's sci-fi films consider this one his best (although personally I prefer `The Space Children' -- and so did Jack Arnold, according to his own statement).

Charles Drake (`Tobor the Great') is the skeptical sheriff. Russell Johnson plays both a human and an alien (a treat for genre' fans). The supporting cast includes Joe Sawyer and Kathleen Hughes. Special effects by David S. Horsely and the great Clifford Stine. Makeup by Bud Westmore, of the famous Westmore family who contributed much to all the `Star Trek' spin-offs.

Originally released in 3-D. A 3-D tape was available a few years ago, but the quality was not good . . . sad to say.