Invasores invisibles

We don't see too much of John Carradine, but we sure hear a lot from him as the disembodied voice of the Invisible Invaders coming to a planet near you.

Carradine's a scientist who is killed in a lab explosion. His cadaver is then used by a group of aliens who are invisible to communicate with fellow scientist Phillip Tonge. Tonge's a Linus Pauling type, wanting the world to disarm before Armeggeddon. Of course one encounter with the invisible crowd and he's seen the error of his ways.

The aliens attack, opening the cemeteries and letting loose a gang of zombies on the world. Humans retreat to the underground and in one such bunker is Tonge, his daughter Jean Byron, fellow scientist Robert Hutton and John Agar to lend some military muscle to the project of finding the weapon that will destroy the invisible fiends.

Though it's not quite as campy as Attack of the Killer Tomatoes, Invisible Invaders is right up there. If I had to make a guess as to which player appeared in more garbage in his career, the answer would be John Carradine. His film career lasted over 50 years and a voice that gave life to Shakespeare was used for science fiction at it's worst.

I think Carradine just liked the paycheck and he also probably just loved hamming it up in parts like these. He made a lot of these awful films somewhat endurable.

Robert Hutton and John Agar were a couple of once promising players who had seen their best days and now were scratching out a living in science fiction. Jean Byron though would shortly see her career part as Patty Duke's mother in the Patty Duke Show.

But I'll bet she never saw sights in Brooklyn Heights like these invisible ones.

This is one of the dumbest movies ever made - but I still get a kick out of watching it over and over again. First - John Carradine is vaporized in an atomic lab explosion and yet an invisible invader (which somehow has to drag its feet in the sand as it walks) can still take over the body. Second - if someone got on the P.A. at a hockey game today and said the world is about the end, some of the guys in the cheap seats would go up there and beat him up instead of running away. Third - how many times can they use the same scene of the zombies stumbling down the hill outside the army bunker? This movie is so stupid, it's frightening, but for some reason I love it.

I have to admit this was fun to watch despite how ridiculously silly it was or maybe because of that. This isn't a zombie movie in the modern sense, but a sci-fi alien offshoot of the mind-controlled zombies out of the voodoo genre. It's a big slice of black & white American cheese all the way which seems to use a lot of disaster stock footage for invasion scenes that involve conventional sabotage, but it manages to be pretty entertaining anyways.

The director also made 50's sci-fi movie "It! The Terror from Beyond Space" (which helped inspire lots of trapped on a spaceship with a creature film, including "Alien") and the swimming zombified sailors guarding buried treasure film "Zombies of Mora Tau" (which I still haven't seen yet as of writing this review).

THE PLOT: A scientist ditches out on his gov't job because he opposes nukes. A fellow scientist killed in an experiment walks up to his house and has a chat with him, but its not his friend. It's an alien who is none too happy with where out technological advancements are headed (reaching nuclear technology and space travel) and the threat they could pose to their outer space alien race and they want us to surrender or die (this was a common sci-fi plot thread back in the day). They are apparently invisible as are their spaceships awaiting us at their hidden base on the moon and the aliens can take over corpses and walk around in them sabotaging our planet. It's a race against time for the scientists to find a method to combat the alien menace before the walking dead breach the military bunker.

It doesn't have a lot of the elements of modern zombie films like gut munching or turning from being bitten (though the aliens will inhabit your body if you are killed), but it's kinda fun and has some good silly quotes. So bad you might think it's good 50's sci-fi fun.

Invisible Invaders (1959)

** (out of 4)

Incredibly silly film about an invisible alien who comes to Earth to once again try to wipe us all out. Thankfully for us humans Maj. Bruce Jay (John Agar) is on hand to try and save us. INVISIBLE INVADERS has the reputation of being one of the worst films ever made but I think that's a tad bit too harsh for a number of reasons. The biggest for me is that it's hard for a 66-minute movie to be the worst ever made because the filmmakers are at least smart enough to not keep giving us stuff to make the movie run longer than it should. The 66-minutes actually go by rather fast for the most part and this is always a good thing. Another thing this film has going for it is that we're given some familiar names that cult and "B" movie fans are going to know. Agar certainly looks a bit tired here but maybe he just wasn't feeling good during the production. He's at least entertaining and has no problem carrying the film. John Carradine appears briefly at the start of the picture and while he's certainly not reaching the levels he did in THE GRAPES OF WRATH, it's still fun seeing him. Jean Byron plays the female/love interest and does a nice job as well. Robert Rutton is also in the cast and adds some charm. The special effects are pretty bland as usually we just gets piles of dirt "moving" to show us the invisible creature or we get branches moving. These certainly aren't groundbreaking but at the same time they could have been a lot worse. There's some stock footage used throughout with the funniest bit happening when a plane crashes, due to the aliens, but the stock footage is from a test run and you can see the "X" mark to where it's supposed to hit.

Invisible aliens stationed on the moon have had enough of Earth's atomic tomfoolery. So they use reanimated dead bodies of humans to let the nations of the world know they mean business, delivering an ultimatum that Earth better surrender to them or else! Now a group of people gather together in a bunker laboratory to work on a way to defeat the invisible invaders while zombies lurk outside.

Edward L. Cahn directed this campy and cheap sci-fi movie with a muddled anti-nuke message. The special effects are poor with an overuse of stock footage and a monotone narration (one of the staples of no-budget sci-fi flicks back in the day). Still, Cahn produces a reasonable amount of atmosphere and it kept my interest throughout. The short runtime helps. It stars washed-up stars John Agar, John Carradine, and Robert Hutton, along with Jean Byron (of Patty Duke Show fame) and venerable character actor Philip Tonge. Other reviewers have pointed out that the movie might have inspired Night of the Living Dead. Whether that's truly the case or not, I don't know, but it is certainly something for movie buffs to chew on. Not a particularly good picture but fun in its way. Fans of '50 sci-fi will like it more than most.