Killers from Space

Killers From Space is undeniably a cheap science fiction film. The story centers around Peter Graves, having landed inexplicably in what looked like a blast, somehow living through his crash landing. Only trouble for Graves is that he cannot account for the time between his flight in the sky and his return - nor can he explain the surgery done on his chest. Graves is one of a handful of men in charge of these tested explosions, and now the army has concerns with Graves's return and his memory loss. Well, turns out Graves was intercepted by some real cheap-looking aliens. Aliens with bulging eyes that look incredibly artificial. Their suits are just as bad. And they have alien monsters which are nothing more than lizards and frogs showed to be giants(if you really, really, really stretch your imagination). I enjoyed Killers From Space. Sure, even for B science fiction films it is cheap, but the story really isn't that bad and Graves does a workmanlike job acting. The rest of the actors are adequate as well. The biggest detractors - other than the non-existent budget - is the cheap feel the movie has, its mediocre direction, the lack of even remotely believable special effects, and the aliens themselves. The aliens just do not carry off any believability. Notwithstanding these, the film is fun and short.

You want to blackmail Peter Graves? Get a copy of this turkey.... The story is about a scientist whose plain crashes. He is supposed to be dead but returns unexpectedly weeks later and behaves rather strange. No points for originality but one for good use of stock footage. I actually thought this was your average boring 50s sci-fi B turkey and was about to switch off when the aliens appeared. This has to be the most pathetic attempt at make up I have ever seen. The aliens have bushy eyebrows and ping pong balls cut in halves as eyes. This is actually where the entertainment value of the film comes from. Not even Ed Wood would have presented us aliens like that. So all in all the film is fairly boring (even for sixty odd minutes) but definitely has camp value.

Wow... This is a bad movie. I mean literally there's nothing extremely good about it. Even the length of the film, the whole 70 minutes, feels too long to watch, when no-one actually can act, the plot is terrible and the special effects are bad, even for the 50's standards.

Now, there are some elements in the film, that caused me to laugh, but that was just because of the lack of quality, or just the sheer stupidity of things coming out from the mouths of the actors.

Let's tackle the plot: A-bomb, the great and glorious days of the atom. The military is doing some experiments with THE bomb, when something goes wrong and a survey plane explodes. Everyone thinks, that Dr. Douglas Martin (Peter Graves) is dead, but then he suddenly appears. But he's acting somewhat strangely and there is a huge scar on his chest.

Soon it's discovered that he was hypnotized and open heart operated by the aliens with huge, bulging and quite motionless, yet sometimes in different way looking eyes. Oh and did I mention they are about to conquer Earth by the help of mutated insects and lizards and stuff.

This movie could be a true camp classic, but it's just far too boring for that. Static camera mostly just shoots people talking nonsense about everything possible and the action is very badly portrayed. Direction and the script are non-existing.

"Killers from Space" has small amount of value as a purely bad movie level, but it's not a classic such as the legendary movies of Ed Wood just because the film just is bad bad. Most of the time. But you could watch it for the aliens. They're just so funny looking with their huge eyes and the Phantom rip off suits.

Rating as a movie: 2 out of 10, Campy movie rating: 3 out of 10

Pretty bad. The premise is the test pilot, Peter Graves, is saved by a group of creatures from Astron Delta after a certain fatal crash. He acts irrationally after finding his way back to the base. The aliens look like a

hybrid of Marty Feldman and Eddy Cantor. They are on earth, setting up an environment for their doomed species. Graves has been brainwashed and sent on his way to bring secrets back to the aliens. If it weren't so dull, it would be genuinely funny. There is a scene where Graves runs through a series of tunnels for 10 minutes, getting nowhere. No one believes him when he tells the truth under sodium pentathol. For some reason these creatures have felt the need to tell their emissary every secret of their existence. This is a fatal flaw which inevitably gets so many villains in trouble. Pretty silly all the way around.

Before Seventh Heaven, before Mission Impossible, before even Fury, Peter Graves spent a lot of his time doing science fiction films, some of the best and some of the worst. This one falls in the latter category.

This was a cheaply based low budget thriller with no thrills where Graves has been monitoring atomic bomb tests out in the New Mexico desert by air. Some nasty old aliens are out in the caverns laying plans for a billion of their people to come take over the earth from the folks who live here now. I won't say more, but it involves a scheme of creating monsters who will destroy mankind and then the aliens will destroy the monsters without spilling too much human blood.

The miracle here is that Peter Graves as an actor had a career after some of the films he appeared in back in his salad days. This is one great example of what he survived.

Stock footage from other films, cheap black and white photography, imbecilic plot. Peter Graves looks stoically earnest throughout though. I guess that is a tribute to his talent.

Ed Wood would have looked down on this one.