Les Envahisseurs de la planète rouge

Lots of positive and negative feedback for this film, and I can understand why. Whether we want to admit it or not, nostalgia does have an impact on how we view things. As someone between the two generations(early 30's at this time), I can understand how I have put special importance on things I watched as a child. I know that some of these films were not too good but they mean't a lot to me. I also know that I was the kind of person that watched older films and appreciated them if they were good, and watched newer films and appreciated them if they were good. The biggest problem with many younger viewers today is that they do not look at a film in a context of when it was made, nor do they look at the most important aspect of the film which is what message is the film trying to relate....NOT how does it look in relating its message. We as a society are too caught up with presentation and other superficial things that sometimes we ignore what the core of something is. Anyway...enough philosophizing. This film is a good film period. Yep, it is cheaply made. Yep, it is filled with lots of stock footage, particularly the battle scenes which take place at night but footage takes place during day. Yep, it has mediocre acting. I won't argue those point because they are accurate. But those are only a part of the film...and for this film at least a very small part. This film has style and substance. Director William Cameron Menzies WAS a great director. He directed the science fiction classic Things To Come in the 30's which was a visionary masterpiece. He made this film fun to watch as he incorporated German expressionistic sets into his small-town simple story of a boy that knows aliens have landed on Earth in his back yard. The young boy played by Jimmy Hunt does a fine job in his role. The messages the film relates, however, are for me at least the core of the film....watch out for the ordinary....listen to children.....conformity is dangerous. This film is saying so much...give it a chance without worrying about window-dressing! And a final note...Long Live Morris Ankrum in film...I like him in this movie!

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, it'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.

And yet...there's something oddly menacing about this film. It'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 I'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.

The 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 that's stayed with me for my whole life. It'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 '50s-era B-movie alien invasion classics.

I was seven years old when I was taken to see this movie by my sixty-year old Lithuanian grandmother (to whom it must have made no sense at all). The images in the movie - the big green guys, the melting rock that looked like an explosion in a bubble gum factory, the people falling into the sand pit, the dreaded implant approaching the pretty neck of Dr. Blake, the little silver octopus-like guy in the fishbowl - all replayed themselves in my mind over many nights. I saw it again recently on AMC and can see many of the things that are dated, but can also understand why the movie made such an impact at the time. The concept, especially, of one's parents being taken under the control of evil forces is particularly disturbing to a young child. The music and sound effects, too, are particularly eerie. The almost abstract quality of the set in the police station scene lends it a foreboding quality. I'm ambivalent on how to rate it. It very much shows its age (and they could have shortened the stock army footage of tanks rolling) but has much that gives it a weird sort of drawing power even today. A curiously compelling movie.

The Fiftieth Anniversary Edition is made from the original 35mm film without any attempt to clean the film of interference lines, or clarify the print in any way. Unfortunately this takes away from the enjoyment of one of the classic benchmark scifi films of the fifties. I have a VHS tape of the film that has a better print. This DVD is also usually priced higher than other DVDs or prints. It is definitely not worth it. Try other versions before you buy this one.

I was only a year old when this movie came out, but I saw it on TV when I was around 8 years old, and it made a deep impression on me. In fact, when they brought out that long needle, my sister and I hid behind the couch and screamed for our mother to come turn off the TV! As a result, I did not know how the movie ended until I saw it again as a teenager. The special effects may seem cheesy to the jaded audiences of today, but they were effective enough to give me nightmares for years. (In one dream I am being carried by my own mother, who is walking stiffly, with a fixed smile.) I believe what makes it work is that the entire film is seen from the point of view of the boy. The director capitalizes on the insecurity of young children, and the way they relate to the world around them. All the best horror and science fiction movies succeed not because of CGI, costumes, rubber prostheses and fake blood, but because they focus on basic human fears and insecurities.