Killers from Space

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.

This is the definitive low-budget early-1950s sci-fi movie.

Not bad enough to go down in the annals of the worst movies ever made, but it comes close. Part of the "problem" from that perspective is that Peter Graves is pretty good in the lead, and the special effects aren't as horrific as the Ed Wood movies. There are also some mainstays of B and C movies of the Fifties in supporting roles, such as my longtime favorite Frank Gerstle. I always wanted to grow up to be like Frank Gerstle but unfortunately never succeeded. Sure, we get to see some wild beasts that are obviously running on a film screen, but that is OK. It's all good fun.

predatory aliens with the worst cases of ex opthalmis in medical history are lurking under the desert in the Southwest, and it's up to Peter Graves to stop them before we all laugh ourselves to death. The effects in this stinker are embarrassingly bad and very, VERY cheap. Lots of stock footage, glaringly obvious blow-ups of various insects, spiders, etc., model airplanes that look like model airplanes, a creaking plot. . .well, we could go on all day, but you probably get the picture by now. While we like Peter Graves, this is almost certainly one of those projects that he would like to forget. The one intriguing item in this otherwise rotten film are the alien physicians (at least we think they're physicians) who successfully perform open heart surgery on Peter by waving incense sticks over him. How did they DO that?

I didn't think it was that bad of a movie. It has more drama, and mystery and not as much horror than I expected. The story does move a little slow but it did keep my attention. The so called special effects can fairly be called poor. A lot of attention by reviewers has been given to the aliens big eyes. The aliens did look pretty strange and almost laughable but did everyone miss the comparison there is to the big eyes of the so called "grays" that are supposedly being seen by people today. How about the abductees that talk about being probed and operated on by aliens today? This movie did have aliens with bulging eyes doing an operation on a human in 1954. I have trouble calling this a good movie, but I cannot really call it a bad movie either. I think it's worth watching. Don't expect too much, and view it objectively. You might like it.

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.