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.

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.

I get the horrible rating on here. But...

The cold war, guys in suits smoking cigarettes half of this movie is great. The cast is great and the story is interesting. A 6 or 7.

The aliens underground part of the movie is truly atrocious. Even if you enjoy close up footage of insects it is still trash. So bad. A 1 or 2.

But i find this movie overall enjoyable, hence I gave an almost respectable 5.

This film is soo jaw droppingly cheesy. The film begins with tons of atomic stock footage. Then the plot gets down to business. Peter Graves is a scientist kidnapped by jaw droppingly awful aliens with unbelievable eyes. They show him a bizzare montage of stock footage. Then everyone thinks he's insane when the aliens return him to civilization. I recommend this to any fans of bad movies, they will love it.

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.