Invasion of the Saucer Men (1957) – Review

What can you do if your science fiction film doesn’t quite have the budget to pull off a proper alien invasion? Easy, just shift the tone into the arena of comedy so that the audience is laughing “with you” instead of at the cheesy special effects on display.  This is exactly what happened with Edward L. Cahn’s Invasion of the Saucer Men, but the real question is did this tactic work?

The movie opens on a book with an interesting disclaimer stating that this is “A true story of flying saucers” which made me check the date of this movie’s release to make sure it wasn’t written by the Coen Brothers. Sadly, it wasn’t. This film was actually based on the 1955 short story “The Cosmic Frame” by Paul W. Fairman and it tells the exciting tale of teenagers vs. aliens – while that doesn’t sound like a Coen Brothers movie I’d sure love to see John Turturro and Francis McDormand facing off against an alien invasion – which was your standard Drive-In fair of the 1950s. The plot of this sci-fi entry unravels over a single night with con man Joe Gruen (Frank Gorshin) witnessing the arrival of flying saucers and him deciding to investigate as this could lead to “Big Money.” While Joe is very excited about the prospect of meeting some aliens his partner, Art Burns (Lyn Osborn), is more concerned with getting a good night’s sleep then he is in investigating an “alien” encounter.

“Riddle me this, what has green skin and flies?”

Joe isn’t the only one about to have a close encounter as we’ve also got a teenage couple, Johnny Carter (Steven Terrell) and Joan Hayden (Gloria Castillo), who accidentally run down one of the saucer’s large-headed occupants while driving to their local lover’s lane. This is due to the fact that they were driving without their headlights on so not to alert crotchety Farmer Larkin (Raymond Hatton) to their trespassing on his land.  This is where things get interesting. When Joe stumbles across the alien corpse he also sees future riches, but instead of receiving fame and fortune he is attacked by the dead aliens’ buddies who use their little finger needles to inject enough alcohol into his blood stream to kill him. The aliens then remove their dead companion from the scene of the crime and replace it with Joe’s corpse, basically framing Johnny and Joan with vehicular manslaughter. This is definitely not your typical alien encounter. There are no national monuments being blown up or even the threat of a good anal probing, but worst of all, when the movie ends we never do find out what in the hell these little bastards were doing on Earth in the first place. Did they come for some kind of intergalactic kegger?

Question: Is alcohol poisoning more effective than a death ray?

Stray Observations:

• This film was released as part of a double bill alongside I Was a Teenage Werewolf, with the tagline “We DARE You To See The Most Amazing Pictures of Our Time!” which is quite the gutsy claim and pretty much tells you all you need to know about this film’s quality.
• The town’s “Lovers Lane” was co-opted by farmer Larkin as a pasture but that doesn’t stop the local teens from necking amongst the cow paddies. I guess when your town is literally called Hicksburg you have to make do with what’s available.
• Colonel Ambrose is bitter over the fact that the Army scooped them during the last flying saucer encounter, which goes to show you that departmental rivalries know no bounds, even intergalactic ones.
• I love the military’s blasé approach to their Close Encounters of the Third Kind, treating the arrival of a flying saucer as nothing more than a routine Friday night. That these aliens are a trick-or-treating menace doesn’t even seem all that important.
• To be fair to the military, these particular aliens don’t appear all that menacing, with members of this “invasion force” being taken out by a couple of teenagers driving without headlights and a bull with a fondness for beer. Why develop some fancy weapon to kill these aliens when a Ford Pontiac will do just as well?

Aliens are notoriously lax at looking both ways before crossing the street.

There is not a lot of plot to be found in Invasion of the Saucer Men 69-minute running time as it consists mostly of a bunch of idiots stumbling through the woods – this includes the stupid aliens – but we do get the standard generation gap conflict between teens and authority, with the police not believing Johnny and Joan about little green men. Then we also have the subplot concerning the military’s investigation of the landed flying saucer, but that circles the drain for awhile before exploding in a burst of flames – apparently trying to cut through the hull of a flying saucer with an acetylene torch is not a good idea – because these aliens didn’t spend the extra money to get one of those invulnerable flying saucers found in The Day the Earth Stood Still. So even if our teen heroes didn’t defeat these little buggers they were still stranded on Earth.

Do aliens have some kind of roadside assistance that they can call?

I’ll give it to the filmmakers that the aliens in this outing are decidedly creepy, and special effects technician Paul Blaisdel did a great job in creating this particular alien menace and the disembodied hand of the dead one roaming around gets bonus points for creativity, but while this film was originally intended as a serious science fiction/horror film it gradually developed into a comedy and the score by Ronald Stein sounds more like a sitcom to the point that you almost expect to hear a laugh track.  It all comes across as weird and out of place.

“Car 54 where are you?”

This isn’t a particularly bad film but it has more in common with the Bowery Boys movies that populated cinemas of the 30s and 40s as those movies also dealt with teens coming together to solve various mysteries, without the help of grown-ups or authority figures.  We also have to deal with actors who we are supposed to believe are teenagers when they are clearly in the late twenties or early thirties. Overall, this is a decent little entry and the film’s brevity works in its favour, with the end result being a fun if weird little outing that manages to entertain despite itself.