Target Earth (1954) – Review

The 1950s was the peak era for cinema’s exploration of extraterrestrial threats and one of the greatest threats depicted in sci-fi movies would be the robot, and while the likes of Gort from 20th Century Fox’s The Day the Earth Stood Still may be the most notable example of this, Allied Artists did their best with their own mechanical threat that would target Earth.

The plot of this film deals with a small group of people waking up to find the streets of Chicago abandoned, with nothing but the occasional dead body strewn across a sidewalk to “liven” things up. Our hero, Jack Brooks (Richard Denning), is a determined man from Detroit who woke up after a mugging only to find the streets around empty. He plans to get to the bottom of things but, unfortunately, this involves a lot of running down empty streets and looking concerned and that gets old fast. His sidekick/love interest is Nora King (Kathleen Crowley) whose failed suicide attempt, via sleeping pills, caused her to miss the invasion and she brings some sass and heart to the occasion. But let’s be real – her survival skills are about as reliable as a despondent lemming. These two are soon joined by Jim Wilson (Richard Reeves) and Vicki Harris (Virginia Grey), a pair of booze hounds who decided an empty city was the perfect opportunity for a pub crawl.

“We survived Al Capone, we can survive anything.”

Turns out that an unknown menace had caused the city’s evacuation but due to various reasons our protagonist missed it and the film splits its time between our heroes trying to figure out what has happened – when not bickering and looking for sandwiches – and the military and scientists deciding how best to proceed against what appears to be a nigh unstoppable robot invasion. This is a good thing because our leads are going to do fuck all to solve things. The characters in this science fiction offering are straight out of central casting for 1950s B-movies. We’ve got Richard Denning as the straight-shooting hero who is on a mission to uncover the truth while winning the heart of fair Kathleen Crowley, but the appearance of a lumbering robot menace soon puts the mystery into high gear and their chance of survival in question.  Sadly, you’re more likely to root for the killer robots by the end of this picture than these two. The cast on hand gives it their best shot, navigating deserted streets like they’re auditioning for a “Who Left Chicago?” theatre troop, but with a tough guy with a heart of gold, a damsel in distress and a token scientist (Whit Bissell) spouting technobabble faster than you can say “flying saucer” it all becomes ridiculous rather quickly.  Yet it still somehow manages to charm its way through the absurdity. Will the army be forced to use nuclear weapons? Will the scientists come up with the “magic bullet” that can stop these seemingly unstoppable robots? Can Nora and Jack find love before the world ends?

Could we, as an audience, care any less?

With Target Earth, director Sherman A. Rose provides us with a rollercoaster of B-movie clichés, introducing a group of strangers waking up to an empty Chicago, but they’re not in the mood for deep-dish pizza. Nope, they’re too busy wondering where the heck everyone went. Aliens? Zombies? An epic Cubs game? Cue the dramatic music and enter the extraterrestrial threat, which looks like a cross between a vacuum cleaner and a rejected Halloween costume. The lumbering aliens from the Ray Harryhausen classic Earth vs. the Flying Saucers looked a little silly but at least they had cool spaceships to zip around in while destroying national landmarks, in counterpoint, the invaders in this film don’t even have an intergalactic pot to piss in let alone a flying armada. Instead of thrilling alien attacks, we find ourselves subjected to such high-stakes drama as our plucky heroes finding themselves trapped with a psychotic killer (Robert Roark) who has his own survival plans.

Who needs killer robots when we have Wilmer the Gunsel to keep things exciting?

Stray Observations:

• The filmmakers make the bold choice of having its central characters having slept through the alien invasion, it’s not as if seeing the invasion would have interested us viewers.
• When Richard Dennings’ character encounters a panicked Kathleen Crowley on the barren Chicago streets he states “I’m not going to hurt you” and then proceeds to grab and slap her. Heroes of the 1950s were definitely cut from a different cloth.
• Frank theorizes the invaders are from Venus, stating “As far as I know it’s the only planet that might be capable of supporting human life. “It’s covered by a heavy layer of clouds, that means plenty of water, oxygen and hydrogen in its atmosphere.” In reality, Venus’s atmosphere is 96% carbon dioxide with clouds of sulphuric acid, which is not at all conducive to human life.
• In 1964 Britain made their own robot invasion film called The Earth Dies Screaming with a small band of survivors facing a robotic threat. That entry was handled with a little more grace and aplomb than this one.
• At the end of the film the soldiers tell Frank that their oscillator smashes the robot’s “cathode ray tube” and puts them out of commission, but a cathode ray tube is essentially a television, which means that the devastating robot army operates on home entertainment electronics.

Thrill to calipers in action!

One of the film’s major drawbacks is its reliance on a formulaic plot, one that echoes the pervasive Cold War anxieties of its time. The fear of an unseen and alien menace infiltrating urban spaces was a recurring theme in 1950s sci-fi, but Target Earth fails to bring anything substantially new to the table. The narrative unfolds predictably, with very little deviation from the established conventions of the era, leaving us with a sense of déjà vu rather than genuine suspense. From a technical standpoint, Target Earth is hampered by its shoestring budget and cheesy-looking robot and while allowances can be made for the technological constraints of the era, the film’s visuals often come across as cheap and unconvincing, undermining its ability to immerse viewers in its sci-fi world. That the production had only one robot suit to depict their “alien invasion” definitely undercut the seriousness of the extraterrestrial threat. When finally revealed, these aliens appear laughably rudimentary by contemporary standards, further detracting from the film’s overall effectiveness.

Tremble at the power of the army of one.

If one were to forgive the filmmaker’s inability to create a believable alien invasion on a shoestring budget there is still the issue of the film’s inability to build and sustain suspense. The movie meanders through long stretches of characters sitting around a hotel room or navigating the empty streets of Chicago, resulting in a stagnant narrative that struggles to maintain momentum. Even when the threat of an alien presence is introduced it fails to generate the requisite sense of urgency or menace, diminishing the impact of the film’s climactic moments. But you know what? Despite all its flaws, Target Earth has a certain charm that’s hard to resist. Maybe it’s the earnestness of its cast, or maybe it’s the sheer audacity of its premise. Either way, it’s the kind of movie that’s best enjoyed with a bucket of popcorn and a group of friends who appreciate a good laugh – preferably with a side order of flying saucers.

“This was no boating accident?”

In summary, Target Earth is a fun enough entry in the annals of 1950s science fiction cinema, and while it offers little in the way of innovation or intrigue it does give us a cool-looking robot, even if just the one. Ultimately, this film serves as a reminder of the pitfalls of failing to have a decent budget or even a sensible script when you’re trying to deliver a compelling cinematic experience.