As both the vogue for low budget science fiction films and juvenile delinquent films were nearing their natural end, one man band Tom Graeff made this contribution to both and it was his only film as director. It has a reputation for being one of the very worst of the 50s cycle of science fiction films and with good reason and yet despite its many, many shortcomings there’s something strangely sweet and affable about the film.
A peculiar corkscrew spaceship lands somewhere in the desert and out pop the four eponymous aliens, all of them played by actors really too old to be effectively considered teenagers. After zapping a passing dog with their death ray, the aliens set about testing the environment to see if its suitable to raise herds of “Gargons,” lobster-like creatures that the the aliens feed on. One of the visitors, Derek (David Love) – yes that’s right, Derek the alien… – worries that the Gargon herds may destroy life on Earth and flees, planning to expose their plan to the human race. Most of teh other aliens depart, leaving Thor (Bryant Grant) to track down Derek and leaving behind the only Gargon they’ve brought with them. Derek falls in with Betty Morgan (Dawn Anderson) and her Grandpa Joe (Harvey B. Dunn), battles the ruthless Thor and try to find a way to stop the Gargon which eventually grows to immense size.
The film’s rap sheet is extensive and heinous: the acting is terrible, the effects appalling, the dialogue jaw-droppingly awful (“You make me angry. But I like you very much”) and the monster laughable. And yet… This was clearly a labour of love for Graeff who wrote, directed, produced, photographed, edited and appeared in (playing reported Joe Rogers using the pseudonym Tom Lockyear) the film and to be fair to him, he’s not a terrible director. It all moves along nicely, has too much going on to be boring and actually looks like a proper film unlike some of the zero budget, barely better than amateur efforts that we’d see over the years. It’s a much better looking film than you might expect.
His writing on the other hand is excruciating. The dialogue is quite extraordinary, featuring some of the most staggeringly meaningless technobabble you’ll ever hear (“42 saturation degrees and 96 volumes. Intermediate fluctuation in morphon content”) and the plot seems to have been scraped together from various drafts, none of which were actually completed. At the start of the film we meet two astronomers who wax philosophical for a few minutes then vanish from the plot never to be seen or heard from again. Who are they and where do they go? We never find out… The aliens have an unusual reason for being on Earth which makes a change from just turning up to subjugate us or steal our women, even if it does turn out that they’re just farmers looking for a bit more grazing land.
Elsewhere, the alien’s leader (Gene Sterling) sports popular cinema’s least convincing stick-on beard ever, their deadly ray gun is just a barely disguised Hubley’s Atomic Disintegrator toy and a piece of futuristic space tech used to take atmospehric samples is clearly just a portable sound mixer, Graeff having made no attempt to hide the words “multichannel mixer MCM-2” emblazoned on the front plate. Technical glitches and examples of ineptitude like this pop up all over. Apparently Graeff had his cast record at least some of their dialogue in advance and had them lip-synch to it being played back on location, which explains the flat, ambience-free quality of the dioalogue and the fact that lips don’t always match the words.
The effects are terrible though the wibbly wobbly flying saucer is sort of fun. Worst offender is the Gargon, seen at the start of the film as a rather lethargic lobster in a glass tank. The “giant” Gargon at the climax (“the most terrifying thing I’ve ever seen”) is nothing more than a shadow of said bog standard lobster matted over the landscape, emitting screeches that are clearly a member of the crew – probably Graeff – making weird strangulated noises.
And yet the film is oddly lovable. The folksiness of Betty and Gramps is hopelessly out of place but never less than amusing, its naivete and ineptitude is endearing and charming rather than annoying and it’s certainly never dull. It’s packed with incident, boasting multiple climaxes, a big explosion, a few gunfights and car chases, a rampaging giant lobster monster and lots of skeletons. It’s not as much fun as Ed Wood’s Plan 9 from Outer Space made the same year but it’s head and shoulders above some of its other awful, tail end of the genre contemporaries like The Killer Shrews, Teenage Zombies or The Giant Gila Monster.
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