The arrival in force of rock and roll in the mid-1950s (something had been brewing for a while, but it was the success of Bill Haley and His Comet’s version of Rock Around the Clock in 1954 that opened the floodgates and helped the new music go mainstream) ushered in a shole new demographic – the teenager. And American filmmakers in particular were keen to exploit them, either with song-packed musical extravaganzas or by introducing younger characters to those perennial drive-in standbys, horror and science fiction. American International Pictures in particular were very quick off the mark and in rapid succession we had I Was a Teenage Werewolf (1957), I Was a Teenage Frankenstein (1957), Blood of Dracula (1958) and Teenage Cave Man (1958), while other enterprising producers with an eye on the teenager’s disposable income soon followed suit, giving us the likes of The Blob (1958), Earth vs the Spider (1958) and The Giant Gila Monster (1959).
I Was a Teenage Werewolf – one of the best of the batch – was partnered on its original theatrical release by Invasion of the Saucer Men (the much better Invasion of the Hell Creatures in the UK) which was nothing like the best. It was the work of Edward L. Cahn whose long career (he’d been directing since the 1930s) was winding down with a flurry of low budget genre films – Creature with the Atom Brain (1955), Zombies of Mora Tau (1957), Curse of the Faceless Man (1958), It! The Terror from Beyond Space (1958), The Four Skulls of Jonathan Drake (1959), Invisible Invaders (1959) and Beauty and the Beast (1962), the latter his final credit. As the other films attest, Cahn was, at best, a workmanlike director, at worst a dreadful one and Invasion of the Saucer Men is without doubt one of his worst.
A witless comedy (it opens with a caption claiming it to be “a true story of a flying saucer”) it begins with a flying saucer landing in the woods near the kind of small American town already over-run by aliens during the course of the 1950s. Teenagers Johnny Carter (Steven Terrell) and Joan Hayden (Gloria Castillo) are heading for the local lover’s lane when they run over one of the aliens. Elsewhere, Joe Gruen (Frank Gorshin, later Batman (1966-1968)’s The Riddler) finds the body but can’t convince his shifty friend Artie Burns (Lyn Osborn). Other aliens turn up in town, injecting alcohol into Gruen’s using retractable needles on their fingers, killing him (he was already drunk), the dead alien’s hand detaches itself and goes on a rampage, the young lovers’ fathers (Sam Carter and Lee Hayden) try to find their own ways to exploit the situation and the military turn up but are completely stumped. The intrusion is eventually thwarted by the town’s teens who us the headlights from their cars to melt the visitors.
The comedy isn’t terribly funny (and possibly wasn’t even in 1957 – curiously, it’s actually funnier when it’s trying to be scary), the teenage characters are a dull and colourless bunch (Robert J. Gurney Jr and Al Martin’s screenplay, based on Paul W. Fairman’s 1955 short story The Cosmic Frame, suggests, as have so many films aimed at the teen market over the years, that the writers have never actually met a teenager) and Cahn’s direction is stodgy, taking an age to get going and then running out of steam almost immediately. About the only thing it really has going for it are Paul Blaisdell’s rarely seen, never once convincing but still suitably ghastly aliens, with their bulging eyes, bulbous heads and alcohol-dripping finger needles. Had the rest of the film been as much fun as these diminutive papier-mâché invaders (who feel like forerunners of Joe Dante’s Gremlins (1984)) it would have been a lot more enjoyable. Jim Wynorski has suggested that the film started out as a straight adaptation, but that Cahn got cold feet when he realised that teens were likely to laugh at the aliens anyway and so decided to play it all for laughs. It’s debatable whether he succeeded or not.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, this virtually meritless film was seized upon by Larry Buchanan, one of Hollywood’s worst directors, when he was hired by AIP in the 1960s to make colour television remakes of some of their 50s monochrome films. Even Buchanan wasn’t impressed, dismissing them as “wretched” (he wasn’t wrong) – It Conquered the World (1956) became Zontar the Thing from Venus (1967), The She Creature (1956) was adapted into Creature of Destruction (1967), The Day the World Ended (1955) was reborn as In the Year 2889 (1969) and Suicide Battalion (1958) morphed into Hell Raiders (1969). There was also Curse of the Swamp Creature (1968) which Buchanan claimed was an original, though anyone with half a brain could see that it was really a thinly disguised reworking of Voodoo Woman (1956). Invasion of the Saucer Men was pressed into service again as The Eye Creatures and it tried to take a more sober approach to the material with no more success. It was later supposed to have been retitled Attack of the Eye Creatures but a clumsy superimposition over the title card caused it to become Attack of the the Eye Creatures… Whatever title it turns up under, the single most remarkable thing about it is that it’s even worse than the already dreadful Invasion of the Saucer Men.
Crew
Directed by: Edward L. Cahn; © MCMLVII [1957] by Malibu Productions; James H. Nicholson & Samuel Z. Arkoff present; A Malibu production. American-International Pictures; Executive Producer: Samuel Z. Arkoff; Produced by: James H. Nicholson, Robert J. Gurney Jr; Screenplay by: Robert J, Gurney Jr, Al Martin; Based on an Original Story by: Paul Fairman; Photographer: Fred West; Editorial Supervisor: Ronald Sinclair; Film Editor: Charles Gross Jr; Music by: Ronald Stein; Wardrobe: Marjory Corso; Makeup: Carlie Taylor; Technical Effects: Paul Blaisdell; Special Effects: Howard Anderson, Alex Weldon; Art Director: Don Ament
Cast
Steve Terrell [Johnny]; Gloria Castillo [Joan]; Frank Gorshin [Joe]; Raymond Hatton [Larkin]; Lyn Osborn [Art]; Russ Bender [doctor]; Douglas Henderson [Lt. Wilkins, USAF]; Sam Buffington [Col. Ambrose – USAF]; Jason Johnson [detective]; Don Shelton [City Attorney Hayden]; Scott Peters [USAF sergeant with bullhorn]; Jan Englund [diner waitress]; Kelly Thordsen [Sgt. Bruce]; Bob Einer [soda jerk]; Patti Lawler [Irene]; Calvin Booth [Paul – best man]; Ed Nelson [Tom]; Roy Darmour [Sgt. Gordon]; Audrey Conti [Bobby’s girl]; Jim Bridges [Bobby]
The EOFFTV Review 