Killers from Space

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.

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.

Killers From Space is undeniably a cheap science fiction film. The story centers around Peter Graves, having landed inexplicably in what looked like a blast, somehow living through his crash landing. Only trouble for Graves is that he cannot account for the time between his flight in the sky and his return - nor can he explain the surgery done on his chest. Graves is one of a handful of men in charge of these tested explosions, and now the army has concerns with Graves's return and his memory loss. Well, turns out Graves was intercepted by some real cheap-looking aliens. Aliens with bulging eyes that look incredibly artificial. Their suits are just as bad. And they have alien monsters which are nothing more than lizards and frogs showed to be giants(if you really, really, really stretch your imagination). I enjoyed Killers From Space. Sure, even for B science fiction films it is cheap, but the story really isn't that bad and Graves does a workmanlike job acting. The rest of the actors are adequate as well. The biggest detractors - other than the non-existent budget - is the cheap feel the movie has, its mediocre direction, the lack of even remotely believable special effects, and the aliens themselves. The aliens just do not carry off any believability. Notwithstanding these, the film is fun and short.

I didn't think it was that bad of a movie. It has more drama, and mystery and not as much horror than I expected. The story does move a little slow but it did keep my attention. The so called special effects can fairly be called poor. A lot of attention by reviewers has been given to the aliens big eyes. The aliens did look pretty strange and almost laughable but did everyone miss the comparison there is to the big eyes of the so called "grays" that are supposedly being seen by people today. How about the abductees that talk about being probed and operated on by aliens today? This movie did have aliens with bulging eyes doing an operation on a human in 1954. I have trouble calling this a good movie, but I cannot really call it a bad movie either. I think it's worth watching. Don't expect too much, and view it objectively. You might like it.