Invisible Invaders (1959)
Movie Review (spoilers)

This has got to be one of the most moronic sci fi films of the 1950s.  Invisible Invaders is sort of like The Day the Earth Stood Still with the sensibility of Independence Day.  Here’s the premise, straight up.  Twenty thousand years ago, aliens came from another galaxy and invaded the moon wiping out a civilization there; they’ve been living there ever since.  Here on earth, we didn’t know anything about this because the aliens are invisible!  The aliens have been watching us and it turns out they do not like us messing around with nukes so they reanimate a dead scientist to send a message to his still living scientist friend.  They tell him we’d better stop playing with nukes or  they’re gonna invade; they’re gonna come down here in their space ships and reanimate the dead and kill all of us living humans; and there ain’t nothing we can do about because they and their ships are invisible!  Yikes!

The aliens tell our scientist friend that he has to convince the world’s governments to abandon all nuclear research in the next 24 hours, or they will invade!  Of course no one believes him.  The aliens reanimate a couple more corpses and give us a couple more warnings (at sporting events in another stroke of lunacy).   We silly humans do not heed the warnings and the invasion begins.  Why these aliens need to reanimate the dead in order to invade the earth makes no sense; they are shown to be perfectly capable of parading around the planet gloriously invisible doing whatever they please.  The writers also apparently have never heard of radar.

Besides dopey premise upon dopey premise, nothing else in this film is of any merit.  The acting is wooden despite the appearance of John Agar, a mainstay of 50s sci-fi.  The story is spoon fed to us through a clumsy voiceover.  The special effects are unremarkable and lots of stock footage is used.

Zapping the walking dead

It’s hard to believe director Edward L. Cahn made the influential It! The Terror from Beyond Space just a year prior.  Its not hard to believe however, that Cahn churned out dozens of notoriously cheesy genre films in the fifties such as the schlocky yet memorable Invasion of the Saucer Men.

As the invasion progresses, humanity is portrayed as clueless and weak.  We can do nothing to stop the walking dead – they cannot be killed!!! – and we cannot find the aliens or their ships.

Eventually we stumble upon a way to make the invisible invaders visible and thank goodness because we just cannot fight them any other way.  And, in a wonderfully convenient coincidence, the same ray gun we invent to make the aliens visible also kills them!  And blows up their ships!  Perfect!

This movie starts off silly, continues laughably, and ends ludicrously.  Time and again lame-brained ideas are perpetrated by dippy characters.  It’s tough to say who’s dumber, the humans or the aliens.  The one saving grace of this travesty of a movie is that it’s really short.  No nukes!