Rent Invaders from Mars (1953)

Close Encounters of the Cop-Out Kind - Invaders from Mars review by griggs

There’s a primal fear buried in this one: the people who tuck you in might not be the people who tuck you in. Young David watches his dad wander off into the sand pit behind the house and come back wrong, and for a good stretch William Cameron Menzies’s sci-fi gets properly under the skin — all forced-perspective sets, sloping dunes, and Red Scare dread seen from three feet off the ground.

Menzies, a production designer by trade, stages it beautifully on a shoestring. The Martian mastermind in his glass bubble is a lovely bit of pulp. But once the army stomps in, the dread drains fast, replaced by stock-footage tedium — tanks trundling across the same patch of desert like they’re stuck in a loop.

And then the ending. Second film running I’ve copped the same narrative escape hatch, and I feel thoroughly had. Cheated, even. Hard to fear invasion when the film keeps one eye on the undo button.

Matinée Sci-fi (spoiler). - Invaders from Mars review by Steve

This was made for a family audience, or children, and while it's unlikely any kids now will sit still for this typically paranoiac '50s science fiction with home made effects, there is plenty to interest genre fans.

It was the first sci-fi film released in colour, rushed through to pip The War of the Worlds. Director William Cameron Menzies was best known for art direction. And this is the main attraction. It's a low budget production but the expressionist set design makes it feel surreal and illusory. And it looks great.

This story is a child's dream. A science and sci-fi fanatic (Jimmy Hunt) is up all hours watching the stars. Late one night he sees a flying saucer land at the back of his house, near the rocket research facility... When martians take over the bodies of his parents and his community, the boy has to find support among the unpossessed to rally opposition until the army arrives.

It is an eerie film, and while the monsters look crude, their leader, a head suspended in a glass dome, has an unsettling, freakish quality. It became a motif of science fiction that a small town would have to make it through the night against an alien foe to reach the safely of the morning, and that started with this imaginative, lurid nightmare.