Invisible Invaders

Are you cash-strapped while making your sci-fi flick? Try what Edward L. Cahn did with 1959's Invisible Invaders, and make your monsters completely transparent!

The premise of this silly but kitschy film is that there has been a race of invisible creatures living on the moon. They have paid the Earth no attention until they've started shooting rockets into space. Now they want to conquer us. Resistance, as they usually say, is futile, since the creatures and their ships are invisible. We have 24 hours to surrender or face total destruction.

These beings, in order to be seen, inhabit the corpses of humans. Therefore, we get the initial warning from the reanimated corpse of John Carradine, a scientist that was presumably blown to pieces in a lab accident, complete with mushroom cloud. His body is in remarkably good condition, considering. But, instead of going to, say, the president of the Unites States, he takes his warning to a top scientist and member of the Atomic Energy Commission. Of course, he is regarded as crazy ("I'm telling you, the corpse of John Carradine told me invisible monsters are going to attack us!").

So then the destruction starts, and amusingly it's all done with stock footage, mostly of bridges and buildings being demolished. The powers of Earth are now taking things seriously, and the scientist (Phillip Tonge,) his daughter (Jean Byron), a colleague (Robert Hutton) and a buff major (John Agar, a familiar face in '50s B-movies) are trapped in an underground bunker until they figure out how to kill the creatures. It turns how to be highly concentrated sound, which prefigures the Martians in Tim Burton's Mars Attacks!, who are killed by the music of Slim Whitman.

This is campy fun, especially since the invaders are so stupid. Instead of sneaking around, invisible as they are, they keep popping into corpses and walking around like zombies, which make they easy to catch. This reminds me of the Woody Allen stand up routine in which he tells us about a sci-fi story he came up with: the Earth is conquered by a superior alien race, and we are all forced into the dry cleaning business. But the aliens are foiled when they come a billion light years to pick up their laundry and forget their ticket.