BY HANK REINEKE

Robert E. Kent’s production of Invisible Invaders is merely one of a long string of modestly budgeted 1950’s science-fiction films. As such it’s almost inevitable that at some interval during the film the healthful actor John Agar will turn up. In this movie the always dependable Agar – rocking a serious military buzz-cut - is cast in a leading man role as Major Bruce Jay of the United States Air Force. Throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, this sinewy, lantern-jawed actor would star in a number of bona fide sci-fi classics as Revenge of the Creature (1955), Tarantula (1955), and The Mole People (1956). The score of sci-fi and horror movies he would appear in from 1955 through 1962 weren’t all of such high cinematic or popular culture caliber to be sure; nonetheless most were enjoyable programmers if you happened to be a popcorn-munching juvenile or a mostly uncritical adult with a soft spot for low-budget monster movies. In this latter category you might find apologist fans – and I’m one of them, truth be told - of Agar’s turns in Daughter of Dr. Jekyll (1957), The Brain from Planet Arous (1957) and Attack of the Puppet People (1958). These films weren’t bottom-of-barrel offerings, but they could hardly be considered particularly buoyant either.

I suppose that part of the reason I love the low-brow end of 1950’s science-fiction is that there’s always something much worse out there still to be discovered. We already know of the complete calamities, the cinematic trash that nonetheless never fails to entertain. Maybe the on-screen monster we’re supposed to fear is little more than a gorilla wearing a deep-sea diving helmet (Robot Monster) or perhaps a rolled-up carpet with pasted-on eyes (The Creeping Unknown), or the busty but empty-headed Fire Maidens of Outer Space. These films, for all their charms, are simply not good – at least not in any conventional sense. The true fans, of course, will generally excuse or explain away a film’s shortcomings and wince-producing missteps. Hey, the producers did what they could with what they had; the film’s production schedule was too rushed etc. etc.… This is willful, but empty devotion and I confess that I suffer from it.

If the appearance of John Agar isn’t enough to sound your preliminary bad-film alarm bell, I suppose the additional presence of the skeletal Shakespearean actor John Carradine in the cast should alert one that there might be some cinematic rough-sledding ahead. Of the hundreds of films – and television shows - Carradine would appear in over a long but sadly only occasionally distinguished career, only a handful are truly great. Carradine is fifth-billed in the ending credit roll of Invisible Invaders, and I guess this placement is fair. The veteran actor only appears in two scenes of any real consequence (and the first is so brief that it might be missed in the blinking of an eye). During his too-brief portrayal of military-scientist Karol Noymann, the lanky Carradine is seemingly incinerated in the film’s opening montage. But as this is a borderline horror film, the ill-fated scientist’s fiery demise proves to be merely temporal. It’s clearly too early in the film to confidently write off the possibility of a second appearance.

That second coming arrives soon enough when Carradine – or, at least, something in the personage of Carradine – comes knocking on the door of his old friend and scientific colleague Adam Penner (Philip Tonge). Technically, Penner is not visited by Noymann; instead he’s met by an alien who is temporarily utilizing the scientist’s corpse as an agent of mobility. The gaunt, expressionless corpse-shell of Noymann coldly informs Penner (in that peerless Carradine basso tone) that the earth will be destroyed in twenty-four hours time by a merciless alien invasion. This has been deemed necessary since the previously “slow scientific developments” of the earthlings – their activities having long been monitored by the aliens from their outer space perch - have recently accelerated… as has their misuse of atomic energy. The aliens are now prepared to invade earth and set up a “Dictatorship of the Universe.” It seems as though 20,000 years prior – just in case our planet’s inhabitants started getting too smart for their own good, I suppose – the aliens proactively established on the moon a conveniently invisible and “impregnable base for its space ships.” The militarists and scientists on planet earth never picked up on these moon bases as… well, they’re invisible and we couldn’t see them.