Rish Outfield's reviews
Let me be brief (considering this review is way overdue): in Invaders From Mars, All-American kid Jimmy discovers a Martian plot to conquer Earth, realizing that aliens are taking over the locals in his town (and members of his family). When he tries to tell people what is happening, he is either not believed, or addressing those who have already been replaced. Neat, huh?
Well, yes. And no.
This is a film from what I affectionately refer to as the lowest period of movie Horror, the Fifties. While the story, for the most part, is an intriguing one, a lot of it falls into the realm of camp. It's filled with hokey dialogue like "gee whiz" and "mute-ants" (Charles Xavier would be weep!). The Martians are dressed in green and walk backward. The humans, for some idiotic reason, refer to them as "apes." The master Martian is a man's disembodied head with lame, moving tentacles that controls them. The movie was in colour, (which was a big deal, apparently), and was probably an A-picture, though I don't know for sure. Every once in a while there's grainy, bad stock footage of jeeps and tanks and such, leading me to wonder about that.
This may be unique in that it featured a kid as the film's hero, with all the villains adults. Even the sympathetic non-alien adults are unwilling to believe him, regardless of how convincing he is. The film is scary because of the whole ‘body snatchers' mind control angle. In this one, a red X mark on the back of the neck where the mind-control device emerges reveals who is martianated and who isn't.
It started out really well, then fell apart almost completely, getting sillier and sillier. The big finale featured the slowest detonator ever. There is an extensive montage at the end showing practically all of the scenes from earlier in the film. That's something I don't get . . . did they need to fill a certain time allotment? Was there something they were trying to say in showing literally minutes of flashbacks? How could anyone stand it?
And here's the death knell: In one of the most terrible endings in all film (Stephen King even talks about it in Danse Macabre), Jimmy wakes up, finding it was all a dream. Still, this had to have been at least a little influential, for us to know about it today--and for it to have been remade in 1986.
The Fifties were a dark time. It seems like I had some nice things to say about this film back when I saw it, but all of that was either completely obliterated by the stupid last ten minutes, or forgotten with the passage of time. Sorry.
I'd Recommend It To: Anyone who didn't truly appreciate how great Invasion of the Body Snatchers was. I'd rather see that ten times through than Invaders From Mars once.