ALL SCI-FI

[Bud Brewster]

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A movie that starts out promising, but slowly dissolves into confusion. Here's the story, but be advised that it sounds a lot better than it is.

Two humanoid women — Yoko Tani ("First Spaceship on Venus") and Cali Raia — and an alien man (Eric Young) show up at different locations near a small English country hospital. The man's first appearance occurs when a middle-aged couple hit him with their car on a lonely road and take the unconscious young man to the little hospital.

Edward Judd ("First Men in the Moon", "The Day the Earth Caught Fire") is the doctor who figures out that the man isn't human after taking a blood sample and then acting surprised by how it looks like through a microscope.

We don't get any details, just a lot of large leaps on logic from evidence that isn't explained very well.

The alien's injuries turn out to be . . . well, we never see any injuries, and he wakes up soon, feeling just fine and talking to the doctors and nurses about how he was wrongfully convicted of murder in his female-dominated alien society.

The two alien women (seen only briefly at this point, miles away) are police officers, and the man is their prisoner. He got away from them in an escape pod while they were repairing their ship out in space. Sadly we never see any of this. Just lots of dialog.

At about the halfway point in the movie the story stops making sense altogether. The two alien women make a few brief appearances, lurking around in the night while they try to find their escaped prisoner. But one of them just drops out of the story without explanation, never to be seen again, and the other one (Yoko Tani) shows up at the hospital and pulls a Jedi mind trick on a nurse, telling her to go sleep, after which we never see the nurse again either.

We do see the alien woman a few more times, walking around the hospital in a nurse's uniform, but she never gets near the prisoner, who is still in his hospital bed, unaware that the long arm of the law is lurking around the premises for reasons never explained.

If that isn't puzzling enough, there's also a lot of talk about a force field surrounding the hospital, preventing anyone from leaving. The force field somehow raises the air temperature until the whole cast glistens with sweat, but we never see any real evidence of this alleged force field — except when a man crashes a car into it and sails right through the windshield, dead by the time he lands on the hood. No kidding.

The movie is actually directed by Alan Bridge with surprising style. And before things get so crazy, you think you're in for a real treat — a lost sci-fi movie you've missed for the last fifty years.

Oh, boy!

Alas, you don't get the treat, you get the trick — a movie that dangles the carrot for 41 minutes and then babbles nonsense for 41 more.

The screenplay is by Roger Marshall, based on a story by Robert Holmes, but somehow these writers lost their way in the English fog and gave us a murky tale that wanders around aimlessly for 82 total minutes before ending in complete confusion.
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Is there no man on Earth who has the wisdom and innocence of a child?
~ The Space Children (1958)

[Bud Brewster]

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IMDB has an interesting trivia item about this movie.
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Writer Robert Holmes later reused elements of this story in the first Jon Pertwee Doctor Who (1963) story, Doctor Who: Spearhead from Space: Episode 1 (1970).

Like this film, it was initially set in a remote English cottage hospital complete with a mysterious and unconscious alien stranger, puzzled doctors, an army patrol, and lurking alien forces in the nearby woods.
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Is there no man on Earth who has the wisdom and innocence of a child?
~ The Space Children (1958)

[Gord Green]

A great example of "hack" writing! I swear they put plot elements on little pieces of paper and drew them from a hat!

I can just see the writer and producers sitting around a table drinking tea......"Ooooh, That's good mate, write that down!"

[Bud Brewster]

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These two versions of the trailer make the movie seem pretty exciting! And Edward Judd (The Day the Earth Caught Fire) is a fine actor.

_____________ Invasion (1965) Original Trailer


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_________ "Invasion": Out on DVD 03/11/2014


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Is there no man on Earth who has the wisdom and innocence of a child?
~ The Space Children (1958)