You wake up late
one morning a little groggy after having tried to kill yourself the night
before with sleeping pills. Your first reaction is shit, I am still alive.
The day gets worse. No water, no electricity, no phones. Where are my neighbors.
Why am I still alive. You drag yourself out of your apartment building into
the street. No people. No cars. Am I still in bed. Am I dead. I should just
go back to sleep. It is going to be one of those days.
A fine beginning to this alien invasion
film. Sci-fi, aliens and Armageddon was the rage in the world of B films
at the time. A combination of the Cold War and the Red Scare made Americans
a little paranoid. These fears fed into these films. You wake up and you
are alone. Everyone is gone. What do you do. The filmmakers keep the mystery
going for 30-minutes as our lone female haphazardly walks the streets. Until
she is grabbed by a man. Who chases after her, catches her and slaps her
because that is what men did to panicked women in the fifties. She is Nora
(Kathleen Crowly) in a fine vulnerable performance and he is Richard Denning,
future governor of Hawaii. On Hawaii 5-0. They come across two others, drinking
it up in a bar. Bickering like they have for ten years, so much so, you know
they love each other. They decide to get out of the city (filmed in Los Angeles),
but they start running into dead bodies. And killer robots. From Venus.
And what was turning into an interesting
drama about relationships during stress becomes the B film it always was
intended to be. The robots (actually only one was constructed) is just a
bunch of cans piled on top of each other with vacuum cleaner hoses taped
together. A push would topple them. A strong magnet would mangle them, but
they are supposed to be indestructible. Merciless machines as they wipe out
humanity. So, damn it, spend a few dollars to make them look cool. Once you
see the robot clunking along, it is hard to get back into the film.
