Claysaba Excellent, Without a doubt!!

Livestonth I am only giving this movie a 1 for the great cast, though I can't imagine what any of them were thinking. This movie was horrible

Lollivan It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

Zlatica One of the worst ways to make a cult movie is to set out to make a cult movie.

Scott LeBrun Studly Hugh Marlowe ("The Day the Earth Stood Still") is the egghead hero of this classic example of alien invasion sci-fi. He plays scientist Russell Marvin, one of the first few humans to witness extraterrestrial craft in our own atmosphere. It turns out, the creatures are here to colonize our planet - hopefully with our consent, but it's no skin off their "noses" if we don't go with the program. They have advanced weaponry to use against mankind, but they didn't count on Russells' ingenuity."Earth vs. the Flying Saucers" is pretty good for a movie of this nature. As was often the case with movies of its ilk, it features a narrator who gives the proceedings a documentary type of approach. It's a reasonably intelligent story (scripted by Bernard Gordon and George Worthing Yates), with an array of engaging characters. Less patient viewers could make the point that it's often more plot and dialogue-based than action-oriented, but it does work its steady way towards some effective scenes of destruction and annihilation. The special effects are fine, but it's the "technical effects" devised by stop-motion legend Ray Harryhausen that do ultimately take centre stage. Fred F. Sears, whose other B credits during this era include "The Giant Claw" and "The Werewolf", capably occupies the directors' chair.Marlowe, and the very pretty Joan Taylor (also the leading lady in "20 Million Miles to Earth"), are a hero and heroine for whom we can easily root; he possesses a Richard Carlson-like air of sincerity. Donald Curtis ("It Came from Beneath the Sea") is the efficient Major Huglin. Of course, you can't go wrong with character actor Morris Ankrum ("Rocketship X-M") in a key supporting role; he was on hand for a number of these 50s sci-fi flicks, and was always excellent value. John Zaremba ('The Time Tunnel'), Thomas Browne Henry ("Beginning of the End"), Grandon Rhodes ("Detective Story"), Larry J. Blake ("Creature with the Atom Brain"), Clark Howat ("Billy Jack"), and Harry Lauter ("Escape from the Planet of the Apes") co-star, and the great Paul Frees - actor, author, composer, songwriter, and prolific voice-over artist - performs the voice of the alien intelligence.Good fun, and essential for anybody who enjoys this sort of entertainment; subsequent blockbusters like "Independence Day" may outdo it for sheer spectacle, but this movie isn't nearly as stupid as that one.Seven out of 10.

classicsoncall If 1950's schlock sci-fi is your cup of tea, you won't be disappointed here. This is what fans like myself live for and have to wait to see until they're aired in places like Turner Classics or in my case, Antenna TV this morning. Had to set the alarm for a 5:00 AM start too, so that has to tell you something.I don't know if Ray Harryhausen was proud of his special effects work in this; everything is still pretty primitive but for 1956 you probably won't find better up close and personal flying saucer work. Obviously the picture's use of the term 'Air Intelligence Command' can be considered an oxymoron today, but then again, it was explained that the scientists back on Earth hadn't been able to track any of the observation rockets sent into space to set up twelve 'moons' because they blew up and fell back down to terra firma. I don't think I'd want to be admitting that if I was in charge of the space program.Lots of goofy stuff here, one of the first instances was when Dr. Russell Marvin (Hugh Marlowe) and his wife Carol (Joan Taylor) perused the horizon for traces of alien activity and you had both day and night time sky at the same time! Flying saucer continuity took a hit as well, as depending on the scene, weapon fire either disintegrated it's target or blew it to smithereens. And even though they seemed invincible when attacking Washington, D.C., they were rather easily shot down by military rockets on their way there. Similarly, the alien life forms inside were impervious to harm when they weren't otherwise being knocked out by innocuous rifle fire!?!?Well look, you either go for this stuff or you don't. Hard to believe there were some intelligent sci-fi flicks coming out around the same time like "War of the Worlds" and "The Day The Earth Stood Still" that puts pictures like this to shame, but you can have a lot more fun with the silly stuff. For a double header treat, try catching this one back to back with "Teenagers From Outer Space". You'll never be the same again.

Fuzzy Wuzzy Blast off into orbit with this classic Sci-Fi Alien-Invasion Flick, featuring some truly remarkable flying saucer effects courtesy of Ray Harryhausen.EARTH VS. THE FLYING SAUCERS pits puny, little earthlings against mighty alien humanoids in a violent battle for Earth's survival.When the robot-like aliens arrive at a U.S. Army base in search of help for their dying planet, they attempt to make friendly contact with scientist Dr. Russ Marvin. But the military gets into the act and greets their fleet of saucers with non-stop gunfire, and so, the aliens are automatically forced to retaliate.Can Dr. Marvin invent the ultimate weapon in order to counter their terrible attack of mass destruction and save the human race in this deadly game of beat-the-clock? Well, buckle up and hold onto your seats, space fans, 'cause you're in for an intergalactic joyride of pure Sci-Fi/Fantasy fun, 1950s-style! Shot mainly on location in Washington, DC, this picture would be best described as being a cross between Independence Day and Mars Attacks! (on a considerably smaller scale, of course). It's quite easy to imagine both Directors Emmerich and Burton being inspired by this film for their respective pictures.

chaos-rampant At the time, spectacle of the scope of flying saucers tearing through the Capitol must have been stupendous to watch. Independence Day owes everything to it. It is still impressive to watch, we have Ray Harryhausen to thank for that. He did quite a bit of work, less on saucer design, which is simple and carried over from the lurid covers of pulp magazines of the day, and more on the seamless engineering together of different worlds.You have the fictional world of the story of an alien invasion, of Pentagon meetings and running around to prevent disaster. It is not the best acted you have seen, but works from a scenario that seems more credible than most of this ilk. It does the job of lowering you into a situation that for a sizable portion of 1950's North Americans, was a less distant threat than you may think.You have stock footage of real disaster; real ships and bombers blowing up, exploding V2 rockets and buildings, solar flares, floods. This registers in a powerful way. In fact, I am convinced that the majority of viewers when they celebrate Harryhausen's SFX work in the film, subliminally include these pieces into a single impression of havoc.And you have Harryhausen's vision of alien gizmo and destruction. The genius is not in any individual effect, though several are quite well done they stick - and others a bit corny. His envisioned interior of a saucer deserves mention, with a rose-petal shaped 'translator' and cinematic screen. As mentioned though, what really grabs you is the seamlessly choreographed blend of real and staged destruction. And while Emmerich's film is more visually pompous, this impresses me more because they couldn't construct everything on a computer in those days.It works to this day, as many will testify. It does, because overall it achieves a remarkable illusion, and cinematic vertigo is to this day the primary draw to movies, that dazed feeling of weightless escape into a second world.I have noted elsewhere that deep down we are psychotic beings - this is foremostly revealed in acts of love and war, as well as powerful cinema. Logic does not spin our world, though we have to pretend to that effect. In fact, logic is a (relatively) recent adoption - for millenia, we relied on extra-logical capacities for survival, and their denial in modern life is a main cause of anxiety.Anyway, I am collecting examples of this in film and this is a prime one - psychotic in both the making and viewing levels.You see, among the alien gizmos that intrigue here (fluid 'alien vision'!), are remote-controlled balls of fire, initially mistaken for St. Elmo's fire.Now, during WWII, among the most baffling news topics to reach back home from the front, was reports of strange balls of fire encountered by airmen on night missions. The ghostly apparitions would mysteriously appear and chase after the planes in a way that seemed they were under intelligent control.Initially thought to be superior German jet technology, hundreds of reported sightings of these UFOs poured in from ally aircrews all over Western Europe, usually seen by two or more people on the same bomber. British crews reported them, Canadian, and as it turned out after the war, the Germans did as well. US crews flying over the Pacific knew them as 'bakas' or 'robombs', and thought them Japanese.So this was the first massively reported (and at the time, credible-seeming) sighting of UFOs, the whole craze with flying saucers wasn't going to blow open until a few years after the war. Naturally, these floating fires were lumped in the same category when it did. So when this was made a decade later, filmmakers were tapping into fearful public knowledge of these things, not easy to appreciate now that they are things of parody. In a 1950 Gallup poll, more Americans professed knowledge of what a 'flying saucer' is than they did of a 'Cold War'.A similar notion of floating lights encountered by travelers at night goes back to more ancient times however, you will know it as will-o'-the-wisp or Jack-o-lantern. Folk story has its own explanation of these, as does science - that is its own debate. Whatever the thing really was, what travelers were responding to was a projection of fears, not simply a natural occurrence, but the devil's light (or spirits') out for mischief.And the most credible and likely explanation of the WWII version of these night lights, is aviation vertigo, pure optical illusion - not very well researched at the time.How is this psychotic? Natural phenomena occur around us, including in our field of perception, illusory mind images. We invent stories around them. We invent intelligent illusion. And with cinema, the magic of industrial light, we invent optical illusions to convincingly perpetuate optical illusions, and as viewers we pay to inhabit them for a while. It is a direct line from the medieval traveler's Jack-o-lantern to what those pilots experienced in flights, to what we do in our flights of seeking illusory sensations in the dark of the theater.And what do these balls of fire do in the film? They 'watch' us! I'm telling you, we are completely nuts.