Earth Vs the Flying Saucers **½ (1956, Hugh Marlowe, Joan Taylor, Donald Curtis) – Classic Movie Review 2499

Warning! Take Cover! Flying Saucers Invade Our Planet! Director Fred F Sears’s 1956 sci-fi thriller is an effective humans-against-the-aliens movie, with decent Ray Harryhausen effects (for their day) that include the excellent spinning space-saucers and the destroying of Washington landmarks.

Hugh Marlowe stars as scientist Dr Russell Marvin, who is contacted by extra-terrestrials flying in high-tech flying saucers as part of a plan to enslave the inhabitants of Earth. Dr Marvin invents and develops an anti-magnetic weapon and saves the Earth with this anti-saucer device, and hitches a ride on a spaceship with ‘suits of solidified electricity’. Joan Taylor co-stars as the scientist’s wife Carol Marvin.

Obviously it is all too cheaply made, with not enough spent on it by Clover Productions and Columbia Pictures, and now it seems naive too, but it is still quite a lot of fun to watch. Sad to say, though, Harryhausen  stated in his biography that this is his least favourite of his films.

It is also known as Invasion of the Flying Saucers.

Also in the cast are Donald Curtis, Morris Ankrum, John Zaremba, Thomas [Tom] Browne Henry, Grandon Rhodes, Harry Lauter, Frank Wilcox, Larry J Blake, Charles Evans, Clark Howat and Alan Reynolds.

It was released in a double bill with Sears’s The Werewolf (1956).

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© Derek Winnert 2015 Classic Movie Review 2499

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