By Jerry Roberts

October 21, 2002

Oh that's great! We've been attacked by Marty Feldman!

Hollywood loves for aliens to invade the planet earth and they never portray it funnier then when they are stuck with a low budget. In the 1950's, just slightly after the bomb and just as the Reds were making us tremble in our boots, science fiction was swamped with dozens and dozens of bad alien invasion movies and, to my mind, none were funnier then Killers From Space.

Killers from Space is no long than 70 minutes (an hour and time minutes for those who hate to add) but I swear, at least half of that is padded with stock footage. Stock footage of airplace, tanks, jeeps, cars even office workers. There is one shot in which Doug commander speaks to him in a busy office and the milling around behind him is all on a big projection screen (We know this because at one poing the screen is rattled).

The movie stars Peter Graves, star of stage, screen and "Biography" as Doctor Douglas Martin (Doc Martin?), a good 'ol average Joe test pilot whose latest mission has him flying around a nuclear blast. But things go awry and Doug has crashes his plane and goes missing.

Turning up some time later at his base he relays the story of how he was captured by aliens and keeps seeing disturbing images of big ping-pong ball eyes staring at him (it looks horrifying to him, but to us it looks like Beaker peeking through clouds). It seems that the creatures now reside underneath the New Mexico desert and are using Doc Martin to capture earth right under our feet. *giggle*

Doug seems to be going on some unusual espionage missions, sending his secretary home so that he can remove things from the safe. Understandably, the army gets curious as to why some of their secret documents have disappeared (though no one investigates why such an easy breach of security was possible) they turn to Doug who turns on them. He escapes and the stock footage brigade rolls out to hunt him down.

Hunting him down may be a problem because he has now turned up in the hands of the aliens. The aliens are, um, let's see . . . . ridiculous. They wear hooded outfits and have ping-pong balls for eyes and speak in an echoing tone that makes them sound like their voices are in the next room (I'd like to see them on "Biography").

I'm not sure what kinds of experiments these guys are performing on our hero because they seem to consist of the aliens standing around a table staring at him (I was thinking "What? Their secret weapon is to stare us to death?"). They aren't exactly highly advanced creatures either as their plot to take over the world is diffused by cutting their power.

Theorizing that aliens would invade us to steal our atomic bomb and use it on us might seem reasonable to some (after all, most of those people made movies about them). But I would have given anything for a final shot of the bug-eyed creatures vaporzied by the bomb while all good citizens of America duck and cover safely under their desks.