Invisible Invaders (1959)

Invisible Invaders (1959)

Directed by: Edward L. Cahn

Starring: Philip Tonge, John Agar, John Carradine

Sorry for the poor quality of the poster, but I’m trying to get the original posters instead of the re-release video boxes as much as possible, just for the sake of… Um… Because it’s cool, okay? Shut up.

Invisible Invaders deals with an invading alien force that is invisible. Normally these pulp movie titles are exaggerated to get people to go see it, but this one’s pretty much right on the money. The movie starts as John Carradine dies in an accidental atomic explosion, forcing his colleague Dr. Adam Penner (Tonge) to resign and devote his life to only finding peaceful applications of nuclear power. Soon after, Carradine comes back and tells him that his dead body has been taken over by an invisible alien from the moon and warns him that he has one day to tell the world’s powers to surrender or the aliens will revive an army of the dead to kill the living and destroy humankind. Dr. Penner never once asks how his body is still in one piece since he exploded.

Of course, nobody believes him, and when the alien-powered corpses start destroying the world, they ship him off to an underground bunker so he can come up with a way to stop the invasion. The “invisible invasion,” if you will. Eventually with the help of John Agar, they capture one of the invaders and find out that with a certain application of sound waves, they can turn the invaders visible. There also happens to be a side effect where it kills them, too. And after the first time, it doesn’t make them visible, it just kills them. So… whatever, it works. Using their gigantic sound guns, they kill off all the zombies (well, they’re not technically zombies, but close enough) and also blow up their ship, which was completely visible anyway. I think toward the end of the film they were just trying to get it done and over with so they just figured the solution was to shoot everything.

Invisible Invaders has a very subtle underlying message about how humanity should work together instead of fighting and killing each other, and it’s expressed by the narrator specifically telling you that several times, as well as having the main character constantly talk about how great it would be for everyone to get along because of the alien invasion. Obviously, subtlety hadn’t yet been invented in 1959.

I don’t really have anything pithy to say about this one. It was kinda neat, I guess. Interesting idea behind it, anyway. The whole sound making the aliens invisible thing was… different, but whatever. There’s been worse movie science.