Ten feet long, five and a half high, weighing 1,000 pounds, it didn’t just light up, it pulsated. That visiting peace-booger from the stars was a construction of lucite and lemurith, welded together to cover the solenoids, manifolds and needle valves that operated $3,300 worth of oscillating neon lights. Kids include Johnny Crawford (son of The Rifleman ), Johnny Washbrook (the lad on My Friend Flicka ) and Sandy Descher (the little wide-eyed screamer from Them! ). Heading the parents are face-familiar bad guy Adam Williams (in a rare nice-fella part) and the offbeat, rather alluring Peggy Webber, a highly respected writer/director/performer of a huge number of radio and theater productions as well as a sexy shrieker of cult immortality in the realm of doofy chillers, as the lung-shattering victim of The Screaming Skull. Brow-furrowing adults include Jackie Coogan ( ‘Fester ‘ from The Addams Family) Russell Johnson (the beloved ‘Professor’ of Gilligan’s island, here a drunk child abuser) Larry Pennell ( Ripcord and ‘Dash Rip Rock’), and Ty Hardin ( Bronco). The beat-the-Commies satellite project is headed by Raymond Bailey, ‘banker Drysdale’ from The Beverly Hillbillies. The cast is a doozy mix of nostalgia, competence and surprising biographies. The cinematographer was Ernest Laszlo, hardly a slouch with credits like Judgement at Nuremberg and It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. Can the tots and their mind-melding master from beyond manage the madness?ĭirector was Jack Arnold, who did the bona fide classics Creature From The Black Lagoon and The Incredible Shrinking Man. Meanwhile the grown-ups are the ones designing stuff that will blow up the planet as the rocket project-‘the Thunderer’-will carry multiple nukes into orbit. Yet it’s also straight-faced professional, faintly creepy and rather endearing, as families of personnel involved in a missile program (ah, for the certain uncertainty of the Cold War annihilation-approaches days) are understandably alarmed when their offspring discover a growing mass of alien goop in a cave and start acting odder than kids normally do. Short (69 minutes), silly (requisite bad lines and half-baked behavior littering the script landscape and make-do settings), cheaply done (that rocket won’t fool anyone over four). Drysdale, The Professor and Dash Rip Rock? * For Mankind’s benefit? Did anyone think to tell Eisenhower? With Uncle Fester, Mr. Somehow I missed this one-and at what cost in movie-logging self-esteem, and brotherly pride? Staring youngsters controlled by a glowing blob from outer space. Besides invaluable lessons in science and tips on fighting giant grasshoppers, this revival gave us a chance to see what had kept drive-in’s busy (apart from giving teenagers a zone to practice undoing sweater buttons). As part of a boomer generation rite-of-passage many a Saturday afternoon and late-night in the 60s was spent watching legions of goofball sci-fi flicks ground out in the previous decade (along with the classic 30s-40s horror brew), as they crept across TV screens. THE SPACE CHILDREN-spaced-out kids form a cosmic link to a space-case adult-me-when I discovered that this 1958 cult item has a family relative tie-in.
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