As the afternoons get shorter and the kids’ homework starts to pile up, you should make room in your lives to hunker down on the couch and show the family a classic B-movie thriller.
B movie as in, could-B good, could-B awful. We report, you watch and decide.
“It Came From Outer Space” arrived in 1953 on the heels of the successful “The Day the Earth Stood Still,” and picked up on that movie’s counter- Cold War message that maybe the space aliens weren’t out to get us.
“It Came From Outer Space” occasionally subsitutes a lot of driving through the Arizona desert for an actual plot. But the scenery is rendered in enjoyable black-and-white contrast, and accompanied by that spooky “there might be a flying saucer just out of camera range” music that is at the heart of a true B movie.
The film also foreshadows a true science-fiction classic, 1956’s “Invasion of the Body Snatchers.” Being possessed by the invading “others” is a longtime fictional plot, of course, and “It Came From Outer Space” isn’t on the same level as “Body Snatchers.” But it has its moments, and it’s fun to sit with tweens or teenagers and watch a movie walk the fine line between genre and camp.
In “It Came . . . ,” based on a story by Ray Bradbury, writer and astronomer John Putnam sees a meteor crash and discovers a space ship that no one else believes in. Locals get snatched, and come back as emotionless robots doing the aliens’ bidding. As in much science fiction, Putnam spends much of the film yelling at skeptical officials who think he’s gone cactus-crazy.
Don’t worry about watching it with the youngest — this was not the era of cutting-edge special effects. The “monster” would barely startle the family dog.
