The real star of this movie is William Cameron Menzies......not only its director but its Production Designer.......
And we're not talking about any ordinary art department journeyman here.......this is the gentleman rightly given Hollywood's first official credit as a Production Designer on "Gone With The Wind."
Yes, those iconic blood orange sunsets that Vivian Leigh's Scarlett O'Hara posed against came from Menzies.
Given the directing reigns of a typically low-budget sci-fi exploitationer, Menzies applied his pure genius as a designer to the project. In deliberately warping the size and shape of the film's sets, he scarily reproduced, in lurid color, the very essence of a pre-adolescent bad dream, the kind of nightmare that would send kids screaming from their rooms to dive under the covers with their parents.
The terror for young David (Jimmy Hunt) begins with a Martian saucer crashing into a sand pit at the top a hill behind his house. (This setting is as eye-catching a design as anything Menzies created for 'Gone With The Wind')
Before long, the Martians have sucked David's parents down into the shifting sand (to the sound of an unearthly, wailing chorus, a master stroke by composer Raoul Kraushaar). When they're spat out into the world again, to David's horror they've been converted into cruel, heartless Martian minions.......(this plot device of humanity sucked out of humans became an all-time favorite of science fiction screenwriters, reaching its penultimate version in "Invasion Of The Body Snatchers")
David desperately seeks help from unbelieving authority figures who loom over him in Menzies' brilliant conceptions of what the adult world looks like to a kid........long, long unfurnished corridors existing only to intimidate any child who'd wander into them.
For these dream-like paranoid sequences alone, we're more than willing to forgive the flaws that come with the film's rock-bottom budget.......the hulking Martian mutants outfitted in furry green footie pajamas and the dreary use of grainy 16 millimeter Army stock footage of tanks, presumably rolling along toward the final battle with the sand pit embedded invaders.
Our hapless young hero finds himself as a fleeing non-combatant in the middle of the Martian Vs. Army showdown........but not before he encounters one of the film's most unforgettable creations, the Martian Master Brain......literally a greenish head in a fishbowl, carted around from place to place by the hulks in the zippered jammies. Instantly creepy and unnervingly serene, this creature forever implanted itself into immortal sci-fi imagery.......and millions of baby boomers' bad dreams.
But for the film's first young audiences and David, the worst was yet to come.......with the film springing a nasty, queasy twist that rivals anything in the "Twilight Zone" and or an M. Night Shyamalan thriller. Unlike most science fiction of the era, no kid ever left a showing of "Invaders From Mars" breathing a sigh of relief.........immediately putting the film way ahead of its time.
This one's an easy call for us.....5 stars (*****)a FIND OF FINDS......accept only the original.....the atrocious Tobe Hooper 1986 remake should be avoided at all costs.....(although we're sure we'll eventually get to it in a future post...)
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