It Came from Outer Space (1953)

Directed by Jack Arnold [Other horror films: Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954), Revenge of the Creature (1955), This Island Earth (1955), Tarantula (1955), The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957), Monster on the Campus (1958)]

I can appreciate a good alien invasion movie from the 1950’s, and It Came from Outer Space is decent, but compared to others I’ve seen (The Thing from Another World, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and hell, The Blob), this falls a bit flat.

The cast is fine, and I’ve no complaints. Richard Carlson (also in The Maze and Creature from the Black Lagoon) is pretty fun as the main character, a bit of an odd-ball who no one in town believes when he spouts off stories of crashing spaceship. Playing his opposite in many ways is Charles Drake, who has a (pardon the pun) more down-to-Earth view of things, and sort of becomes antagonistic and paranoid toward the end (though certainly with reason).

Even so, I wasn’t really taken in by the story. I sort of like the paranoid feeling Drake’s character starts feeling near the end, but It Came from Outer Space doesn’t nearly have as good a vibe as does Invasion of the Body Snatchers a couple of years later. At the same time, I did quite like a setting, being a small Arizona town surrounded (of course) by desert.

This isn’t a movie I take pleasure in shooting down, nor is that exactly what I’m doing. It’s still a decent movie, but it’s not a movie I could see myself watching that often or really going out of my way to recommend to others, especially when there are so many better movies in the same decade. For the time being, I’d say this is worth one watch, and past that, maybe not so much.

7/10