This Movie Can Only Be Described With One Word.

Dreadfully Boring

I think this is a new genre that they're all sort of working their way through it and haven't got all the kinks worked out yet but it's a genre that works for me.

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

Coming at the tail End of the Fifties Alien Invader/Nuclear Paranoia Films, this is a Fitting Finale to the Cycle. Low-Budget and Proud of it, B-Movie Maker Ed Cahn manages to Cobble Together enough Thrills and Political Inclusions that the Movie just Cannot be Ignored.The Cheesy Effects are incorporated for Your Viewing Pleasure and Aided by enough Stock Footage that Ed Wood would be Proud. But the Lasting Images are the ones of the "Zombies" and Romero Fans might Experience Deja-Vu.Overall, this is a Rich and Rewarding little Ditty that fully Realizes its Place in the Pantheon of Saturday Matinée and Drive In Fodder that so Enamored Baby Boomers and Sci-Fi Geeks who were Coming of Age in the Fifties.The Cast includes Cult-Favorites John Agar and John Carradine. The earnest Anti-Nuke Scientist is stern Serious and makes Us believe that the Only Good Nuclear Weapon is One that is Never Made. The Ending World Coming Together to Fight an Invading Force has become a Standard Geo-Political Mantra given Voice by no less than President Ronald Reagan on More than One Occasion.

Aliens, contacting scientist Adam Penner (Philip Tonge), inform him that they have been on the moon for twenty thousand years...Why is science fiction always better with John Agar? And why does it strike me as odd that they refer to the zombies in this movie as the "walking dead"? I thought this was a more recent term, but it apparently is not.Overall, you know, the movie is cheesy. The invaders are "invisible", which is just about the easiest kind of aliens that can be shown on screen. I do appreciate they had the newspapers making fun of the idea, because it is pretty silly and sounds like a way to cut the budget.

No, this movie did not "inspire" Ed Wood.Plan Nine From Outer Space may have been released after this film, but it was shot at least two years prior to this one (around 1956), and probably was written one or two years before that. Ed Wood spent some time trying to get the thing made/gathering money together, and then after the film was actually completed, PNFOS sat on the shelf for quite a while before it got minimal screen time from a barely interested distributor in 1959 at the bottom of low budget double or triple bills.Having said that, I highly doubt that the makers or writers of this film actually saw PNFOS prior to putting together Invisible Invaders. PNFOS was just that ignored and low profile before it achieved its notorious reputation as "The Worst Film Ever Made," which did not take place until the early 1980's.I'm sure it's just a matter of pure coincidence, or let's be a little more generous and say zeitgeist among 1950's low budget science fiction/monster movie makers, and leave it at that. There were many other plot threads repeated in these low budget genre pictures during that time. There was the "traveling to another planet and finding the underground civilization of hot female beauty pageant winners in high heels and showgirl costumes" plot, or there was the "astronaut goes up into space and returns to Earth as a mutated monster" yarn. How about the similarities between the Steven King/Frank Darabont "The Mist" and the 1963 Grade-Z cheapie "The Slime People"? Many others I could mention.Although as far as George Romero goes, it's quite possible that both Invisible Invaders and Plan Nine From Outer Space did make some contribution towards the idea behind Night of the Living Dead. Both films were occasionally screened on late night local TV broadcasts during the 1960's on various local channels around the USA. But, I'm sure Romero would deny it.

This film was "panned" by Lenny Maltin in the 1995 edition of his book. I think unjustly so. Many of the reviews here do justice to the film far better. However, even they, in their totality, miss a few points. For example : The scientist who resigns so as not to further Armageddon is not discredited by the end of the film, for the aliens are defeated by a "low-tech" sonic gun, which has nothing to do with ABC WMD. This argues that you do not necessarily need such weapons in order to deal with threats from outer space --- and yet such a threat has been alleged as a main reason for keeping such ABC WMD. So it is implicit in the thesis of the film that the world can and should disarm itself of its ABC WMD. And this is the premise of such subsequent treaties as SALT, et cetera. Again, the use of sound in defeating the aliens also anticipates "Close Encounters of the Third Kind," in which sound is used to communicate with the aliens.( One finds oneself wondering if rumors had been filtering from out of Roswell in the decade or dozen years since 1947.). Do the invaders, in 1959, come from the dark side of the Moon? Could the solution to that be to go there? And what happened ten years later, in 1969? Again, it is notorious that one way to bring the nations of the world together would be to present them with a threat from outer space ---How many other movies and TV series have had that as a premise?! Several national leaders are reported to have talked openly and publicly about just such an eventuality as well. Also, the fact of the very visible foot-dragging, on the part of the aliens, is over-looked as a means to detect and defeat the invaders. But that brings to mind a scene in the film version of "The Andromeda Strain" (not in the original novel ), in which a lab technician falls asleep on duty, thus missing a visual signal indicating a way to deal with the Strain. Vote is 10 out of 10 on the score of prescience. ( The film would get other votes on other scores ) .