The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.

It is neither dumb nor smart enough to be fun, and spends way too much time with its boring human characters.

An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

This is like every Japanese monster movie you've ever seen. A space flight to Mars encounters a giant pie (honestly, they call it a flying saucer, but it looks like one of those Mrs. Richardson's pies before it's baked). The pie sends out little meteors that attach themselves to the ship. In attempting to remove these, they take one as a sample. The thing eats its way out of the ship and goes to earth where it hatches into a sort of Godzilla thing with a head that looks like a garden trowel. It is apparent;y made of some stupid element which then becomes its name. The rest is the usual search for a way of stopping the dumb looking thing. The conclusion is almost impossible to sit through. The characters are too stupid to ever man a spaceship to Mars. One of them is an idiot who has nearly killed people in the past with his carelessness. Don't bother!

In letterbox, in a near-pristine print, in the original Japanese (with subtitles) I have to say this is a much better film than the one most of us saw on TV, back in the day.For one thing, the line "Monsters have rights, too!" is never uttered. even in translation. (Although -- now that I think of it -- some people might prefer the dubbed version precisely because of its goofiness.) Of course, that's just the dialog, and even the most handsome presentation of this film can't obscure its marvelously wacky weirdness. The miniatures and effects are kind of a mixed bag. The space-related sets and models are actually fairly well executed, but the monster effects are often sub-Toho, sometimes hilariously so, like when an absurdly out-of-scale F-101 Starfighter crashes into the X and just sort of hangs there for a few seconds. I think that's more from a lack of experience with kaiju flicks on the part of the studio and its technicians than penny-pinching. In the Criterion edition, at least, it's obvious that Shochiku put a not inconsiderable amount of money into this production.Silly as it undeniably is, there are in fact some very creative moments in this movie, such as when the monster absorbs too much energy from a nuclear reactor and turns into a gigantic, red-hot sphere which bounces around Tokyo, wreaking fiery havoc until it plunges into a lake.When you look at the competition, stuff like "Gappa: The Triphibian Monster" and "Yongary", in its very odd and quite unique way this is clearly one of the most entertaining of the Toho-wannabe giant monster films of the 60s.

Had I known this would have degenerated into a man in a giant monster costume attacking fake-looking cardboard cities, I wouldn't have bothered with the film. Aside from the first Godzilla film, I hate the genre and think the films are awfully dumb (okay, Godzilla fans, start marking this review as "not helpful"). It was deceptive, as the first half of the film was a campy sci-fi film that actually had a lot or retro charm. I liked the cheesy 60s rock and roll sound track and thought a Japanese attempt to copy the style of American 50s sci-fi films was watchable. Unfortunately, all this cute silliness was just setting the groundwork for the crew inadvertently bringing a fledgling monster back to Earth. From then on, it was just some ultra-silly monster film where a Godzilla-like thing with antennae attacked itsy-bitsy tanks, airplanes, etc. If only I had known! Don't bother unless you actually like this sort of low-budget "entertainment".

Though a bit slow at the beginning, THE X FROM OUTER SPACE is one of those over-the-top silly Japanese monster movies that they just don't make anymore and is totally fun to watch because you can't believe how silly everything is. The film is very juvenile and was most likely made for 5 year old kids more than anyone else.If you listen to the dialogue at the beginning of the film, when the astronauts are introduced, there are a lot of double entendres to be heard, like when the man tells a grinning Lisa (Peggy Neal) "However, you are to touch nothing unless specifically authorised by the Captain Sano." ARF!!! I wonder if the folks who dubbed the film deliberately made it sound so funny.The scene on the moon or in space are pretty much pointless but they're funny nonetheless. The best thing in the movie is the monster itself, Guilala (what a sad name for a monster!). When Guilala attacks, it walks about like a drunken fool, as if it got no clue of what it was doing. Maybe the guy in the suit couldn't keep his balance because the models were so cheap and fragile. The monster's roar was really funny to hear. Like someone clearing his throat. When Guilala shoots its fireballs, it looks like he's burping them out. The whole moment when the monster destroys a building and Lisa gets trapped beneath some rubble, they make a big deal about the fact that her leg is trapped and she's in pain is priceless because soon afterwards, she walks about like nothing had happened. Another great scene is when Guilala runs after a truck. It's laugh out loud funny. But the really goofy thing about this film is how fast the characters go from the earth to the moon, and vice versa. It's like the moon was only a couple of miles away and as easy to access as the nearest shopping mall. But the film is not all goofiness. When the monster turns into a fireball and flies about Japan, destroying everything in its path, well, the film sorta becomes cool for a fraction of a second. And the ending, when the monster is attacked for the last time, well, I felt bad for the poor old space chicken! But the producers set it up so a sequel was possible. Where's the sequel? I want to see Guilala battle Baragon. BTW, the container which holds tiny Guilala at the end looks like a camping lamp.The worst thing about THE X FROM OUTER SPACE is the music. Aside from the fun song, the actual music used when the monster attacks is basically the same thing played repeatedly over and over. It gets really tiresome.