It's a tale as old as Science Fiction itself, when the extraterrestrial residents of the moon start to get a little nervous over the 'too fast for their own good' technological-advancements of the primates currently infesting the planet they're orbiting; advancements they fear will only end in self-obliteration on such a scale it will most likely take them out with it.
And so, as part of a preemptive strike, these transparent aliens (hence we never knew they were there) reach out to one of Earth's top scientists, Dr. Adam Penner (Tonge), with an ultimatum of total terrestrial capitulation or face the dire consequences.
To accomplish this, the aliens use their ability to phase into and re-animate the bodies of the recent dead to bridge the communication gap. Here, they use the body of Penner’s old colleague, Dr. Karol Noyman (Carradine), who recently died in a lab explosion, and whose funeral Boyce just attended.
But when this message of belligerent invisible invaders from the moon is passed on up the government chain, one shouldn't be all that surprised by the ridicule and scorn that follows.
However, when several more warnings are ignored, the unheeded aliens, and none too happy about it, unleash all kinds of hell via a two-fold attack: wreaking havoc with the weather and global infrastructure with their own advanced weapons of mass destruction, and then mopping up what's left with their resuscitated ground-troops: an ever-growing army of the unstoppable undead, bringing the Earth to the brink of oblivion...
After his first screenplay was produced in 1937 -- an early vehicle for Rita Hayworth called Paid to Dance (1937), Robert Kent never looked back, cinematically speaking.
Not one to limit himself, over the next three decades, and under countless pseudonyms, the screenwriter brazenly dabbled in all genres.
The Grand Island Independent (August, 1953).
With a prolific, speedy and solid reputation soon established, Kent was always in demand, mostly for second features and serials, with Otto Preminger's Where the Sidewalk Ends (1950) a rare A-picture.
However, his career really took shape in the 1950s when he hooked onto producer Sam Katzman's cheap-jack circus wagon at Columbia, penning several of William Castle's pre-gimmick flicks -- Serpent of the Nile (1953) Fort Ti (1953), and the totally under-appreciated shocker, The Werewolf (1956), for Fred Sears.
All the while watching and learning how to maximize profits by minimizing costs behind the camera, as he pounded out those script pages, it wasn't long before Kent decided to expand his film horizons well beyond a typewriter.
Starting in 1957, Kent began to write and produce his own independent features under several different banners -- Peerless Productions, Vogue Pictures, Premium Pictures, and Zenith Pictures, striking a deal with Edward Small at United Artists for their eventual distribution.
Mostly sticking with the proven commodity of Westerns, Crime Capers, Juvenile Delinquents, and Creature Features, this agreement started bearing financial fruit almost immediately with the release of IT! The Terror from Beyond Space (1957), where Kent handed the directing reins to the wily veteran, Edward L. Cahn.
Now, as fast as Kent was with his typewriter, Cahn might've been even faster behind the camera. A career that spanned nearly four decades began back in the 1920s with a night job at Universal to help pay his college tuition, where Cahn quickly caught on as an apprentice editor. But he showed so much skill, Cahn was soon promoted to the head of the entire editorial department by 1926.
As a testament to his craft, there's an apocryphal story where Cahn was tasked with making the final edit of Lewis Milestone's seminal version of All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) on the train ride from Los Angeles to New York, where its premiere awaited.
Mastering one craft and itching to try another, Cahn slid into the director's chair by 1931, where his speedy reputation soon cemented itself. With his editing experience and precise planning, meaning he knew what he needed to shoot, and perhaps more importantly, what he didn't, this allowed Cahn to get just what he wanted in camera, in one take, with little or no coverage needed to splice in later.
And not only that, but, even from the beginning, from his well-received take on the Shoot-Out at the O.K. Corral in Law and Order (1932) or the violent Pre-Code crime thriller Afraid to Talk (1932), Cahn was already showing a deliberately bleak, frankly brutal, and almost pessimistically stark and simple style of filmmaking -- haphazard at first glance, but more bluntly precise on the second.
But after a couple more solid proto-noir -- Laughter in Hell (1933) and Emergency Call (1933), just when his career seemed to be solidifying, something strange happened; something that has yet to be fully explained as to why. But whichever or however, Cahn was summarily dismissed from Universal and wound up at MGM, where he was exiled to the short-subject, travelog, and two-reel novelty unit, where he most notably flogged a few more years out of the rapidly aging Our Gang / Little Rascals series.
Edward L. Cahn.
And so, the director toiled away on MGM's back-lot through the 1940s, marked with an occasional feature film -- but this was more not than often, before eventually sliding all the way down the studio food chain to the Poverty Row of PRC until Cahn seemingly got his feet somewhat back underneath him with a trio of independently produced thrillers, The Great Plane Robbery (1950), Experiment Alcatraz (1950) and Destination Murder (1950).
But then Cahn just as mysteriously up and disappeared again for nearly five years before Katzman dug him up for the ground-breaking Sci-Fi feature, Creature with the Atom Brain (1955), which told the fantastic tale of a gangster gaining his revenge by employing an ex-Nazi scientist, who re-animates the dead for his boss’s own personal and nigh-invulnerable brute squad.
With its extreme viciousness and lack of blinking during the horrific elements, along with his efficiency behind the camera, Cahn was soon in demand after Creature hit the screens, as a whole new wave of independent producers and filmmakers suddenly crawled out of the woodwork to make this kind of low-budget feature to both cash-in at the box-office or break into the business.
And though Roger Corman usually gets the lion's share of credit for American International's early success, one cannot overlook the contributions of 'Fast Eddie' Cahn, too, who really pushed AIP from upstart independent to a bona fide player in Hollywood after he teamed up with Alex Gordon on a series of juvenile delinquent pictures -- Girl's in Prison (1956 and Dragstrip Girl (1957), westerns -- Flesh and the Spur (1956), war pictures -- Jet Attack (1958) and Suicide Battalion (1958), and creature features -- The She-Creature (1956) and Invasion of the Saucer-Men (1957).
Thus, over the next few years Cahn consistently bounced between AIP and Allied Artists, churning out these 'six-day wonders' that always finished on time and on budget with a startling efficiency. Five films in 1958, seven in 1959, ten in 1960, and peaking with 11 in 1961.
He even did a few more with Katzman -- Zombies of Maru Tau (1957), where I assume he first crossed paths with Kent, which led to him directing both IT! and it's co-feature, Curse of the Faceless Man (1958), of which United Artists were so pleased they immediately asked Kent for two more, resulting in the follow up double-bill of Invisible Invaders (1959) and the morbidly creepy The Four Skulls of Jonathan Drake (1959), which featured native curses, decapitations, and shrunken heads.
Turning to Sam Newman to script this particular alien-invading anarchy, Newman's career began writing for Katzman on Johnny Weissmuller's post-Tarzan Jungle Jim adventures, starting with Jungle Manhunt (1951) and ending with Jungle Man-Eaters (1954). He would also pen the 3-D western Jesse James vs. the Daltons (1954), also directed by Castle, and took his first crack at science fiction with the brain-bending and metaphorically-challenged The Giant Claw (1957), one of the most gonzo creature features the 1950s ever produced.
On paper, Invisible Invaders sounds amazing! On film, well, I, uh -- *pfffft* yeah...
Making his alien invaders invisible was nothing more than a shrewd cost-saving measure, to be sure, and right out of the Katzman playbook. What little we do see of the actual aliens show they just recycled the Martian suit from IT! The Terror from Beyond Space, originally concocted by another AIP alum, Paul Blaisdell.
“Paul’s costume was worn briefly by those actors in the film who portrayed the dying invaders, who for some odd reason become visible just as their vital signs shut down,” said Blaisdell’s biographer, Randy Palmer (Paul Blaisdell: Monster Maker, 1997).
“To help camouflage the costume, optical effects were added to lighten the image and give it a distinct blur, so that it’s very difficult to tell that the invaders’ true form matches that of Paul’s Martian lizard-man.” Blaisdell, of course, was not compensated for the recycled suit. (You’d think there’d at least be a royalty or something.)
More cost-cutting came with a copious amount of stock-footage abuse for the world wide riots and natural disasters as the aliens sturm und drang their way toward total final victory, leaving humanity's last hope in the hands of several scientist holed up in bunkers ensconced around the country, desperately seeking a way to combat these seemingly insurmountable odds.
Here, our story focuses on one such quartet, led by Major Bruce Jay (Agar), who escorts a trio of scientists to one of those bunkers: Dr. Penner, the one nobody would listen to 'natch, his daughter, Phyllis (Byron), and Dr. John Lamont (Hutton).
And while the living dead amass and shamble around outside, constantly hunting for them, the work to stop them inside goes nowhere fast. Things get a little more harrowing when the decision is made to try and capture one of the aliens by trapping its corporeal form inside a corpse as a test-subject. Then, after some dubious scientific method exposition and one nearly disastrous attempt, one of the enemy is finally secured by dubious means and held inside a pressurized cell; a man Jay had shot earlier when he tried to steal their Jeep.
Things
continue to escalate from there -- in a tempest without, crisis within
sense -- as nerves are frayed and the alien P.O.W. gloats as no
counter-measures seem to work. And I have to say, the captured alien
zombie is one of my favorite members of the undead outside of Bub from Day of the Dead (1985) and the ever-present ghoul in Carnival of Souls (1962). (Kudos to actor Hal Torey on his performance.)
But salvation comes in the form of an accident, when the stir-crazy Lamont finally cracks-up, resulting in a rousing dust-up with Jay, which ends with a flying jar of acid tripping a security alarm, whose sonic bleating has a much desired detrimental effect on the captured invader.
One montage later, a crude sonic gun proves very successful in both driving the aliens out of their hosts and neutralizing them with a gooey, scrubbing bubbles finality. It also proves greatly effective in short-circuiting the alien's cloaking device on their attack ships, which causes them to self-destruct.
The tide turned, the aliens are sent packing back to the moon, and our heroes are hailed by the gathered United Nations as a true testament to human ingenuity in the face of any global threat. Hooray! Which brings us to…
Over the years since its release, while completely shat upon by critics and genre fans alike, Invisible Invaders has been equally touted as an inspiration for Night of the Living Dead (1968).
I
honestly have no idea if George Romero, John Russo, and the rest of
Image-10 ever saw it, but: from the shuffling dead, to the rising
tension and isolated location, to the catastrophic news updates on their TV screens, to the explosions of violence (-- special nod to when
Agar brutally shoots Tovey in the head because there simply was no time
to negotiate), to the film's cynical edge, there is some definite
tangential evidence to present -- though I think it actually hews closer
to Romero’s Day of the Dead (1985).
Frankly, the same argument could be made for Ray Kellog's The Killer Shrews (1959) or Sidney Salkow’s The Last Man on Earth (1964). What's really amazing is how much of a plot Invisible Invaders shares with Ed Wood's Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959). Again, it's a fun conversation to have, but as to how much influence it actually had? Well, that's me shrugging right now.
On its own, even with all that stock-footage, Invisible Invaders is an efficiently lean and effectively mean fright flick that barely breaks an hour. What I always appreciated about Cahn, whose films always abused the stock-footage vaults (-- especially his war pictures for AIP), was a sense that this was not done as padding but was actually and specifically used to move the plot along.
“Edward Cahn was Mr. Speed-O,” said John Agar in an interview with Tom Weaver (Return of the B Science Fiction and Horror Heroes, 2000). “He’d jump up and almost get in the shot before he’d yell ‘cut’! But in all fairness I have to say that directors like Eddie Cahn didn’t really have a chance. They had a schedule to contend with, and they wanted those films finished [like] ka-boom. I think he did the best he could with the time he had, but in something like Invisible Invaders it’s pretty much, ‘Learn the lines and get ‘em out.’ They just didn’t have the money to stay there and work on it.”
In his audio commentary for the Kino Lorber release of Invisible Invaders, the always impeccable Weaver commented on the difficulties of coaxing recollections out of actors and craftsmen on whirlwind productions like this one; like when he interviewed Agar’s co-star, Robert Hutton, who would take the lessons learned starring in these genre pictures and make one of his own, The Slime People (1963), which was made even quicker and cheaper and is an absolute hoot.
“On a movie like The Colossus of New York (1958), if you say the dialogue that they’ve written for you, or something rather close, they don’t even care,” said Hutton (Weaver, 2000). “The same thing, unfortunately, is also true of Invisible Invaders; that’s another picture I really can’t remember too much about.”
However, one of Hutton’s few lucid memories of the shoot was a certain harrowing Jeep ride with former Marine Agar. “He damned near turned the thing over. We were doing a scene where we were driving up to the cave entrance in Bronson Canyon, and he made one turn where we went up on two wheels -- he was a madman! But Agar was a very nice guy to work with, very quiet and very serious.”
For their book Screen Sirens Scream!
(2009), authors Paul Parla and Charles Mitchell had slightly better
luck pulling memories from Jean Byron, who had co-starred with
Weissmuller in a couple of those Jungle Jim adventures -- Voodoo Tiger (1952), her screen debut, and Jungle Moon Men (1955), but is probably best remembered as playing Patty Duke's mom in The Patty Duke Show (1963-1966).
“A lot of the footage in Invisible Invaders was stock footage, it was another quick, low budget affair,” recalled Byron. “I’m sure they wish they had a bigger budget so they could have shown some bizarre or weird aliens. But special-effects are costly. They spend a fortune today creating these creatures with costly masks and costumes. So it was far less expensive for them to show walking zombies in dress suits instead of strange alien invaders.”
As for working with Agar, Byron echoed Hutton. “John was very sweet. It’s the one quality that makes a man most memorable to me. When I work with rude people, I tend to forget them. John was memorable, professional and kind. He seemed easy going and worked effortlessly in front of the camera.”
Sadly, co-star Philip Tonge, who played Byron’s father in Invisible Invaders, unexpectedly passed away not long after shooting wrapped. When asked if he appeared unwell on set, “He had no difficulty in shooting his scenes,” said Byron. “The picture was filmed rather quickly. I remember the director moving from one set-up to the next very rapidly."
And with such a tight schedule and minimal budget, as they filmed in and around Bronson Canyon, Byron found herself pressed into service as a stunt driver.
“I guess you could say I was an action heroine," said Byron. "John Agar was on the roof of our truck, operating the sonic cannon. Robert Hutton was in the back of the truck, operating the equipment for the weapon. My father (Tonge) remained in the lab to contact all the other labs. That left me to operate the truck and drive through the zombies. That terrain was rough, too!”
On
top of my eternal love for The Agar, I also loved Paul Dunlop's eerie
electronic and theremin-fueled score (--which would be recycled in many a
space adventure to come); and I love the scenes where the dead pilot
and car accident victim -- whose crash was pilfered from Robert
Mitchum's Thunder Road (1958) -- take over the radio booths at the
sporting events to announce the impending lunar invasion.
Also, I love the hilarious moment when you finally realize how the whole film could've been told even cheaper by just presenting a slideshow of all those interrupting shots of interjecting newspaper headlines. There's also a weird, running meta-textual commentary as we spend half the movie watching people watching the action on another screen within the screen.
And most of all, I love the scenes where the silent dead first march over the hill en masse, or when they slowly but relentlessly close in on our heroes. Sure, it recycles the visible dirt-track gag and moving (the same damned) shrubs by unseen hands probably thrice too often, and it takes a good thirty minutes to really get going, but for the last thirty, man, I'm tellin' ya, this thing really cooks and becomes something truly special.
As Peter Dendle so eloquently put it in his book, The Zombie Movie Encyclopedia (2001), "Though clearly a product of its own time and a low budget, Invisible Invaders is engaging and fast-paced, riddled with genuinely inspired twists alongside breathtaking implausibilities.”
After Invisible Invaders, Kent kept right on writing and producing all kinds of pictures, including a trio of nifty Vincent Price vehicles with Tower of London (1962), Diary of a Madman (1963) and Twice-Told Tales (1963) before capping his career with the movie Ed Wood wanted to make all along, The Christine Jorgenson Story (1970), before retiring from the business.
As for his partner, sadly, just as Cahn appeared to be really hitting his stride in 1961, his health took a dramatic turn for the worse, cutting his production back to only two films in 1962; and his health continued to deteriorate until he passed away in late 1963 at the age of 64, marking the end to a truly mind-boggling career that was absolutely all over the map. A map I have been happily following for decades now.
I know a lot of folks write him off as a genre hack at best, based mostly on the titles of his pictures alone, but all one needs to do is compare Cahn's films to most of his contemporaries to truly appreciate what the man had to offer. And again, it was his type of skills that kept these independents afloat.
Eddie Cahn has mostly been forgotten, barely rating a footnote, and that makes me sad. But this neglect also spurns me to draw attention to the man and his work whenever I can. So, here ya go.
Originally posted on December 30, 2013, at Micro-Brewed Reviews.
Invisible Invaders (1959) Premium Pictures (Robert E. Kent Productions) :: United Artists / P: Robert E. Kent / D: Edward L. Cahn / W: Samuel Newman / C: Maury Gertsman / E: Grant Whytock / M: Paul Dunlap / S: John Agar, Jean Byron, Philip Tonge, Robert Hutton, Paul Langton, Hal Torey, John Carradine
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