Earth vs the Flying Saucers

In light of Mars Attacks! it’s a bit difficult to watch Earth vs the Flying Saucers with a straight face, since Tim Burton’s homage/parody hybrid used it as the most obvious foundational subject. Still, once you get past that first batch of giggles, buckle up for a briskly paced piece of pulp science fiction in which death rays destroy D.C. and loads of military men. Please don’t come around here looking for brainy, politically-loaded science fiction around here, Earth vs the Flying Saucers merely wants to entertain and titillate with its steroidal B-movie charms.

While smarter contemporaries like Invasion of the Body Snatchers took Cold War paranoia (and good ol’ fashioned McCarthyism, which is making a disturbing resurgence of late) as a building block for a heavily symbolic nightmarish thrill-ride, Earth vs the Flying Saucers looks at that paranoia and imagines it ending in a parade of explosions and destruction. Rocket ships intended to collect information about the earth keep being knocked out of the atmosphere, and numerous locations around the world are reporting the appearance of UFOs hovering in the sky. Mounting dread and questions of “what if” lurk over these appearances as they’re quickly proven accurate and not the fevered imaginings of a hysterical public.

While prior Ray Harryhausen features played flirtatious with their monsters, keeping them hidden away until the money shots in the final reels, Earth vs the Flying Saucers lives up to its title by trotting them out within the opening minutes and routinely thereafter. From the knee-jerk military’s shoot-first reactions to the national monuments-go-boom finale, the flying saucers and aliens rain down death, destruction, and charm with their herky-jerky whirligig movements. The blueprints for future UFO invasion films like Independence Day is right here, although Harryhausen’s simplistic designs and creations are more memorable than many of those special-effects extravaganzas.