Target Earth (1954)

... aka: Invasion del mundo (Invasion of the World)

... aka: Invasores de otros mundos (Invaders from Other Worlds)

... aka: Objectif Terre (Objective Earth)

... aka: Rumbo a lo desconocido (Heading to the Unknown)

Directed by:

Sherman A. Rose

Having perhaps downed one too many sleeping pills the night before, Nora King (Kathleen Crowley) wakes up in a daze late in the morning. She cracks open the window for some fresh air. It's strangely quiet outside, especially since this is set in Chicago. How about some noise from the radio? She's unable to get any music to play. A splash of water in the face? The water's off. After getting dressed, she walks down the hallway of her boarding house and knocks on various doors but no one answers. After venturing inside one of the rooms, she not only realizes that no one is there but that their electric, gas and water have been turned off, though a warm breakfast is still sitting on the table uneaten. Nora ventures outside. There are no cars on the road, nor pedestrians walking around. She heads straight to the usually-bustling business district of the city, yet no one's there either. What happened to everyone?

Nora eventually stumbles across somebody: A woman... Only she's lying dead on the sidewalk. So it comes as no surprise that when she finally does run across a living, breathing human, her first instinct is to run. She's chased down by the man, who corners her in an alley. After he promises not to hurt her and then slaps her in the face a few seconds later (!), he introduces himself as Frank Brooks (Richard Denning). Frank informs her that he was passing through town, drank a little too much, was knocked unconscious, robbed, dumped in an alley and didn't even come to until around noon. Whatever had occurred, the two somehow managed to sleep through it.

Rightfully assuming they missed some kind of city-wide evacuation, Nora and Frank break into an electronics store trying to get their hands on a battery-operated radio, but aren't able to find anything of use. Also, none of the cars left in the city are in running condition because the distributor caps have all been removed. They stumble upon a few other stragglers, starting with tumultuous, good-timin' couple Vicki (Virginia Grey) and Jim (Richard Reeves), who've decided to celebrate the end of the world by "whoopin' it up" and treating themselves to a restaurant's fine wine collection. They're joined (briefly at least) by the frantic Charles Otis (Mort Marshall) and everyone tries to figure out just what's going on.

You know how anytime someone wants to parody old sci-fi films, they always trot out one of those clunky cardboard box robots that sways from side to side as it walks? Well, the fiends seen here are exactly what they're parodying! It's definitely hard to feel wonder, fright, menace or much of anything else when we first lay eyes on these alien robot invaders. But this is an early 1950s low-budget science fiction film, so you really have two options here:... 1. Roll with it, overlook the cheap design (or accept it as part of the charm) and focus on the characters and story, or 2. Press stop and walk, crawl, run or waddle away. After the robot zaps Charles with its "cathode ray" laser, the other four duck into a hotel and decide to get a room for the night. Why not the deluxe bridal suite? After all, it's FOC!

The first 30 minutes, when this is focusing exclusively on the survivors trapped in the city, is the best sustained part of the film. Afterward, it decides to break up scenes with these characters with scenes involving the military and a bunch of guys sitting around at desks discussing what's going on and it all becomes a lot less tense. The air force, who have spotted "several hundred" of the robots prowling around (though we never see more than one on screen at a time), send in a bunch of bomber jets (cue stock footage inserts) and the aliens promptly blast them all right out of the sky. Lt. General Wood (Arthur Space) and chief research scientist Tom (Whit Bissell) discuss whipping out the bigger guns, namely guided missiles and atomic artillery. If worse comes to worse, they may have to level the entire city to neutralize the treat. They do get a break when a deactivated robot is located and brought back to the research lab. If they can discover what makes it tick, they may also be able to discover what their weaknesses are...

Though the origin of the robots is in question, both the military and Frank (who had science fiction buff friends in college) theorize they've come here from Venus. Why Venus? Well, because it has clouds, which means oxygen and hydrogen and thus it's "...the only planet that might be capable of supporting human life." Apparently this was made well before the general scientific consensus was established that Venus' atmospheric pressure is comparable to being 3000 feet down in the ocean and the surface temperature of the planet is hot enough to melt lead!

There's a lot of talk and precious little action here but what elevates this a bit above the norm is the likable cast and the enjoyable characterizations. Nora is revealed to have attempted suicide because she's been unable to get over her husband's death in a car accident, though she's finding a renewed interest in life thanks to the relationship she forms with Frank. The hot-n-cold romance between Vicki and Jim has been a bumpy ride full of ups and down for many years. Though the two haven't settled down or bothered getting married, the stress of the situation makes them realize they probably should start taking things a bit more seriously. Grey gives the standout performance as the hard-drinking, sarcastic Vicki and also gets most of the film's funny lines, like when she smirks "I always did like breakfast in bed" when a character offers to fetch her a warm beer in the morning. Added complications arise when Davis (Robert Roark), a dangerous, armed escaped convict / murderer stumbles upon them and plans to make them all act as a human shield to help him escape from the city.

Made on a budget of 85,000 dollars (apparently not enough to afford making more than one robot!), this was one of only a couple directorial credits for Rose, who otherwise worked almost exclusively editing cheap westerns. However, right behind him are a number of others who became genre heavy-hitters in the following years, starting with Herman Cohen. This appears to have been the first genre film produced through his namesake company.

The screenplay is credited to William Raynor (WITHOUT WARNING!; PHANTOM FROM SPACE) and was based on an original screenplay by James H. Nicholson, who'd team up Samuel Z. Arkoff to form the invaluable American International Pictures just a few years later, and Wyott Ordung, who'd just written the bad movie cult favorite Robot Monster and directed the early Corman film MONSTER FROM THE OCEAN FLOOR this same year. All of these were based in part on the novella "Deadly City" by Paul W. Fairman, who wrote it using the pen name "Ivar Jorgenson." The short novel was first published in the March 1953 issue of If: Worlds of Science Fiction (a magazine that Fairman also edited). He also wrote the short story "The Cosmic Frame," which would be adapted twice: as INVASION OF THE SAUCER MEN in 1957 and as THE EYE CREATURES in 1965.

VCI handled the initial home video distribution for this title, releasing it on both VHS and DVD. There was also a "Producer's Edition" laserdisc release from The Roan Group. Since 1954 offers such slim pickins for genre films, this will be debuting at #3 on my Top 10 list for the year, which is the highest-ranking first time viewing I've had here in years!

★★1/2

Mujeres de medianoche (1990)

... aka: Midnight Women

Directed by:

Christian González

A guy dressed in all black and wearing a leather cap picks up a hooker and takes her back to his mannequin-filled apartment. There, he presses a knife up against her crotch, tears off her clothes, cuffs her hands behind her back and then bends her over a table. While in the middle of raping her from behind ("No! Por favor!") as she screams and cries, he then drives a grand total of six knives into her back as she screams and cries some more. Just in the first five minutes we've already half-filled our exploitation movie bingo card with T&A, rape, blood, gore (including close-up shots of the knife blade going into the victim's back) and a complete lack of good taste and subtlety. This also looks just as cheap and grimy as the subject matter. But just when you think this has nowhere else surprising to go, well, it does... by suddenly becoming a lightweight sex comedy! And then it bounces back and forth between being funny (er, well, at least TRYING to be funny) and the bloody, nudity-filled exploits of the serial killer!

At first I thought I was going insane, but then I started looking into matters and this strange production kinda sorta started making a little more sense. This appears to be at least a partial remake of a Rear Window-inspired comedy called El chismoso de la ventana / "The Gossiper from the Window;" which was directed and co-written by Gilberto Martínez Solares all the way back in 1956. The plots of the two films are nearly identical, as are a lot of the character names, and Martínez Solares is also credited here as a producer and writer. So what we likely have is a case of penny-pinchin' producers wanting to make a cheap exploitation movie for the video market and, in lieu of writing an entirely new script, simply opting to recycle an old one. Lazy? Sure. But this still somehow results in a film that's not only unique but also oddly enjoyable.

After the opening murder, we venture off to meet the rest of the characters. Much of the action is set at an antique shop managed by "El jefe" (Claudio Báez), who's your typical obnoxious asshole manager with a superiority complex. Two women work there (both subject to some very questionable behavior from their boss), along with another guy played by Roberto 'Flaco' Guzmán, who is listed as playing "Anacleto" in the credits but is referred to as "Flaco" in the film itself. As for why this tiny little store needs four employees, your guess is as good as mine.

The employees all bicker, randomly start dancing and then the manager gets mad, starts to strangle one of the women (?) and then grabs a bunch of vases and flings them around, eventually nailing one of the girls in the back of the head with one and knocking her out (??) One would almost suspect the filmmakers were trying to make this guy out to be a red herring in the murders except for one little thing: We've already seen the killer. So I really don't know what in the hell that was all about.

Thanks to a mix up in the mail, wealthy antique store owner Mr. Godinez (played by wig-wearing dwarf José René "Tun Tun" Ruiz) receives a plantain in the mail while Flaco receives an expensive telescope meant for his boss. Instead of taking it back, Flaco and his friend Leandro (César Bono) use it to spy on the neighbors, especially the ones who also happen to be young, female and enjoy stripping in front of open windows. They first become interested in a punk girl (Lizbeth Olivier), who dances around topless, smokes a lot of weed and "entertains" two guys who stop over. They then check out a hot little number dancing around in a lime green thong bikini and high heels. Most of the action is seen through a telescope POV circular cut-out. Other "comedic" scenes center around Leandro's hot-blooded Cuban wife Lorena (Yirah Aparicio), who's a terrible cook and is constantly screaming at him, hitting him, pulling his hair, beating him with her shoe and bossing him around. I'd imagine if the genders were reversed on these roles, the audience would have far less to laugh about.

The two plot threads intersect a little bit, with the people in the comedy scenes watching news broadcasts and reading the paper about the killer's exploits. Dubbed El descuartizador ("The Ripper") by the press, the psycho (played by Roberto Ballesteros) ties his next victim up in the bathtub, slaps her around, drowns her, stabs her to death and then fills the bloodbath with flowers. All of Flaco's peeping eventually finds him turning his telescope the killer's way just in time to catch him playing with the decapitated head of a victim. Except Flaco barely pays any attention to that and just moves on to another half-naked lady!

Flaco becomes smitten with one of the girls he's watching, who spends most of her time crying and praying while strutting around in lingerie. The girl - Gloria (Michaelle Mayer) - is sometimes seen arguing with another man who brings a little boy over (whom he assumes may be an ex-husband and her son but are actually her brothers) and suffers from a lot of Catholic guilt over to her chosen profession as a nude model. In an earlier scene, she's shown confessing her sins to a local priest (played by Santos Soberon, also one of the producers) and then immediately skipping on over to an artist's studio and posing topless. Not content with just spying on her, Flaco starts stalking her in an attempt to ingratiate himself into her life.

Meanwhile, "The Ripper" chloroforms a girl, takes her back to his apartment, strips her naked, uses a lipstick tube to draw circles around her nipples (in a bit stolen from the Linda Blair teen vigilante classic Savage Streets) and then sinks six knives into her stomach. Next up is green bikini girl (Ivonne Bardett), who gets kidnapped after taking a shower. He hangs her upside down in a closet, rips off her top, slashes her throat with a switchblade and then spray paints her corpse. Hey, did I forget to mention that "The Ripper" is also a pretentious artist who seems to take styling tips from Walter Paisley?

While the slapstick silliness (which is not above comically sped-up chase scenes, usage of a slide whistle and the two stars constantly fighting over use of the telescope and bumping their heads together trying to get to the eyepiece first) don't gel with the serial killer's sadistic murder spree at all, this is never boring and it's at least something different in the overcrowded serial killer / slasher genre. The horror scenes are all played dead seriously, are unpleasant and fairly gruesome and actually done quite well. The gags are a bit more hit-and-miss, though there's a smile-inducing goofiness to this entire bizarro production that helps you sometimes overlook that.

Adolfo Martínez Solares, son of Gilberto, co-produced and co-wrote this along with his father and also has a cameo as a TV reporter. This one's currently available only in Spanish and the print quality (as you can probably tell from my screen caps) is pretty rough.

★★1/2