"Star Wars," Star Snores.
Can't compare with "Devil Girl From Mars."Rabid fans may be lining up for tickets to "Star Wars: Episode 1 -- The Phantom Menace," but those of us who grew up on the real thing know that if you want the bona fides, you must find them in the mustier corners of your video store or the back channels of your basic cable.
For the kind of sci-fi that sticks to your frontal lobe for a lifetime, you must look to something a lot less classy than George Lucas' New Age Wookiee-fest.
You're talking the 1950s.
The production of that single decade is astounding. There are hundreds of them, really cheesy space monster movies, made with the collective budget of a middle-size Levittown, N.Y., household. During Lent.
Those films, from "Rocketship X-M" in 1950 to "Teenagers From Outer Space" in 1959, outlined a genre. Even today's most up-to-the-state-of-the-art FXtravaganza will manage to pay homage to those cheese-athons of yore.
You know the drill: An elderly scientist with a beautiful daughter discovers a new planet or an underground civilization that will destroy the world, or at least a small out-of-the-way English coastal village. All the best World War II stock footage of tanks and cannon cannot gun down the menace until our hero invents a new ray or oxygen destroyer that manages to vaporize the menace or at least cause it to doze off, meanwhile winning the daughter, whose name, by the way, is always a transgender name like Chris or Pat. (The hero has to be surprised at the beginning that the elderly scientist's assistant is a "girl.")
And at the end she hugs her man, who is usually dressed in a leather flight jacket, and they stare off into the empty ocean and she asks him if the danger is over, if the flying saucer/interplanetary dinosaur/giant centipede will ever come back, and he looks pensive and says: "Keep watching the skies."
How can "Star Wars" compete with that?
And the acting in these low-budget classics is sometimes mind-blowing. Hollywood didn't put its Gary Coopers and Cary Grants in cheap genre flicks. No, it drew from the shallow end of the pool of talent that included such luminaries as William Lundigan and Lyle Talbot. Most of them made Al Gore look as animated as Roger Rabbit.
I mean, let's face it: Mark Hamill may be a lousy actor, but he's no Sonny Tufts.
What is so surprising about those awful films is just how much affection we feel for them when they show up on "Mystery Science Theater 3000" or during a baseball rain delay.
Actually, there are two types of affection we feel for them. For there are two different ways they stand out.
First, there is the movie that is so bad, it is fun to watch.
"Plan 9 From Outer Space" (1958) is the archetype for this. Director Ed Wood has often been credited with making the worst movie ever. But this is calumny. There is something naively loopy about "Plan 9" that makes us cherish its every goofy blunder. Like when the scene shifts from day to night and back again, with no continuity. Like when its star Bela Lugosi died and Wood replaced him midproduction with his wife's chiropractor, a head and a half taller than Lugosi.
And the dialogue: "Greetings, my friends. We are all interested in the future, for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives. And remember, my friends, future events such as these will affect you in the future."
And: "Explode the sunlight here, gentlemen, and you explode the universe."
Audiences howl with laughter all the way through the movie. Nobody could have made anything so cheesy on purpose.
But Ed Wood wasn't alone. There are plenty of bad movies, with plywood sets, paper-plate flying saucers and cardboard acting.
But there is another sort of film that we love, too. In those, a miserable script and lumpy acting are somehow saved by either a director who makes more of it all than you have any right to expect, or by an idea or image that sticks in the mind like a dream.
What alien is more inexpressibly other than the glass-helmeted homunculus from "The Man From Planet X" (1951)? And what planet is more memorably odd than the partly solarized, red-colored landscape from "Angry Red Planet" (1959)?
And there is a subgenre in this, in which such moviemakers as Ivan Tors tried naively but sincerely to show what space travel or robots would be like. "Destination Moon" (1950), or "Gog" (1954), for instance.
The movies are not actually good, but they have good hearts.
The '50s had its share of larger budget sci-fi, too. Some of them are classics, such as "The Day The Earth Stood Still" (1951). They transcended their genre.
Some people consider "Forbidden Planet" (1956) to be a minor masterpiece.
But it is those benighted films such as "Robot Monster" (1953), with its man in a gorilla suit and a diving helmet, or "The Cape Canaveral Monsters" (1960), by the same director, with its out-of-shape zombies dressed in spandex with fried eggs for eyes, that truly deserve worship.
Unfortunately, "Cape Canaveral Monsters" was a swan song. With the advent of the 1960s, science fiction took a turn and not for the better. Producers aimed their films at the teenage market, and the gore level rose. The monsters had faces like used chewing gum and they oozed slime.
And worse, it was all caught on really bad, underlit color film.
The flatly lit black and white film of the '50s was a signature style. You could tell instantly what you were in for. Flood lamps illuminated the scene evenly and spread twin shadows to the right and left of everything. But the bad lighting of the '60s couldn't help the goo-faced monsters. There was a failure of sincerity.
We can recognize that in retrospect, looking back through an age that imitated the loopiness of the earlier films. But it doesn't matter if you call your film "Slave Girls From Beyond Infinity" (1987), these made-for-cable cheesers are way too self-conscious.
We can never regain our innocence.
Most of the bad science fiction and space monster movies from this story are out on video. However, titles appear and disappear without warning. Check your local video store.
Many show up on cable television, especially on American Movie Classics, the Science Fiction Channel and Turner Classic Movies.
Keep watching the airwaves!
TOP 10 CHEESY SCI-FI MOVIES FROM THE 1950s
10. "Cat-Women of the Moon" (1953) -- Our astronauts, led by Sonny Tufts, reach the moon only to find a cave full of exotic dancers in black cat suits. There is also a giant spider. Similar plots show up in "Missile to the Moon" (1959) and "Fire Maidens From Outer Space" (1954), but neither can top the original.
9. "Angry Red Planet" (1959) -- An American space team lands on Mars and is eaten by giant spiders with rat faces. Only the "girl" survives. The acting is rudimentary, but the visuals are unforgettable, even in their cheesiness.
8. "The Crawling Eye" (1958) -- Forrest Tucker acts his heart out in this tale of giant eyeballs with tentacles that live in frozen radioactive clouds above a Swiss village and communicate psychically with a young woman.
7. "Invaders From Mars" (1953) -- This is almost a work of genius. Despite vestigial special effects, no movie has ever portrayed childhood paranoia better than this. A boy suspects his parents have been made into zombies by the buried flying saucer. No one believes him.
6."Kronos" (1957) -- A giant cube from outer space eats energy and gets bigger. So, what does the army do? Try to kill it with an A-bomb. "You Earth people are stupid! Stupid! Stupid!," as Eros says in "Plan" "9." The sight of a building-size monster moving across the landscape is eerie.
5. "Plan 9 From Outer Space" (1958) -- Sometimes called "the worst movie ever made," "Plan 9" nevertheless has a loopy genuineness to it, an almost soft-hearted pacifist message at its core, as zombies raised from the dead by aliens are meant to take over the Earth. This movie is a party waiting for you to invite your friends to.
4. "Riders to the Stars" (1954) -- One of the rare color films from this age of black and white, "Riders" is a straightforward, even humorless attempt to explain the travails of space travel, with lots of centrifuge scenes and a love triangle. Little excitement, but lots of sincerity.
3. "Gog" (1954) -- This is Ivan Tors at his best, telling a story about how man's development of technology can come back to harm him. Gog and its twin, Magog, are among the best robots ever put on film. They are not humanoid but look more like what we see in industrial robots today.
2. "The Queen of Outer Space" (1958) -- This may have been Zsa Zsa Gabor's best role. She plays a kind of Hungarian freedom fighter rebelling against a masked evil queen of the universe and saving the lives of the American space men. This is actually a fourth version of "Cat Women of the Moon," but it is even campier. Its silliness unfortunately forecasts the doom of the naive space movie.
1. "The Man From Planet X" (1951) -- Shot for less than $50,000 in six days by low-budget genius Edgar G. Ulmer, this film manages to make a virtue of every budget shortcut he was forced to take. The atmospheric sets, supposedly English moors, are foggy to hide their phoniness. But the imaginative spacecraft -- a sort of upside down aluminum ice-cream cone -- and pathos-evoking blank-face alien are unforgettable. So is villain William Schallert, before he became Dobie Gillis' teacher, Mr. Pomfritt. This film shows how you can do a great deal on a shoestring and an idea. And a scientist with a lovely daughter.
Richard Nilsen is online. Send e-mail to him at richard.nilsen@pni.com