Far Horizons: Tales of Sci-Fi, Fantasy and Horror. Issue #13 April 2015 | Page 62

Cinema Obscura - The Overlooked Gems of Cinema

Invisible Invaders
(1959)
ByJeff Durkin
Like any art, movies reflect the culture that they
emerge from. Invisible Invaders, a low-budget alien
invasion film, came from a culture with deep seated
fears and insecurities. The ambiguities of the Cold
War, concerns of nuclear proliferation, the tension
between the military and the scientific community,
attitudes towards pacifism and military preparedness
and fears of communist infiltration of America are all
on display. That these themes are sandwiched between
moments of ludicrous melodramatics, scenery chewing acting, boring direction and bland cinematography
and a lot of stock footage does not detract from them.
The film opens with an accident in an atomic weapons
lab, an explosion that kills Professor Karol Noymann
(played by John Carradine). This leads Adam Penner (Philip Tonge) to resign from America’s nuclear
weapons program because of the threat it represents
to the human race. His family, friends and colleagues
don’t understand why he thinks working on weapons
that can destroy civilisation is a problem. His daugh-

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ter Phyllis - played by Jean Byron - exemplifies this
attitude, hoping “he gets over it.”
The night after Noymann’s funeral, his reanimated
corpse appears at Penner’s door, to deliver a message
from the “Invisible Invaders.” The aliens - whose
ships and bodies are invisible, hence the name, and
who can possess human corpses - want Penner to tell
the world that the human race must surrender in 24
hours or a massive invasion force will be launched
from the Moon. The alien explains that they are going
to attack because mankind is developing nuclear
weapons and space travel and might be a threat to their
“dictatorship of the universe.”
The invasion commences; it consists of stock footage
of various disasters, inter-cut with a few scenes of
reanimated corpses lumbering about the countryside
(all of whom are well-dressed, middle-aged white
men). Our heroes (the Penners, fellow scientist John
Lamont (Robert Hutton) and Air Force Major Bruce