Coventry Review of Phantom from Space

Phantom from Space (1953)

The illegal, invisible and exhibitionist alien.

[2/10 · 23 December 2006]

I generally LOVE low-budget Sci-Fi films from the 1950's, but you have to admit they also made some pretty darn stupid and pointless movies back them! Take this oddity, for example! The opening sequences follow a meteor - at least they all think it is a meteor - whisking over the earth from Alaska to Santa Monica for SIX WHOLE MINUTES! All you hear is a typically 50's narrating voice rambling off coordinates and all you see is a type of rock flying through the sky! Fascinating!! The meteor turns out to be a spaceship and its captain immediately kills two earthlings because they were hostile to him. He then thinks they attacked him because they were afraid of his flamboyant spacesuit, so he takes it off and continues his trip naked. That's alright, though, because he also happens to be invisible. The rest of the film concerns a bunch of dreadfully boring scientists trying to figure out whether this visitor has friendly intentions or not, and by the end of the film we STILL don't know this. I can appreciate a lack of financial means & acting talent in B-cinema, but so much boredom in such a little film is really unforgivable. The people hunting for the alien simply sit around in their offices or laboratories waiting for him to come and pick up the suit he left behind at the scene of his first crimes. There's never any outer space menace or suspenseful sequences of mass hysteria and the conversations these people are having are dull, dull, dull!