1954's "Target Earth" was an alien invasion ripoff of "The War of the Worlds," too impoverished to afford more than a single robot built, a screenplay credited to James H. Nicholson, who would soon parlay his experience with Realart Pictures to form a new company with attorney Samuel Z. Arkoff, American International Pictures, catering to the double feature crowd (also credited is "Robot Monster" author Wyott Ordung, director of Roger Corman's "Monster from the Ocean Floor"). Allied Artists definitely looked more like Monogram on this seven day wonder, despite a suitably eerie opening with Kathleen Crowley's unsuccessful suicide awakening to find the metropolis deserted, and no electrical power or utilities. She meets up with Richard Denning, then Virginia Grey and Richard Reeves (as a couple celebrating free drinks in a bar), the quartet unable to escape the city so they hold up in a nearby hotel. We see only a shadow of the robot (effectively making us believe it to be much larger than it is), the only suggestion that the invaders come from Venus due to its cloud cover and moisture in the air. The second half splits time between endless discussions between the four principals, and the military trying to discover how a disabled robot's cathode ray tube was shattered, since bullets have no effect. The picture starts off fairly strong but peters out all too quickly, only a few corpses shown lying in the streets, and the late arrival of a wanted killer hardly enough to break up the tedium (director Terence Fisher tried essentially the same story a decade later in "The Earth Dies Screaming," with similarly underwhelming results).
Review of Target Earth
