Killers from Space (The Film Crew)

Film Year:  1954
Genre:  Science Fiction
Director:  W. Lee Wilder
Starring:  Peter Graves, Barbara Bestar, James Seay, Frank Gerstle

The Movie

Ferociously silly in its own presentation, Killers from Space is kind of a gift from god to bad movie lovers everywhere.  The film stars Peter "Ever see a grown man naked?" Graves as an Air Force pilot who crashes his plane but escapes unscathed, unable to remember anything that happened during that time period.  Graves begins looking into the events and discovers that he may have been abducted by aliens.  And if you thought the giant foreheads from This Island Earth were absurd, wait until you get a load of their choice exaggerated attributes.

Yes folks, it's an alien invasion with googly eyes!  But nobody believes Graves' insane ramblings of these Muppet eyed men from outer space, which leads him to try and figure out a way to stop them by himself.

But the beauty of Killers from Space is that the production itself lives up to the absurd aliens at the center.  There's so many poor framing shots zooming up close to faces that stare blankly at the viewer and quite a few lackluster special effects, including the wildly hilarious plane crash at the beginning that seems to give up on physics.

Unfortunately the film is a bit of a rambler, and it's fun inanities can sometimes be too much of a good thing.  Killers from Space will give us the absurd aliens and forced-perspective lizards to please our cheese-senses, but then it proceeds to give us nothing but for about ten to fifteen minutes without offering anything else.  It's a bit overwhelming, and the movie starts to become stale because of it.

And then it abandons everything by making Peter Graves a raving madman on the run, not showing us the aliens again.  It's an interesting third act that's almost clever, but the movie puts all of its cards on the table too soon and it feels like it's pretty much done by this point.

The Riff

Memory can be a funny thing.  I hadn't seen these Film Crew releases in quite a few years and from what I did remember Killers from Space was not a favorite.  I recall being a bit bored with it really.  I anticipated maybe just slugging my way through it but as I sat down to watch this entry into this brief and forgotten canon I found myself laughing quite a bit.  There are a lot of great reaction riffs to the film itself, the goofy aliens and the needless closeups getting the most jolts out of the guys.  They have a lot of fun with Peter Graves, which they always seem to do.  Mike gets one of my favorite lines in the episode when Peter sneaks around in an office, cuing the observations "Yeah, nobody's going to notice a six-foot-four Sweed."

But all is not sunshine and roses.  As the film drones on a bit, Mike, Kevin, and Bill seem to get a bit bored as well.  The venture into the menagerie of giant animals wears out its welcome after a while.  Sometimes a joke doesn't jive, but they decide to run it into the ground anyway, such as Kevin saying "MITTENS!" every time there is a close-up of a space man's hand.  There is also a bit of an overkill on "Biography" jokes, which is the same pitfall they fell into with Parts:  The Clonus Horror.

The host segments are charming winners.  I love the opening where Kevin nearly electrocutes himself to death and continues the segment with obviously limited brain function.  There is a fun Lunch Break presentation in which Kevin presents alternate exaggerated features for the aliens, which echos the "Is Torgo a monster?" segment from "Manos" The Hands of Fate.  There's also an amusing finale in which Mike and Kevin imitate the horrifying close-ups from the movie.

Enjoying this Film Crew episode as much as I did, I'm starting to think they never made a bad riff.  This was the only one I remember not enjoying that much, but time has been kind to it.  Maybe the Film Crew's legacy is really one that should be remembered in the riffing world:  short but sweet.

Good

The DVD

Like all Film Crew releases, Killers from Space was initially filmed by Rhino in 2005 but shelved and abandoned, while Shout Factory eventually released them on individual discs in 2007.  Overall I think the video is an improvement over Hollywood After Dark, in the host segments at least, which look a bit clearer.  These are still presented in non-animorphic widescreen while the film itself is in full screen.  The picture on Killers from Space is ugly and beat up, but I wouldn't have it any other way.

There is a bonus feature called "Did You Know...," which has Kevin telling us a piece of trivia about the backwards speak of the space men and displaying what he's really saying.  Afterward five "outtakes" are presented, which are really just hidden messages from Mike in backwards speak, usually hostile against Peter Graves.