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For all the hype it got I was expecting a lot more!

It is neither dumb nor smart enough to be fun, and spends way too much time with its boring human characters.

It’s fine. It's literally the definition of a fine movie. You’ve seen it before, you know every beat and outcome before the characters even do. Only question is how much escapism you’re looking for.

This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

It takes a little mental work -- rearranging the schemata, tweaking the synapses -- before you can accept Leif Erickson as a smiling husband, father, and respectable scientist. Usually, he's on an airplane in jeopardy or some other tense situation. And he's the angry guy who stands in the aisle, blocking everyone, shouting orders in a loud voice, and demanding to know what's going on because he has an important business meeting and -- why is that engine on fire? Is he going to be late? Once over that hurdle, you can settle down to an old-fashioned science fiction movie that hides its low budget by the sparing use of special effects. There are no monsters flapping around in ugly rubber suits. People just disappear in the sand. It's like an extended episode of "The Twilight Zone." The story follows the general template of "Invasion of the Body Snatchers," except that instead of pods there are tiny electronic devices planted in the base of the skull. The scientific dialog is risible. "We've attached the standard frame to a variable oscillator. That should do the trick." The rest of the characters are pretty much stereotyped. The first victim to get it in the neck is the loving father, Leif Erickson, and for the rest of the movie we can let our archetypes go back to where they belong. He turns into a nasty brute who slaps his kid around and snarls. Oh, by the way, you can always tell who's under alien control. They stare expressionlessly into the camera and never blink. And if they get in trouble, their heads explode.I'd like to recommend William Cameron Menzies, an intuitive genius in his own way, but this is awfully clumsy. The dialog, lacking any touch of originality to begin with, seems to be read aloud for the first time from cue cards off screen. "Your father and mother are at the hospital, Davey." "But." "They'll be all right." There is a palpable pause before and after "but." Lapses like that recur.We win the final underground battle but I don't know how. Too many suspense devices are stirred into the narrative -- the earthlings are trapped in tunnels while a time bomb is ticking away; tanks are shelling the hell out of an area unoccupied by aliens; crazed Martian slaves wrapped like mummies lumber this way and that; the Ultimate Humanity that runs the whole Geschäft is a bronze disembodied head with the features of Idi Amin.The military defeats the Martians, which is rather an original touch. Usually the tanks are useless and some special device like a ray gun must be invented for the sole purpose of disabling and destroying the aliens and the junk they've brought with them. In movies of this caliber, nobody would ever dream of a solution like having the aliens undone by their lack of immunity to our germs.

*Spoiler/plot- Invaders from Mars, 1953. An overactive 10 years old boy's imagination and dreams take over his waking hours with seeing a flying saucer landing in a vacant lot near his house. The town leaders and military experts need convincing and help in the end. *Special Stars- Arthur Franz, Helena Carter, Jimmy Hunt, Leif Erickson, Hillary Brooke, Morris Ankrum, Milburn Stone, Barbara Billingsley, Robert Shayne.*Theme- The Govt is your friend, not the Martians.*Trivia/location/goofs- Color. Richard (Dick Van Dyke Show) Deacon's first film. Look for zippers on the backs of the mutant's green velor costumes. *Emotion- One of the earliest 50's sci-fi thrillers with a scary ending, so be sure to see the whole film. This film gave plenty of impressionable kids nightmares and time hiding in their rooms. The remakes of this film are terrible.*Based On- The Cold War invasion and rocket exploration fears.

Jimmy Hunt plays David MacLean, a young boy who wakes up to see a spaceship land in a nearby sand pit. His father goes to investigate, but returns completely changed, with an unpleasant personality. Others who go investigate return the same way. Turns out they are being taken over by aliens from mars who are determined to conquer Earth, person by person...Though held in high regard for its nostalgia value, by any objective standard this a turgid mess, with silly looking aliens that are an embarrassment to Science Fiction. Some good cinematography can't save it.

This one scared the hell out of me when I first saw it as a kid; I remember them showing it in the evening on BBC2 back in the 1980s. Looks like a lot of other reviewers were similarly traumatised. Watching it now, as an adult, it's easy to laugh at what is a shoddy, low budget production. Scenes are repeated, special effects are wobbly to say the least, the aliens are silly rather than menacing, and the paucity of the production is apparent in every respect.And yet...there's something oddly menacing about this film. It's partly the Cold War paranoia-inspired plot about nice, ordinary people being taken over by a sinister foreign menace. Interestingly, this is the earliest version I've seen on that theme, predating INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS by a couple of years. The paranoia is cloying and really raises the hackles, even as an adult, and even allowing for the cheesy over-acting of the child star.The more overt aspects of the story, which take place towards the climax, are also profound, and in this case the imaginative nature of the production outweighs the budgetary constraints. That alien leader, little more than a head in a goldfish bowl, is oddly disturbing and an image that's stayed with me for my whole life. It's easy to forgive the problems in a film like INVADERS FROM MARS when it contains such classic, timeless material and I do think this is one of those '50s-era B-movie alien invasion classics.