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Very very predictable, including the post credit scene !!!

Load of rubbish!!

There are moments in this movie where the great movie it could've been peek out... They're fleeting, here, but they're worth savoring, and they happen often enough to make it worth your while.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

Battle of the Worlds (1961) 1/2 (out of 4)Italian nonsense from director Antonio Margheriti has a planet coming into the same solar system as Earth and it appears it is going to collide with us. At the last second the planet misses us but starts to hover around, which causes a brilliant scientist (Claude Rains) to think that the planet is being controlled by aliens who are going to use it to attack us.There are awful science fiction movies like PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE that are so bad that you can actually have fun with them. Then there are cheap movies like THE COSMIC MAN, which rip-off better movies and deliver a quality project even if it's certainly nothing too special. Then you've got movies like BATTLE OF THE WORLDS, which is just downright awful on every level even though it appears they're working with a decent budget and they have a terrific actor in the cast.At one time I called BATTLE OF THE WORLDS the worst movie I had ever seen but revisiting it nearly twenty five years later I've come to see it's not really that bad but there's no question that it's quite awful and pointless. The biggest issue I have with the film is that it's downright childish on every level. The story itself is pretty darn stupid and it seems like something a group of five-year-olds would come up with in their monster club meetings. Even worse are the special effects, which, again, are better than something you'd see in an Ed Wood movie but at the same time they are so badly made and the lasers are so silly that you can't help but shake your head.The performances are also pretty bad but you've got a legend like Rains on hand who I'm sure took this project for the paycheck. I've never blamed an actor for taking a paycheck and especially later in their career. While the performance by Rains isn't "good" at least he does go over-the-top and gives some energy instead of sleepwalking through the part. BATTLE OF THE WORLDS is awful on pretty much every level and sadly it never reaches the "so bad it's good" level.

For me this film is an old friend. Its a film I've seen countless times thanks to showing on the Late Late Show while I was growing up.Its been forever in the bargain bins. The film is about a giant asteroid that comes close to earth and our attempts to find out why its sending out ships to attack us. As a film its an okay time killer its not bad. Its not great but its definitely not bad. Its certainly better than many of the space opera films that followed in its wake through the 60's and early 70's. One of the reasons I think the film works, and is the reason I will watch the film again and again is the presence of Claude Rains as the mad genius who wants to know whats going on so he can save the world. Its a force of nature performance that allows him to really tear the roof off and go for it. Certainly it more than a little over done but some how seeing the great man being out of character is a great deal of fun. I really like the film and recommend it to those with a love of science fiction

From Italian genre expert Antonio Margheriti, or "Anthony M. Dawson" as he was known to the English speaking world, best known for films about cannibals and killer fish. In 1960 he started an entire genre of spaghetti sci-fi films with Assignment: Outer Space. It was a typically Italian exercise in creating something out of nothing, and not surprisingly at a time when any film with Hercules in the title meant instant box-office, it was sold around the world. For his second space opera Margheriti was handed a bigger budget - which means he was given slightly more than nothing - to create an ambitious, not to mention enjoyable, effects-filled no-brainer: the 1961 Battle Of The Worlds.More moolah meant star billing for an imported American actor. So, almost 30 years after playing The Invisible Man, aging raconteur Claude Raines plays Professor Benson, a cranky, wordy, gas-filled yet sympathetic egghead in Mr Magoo glasses who detects a planetoid dubbed "The Outsider" heading for the pseudo-utopian community on Earth. Against Benson's advice the Army sends its spacecraft to knock it out but they're destroyed by a fleet of spinning flying saucers who emerge from inside the planet with jagged laser beams a-blazing. The fools! Benson then discovers the planetoid locked into an ever-decreasing orbit around the Earth, suggesting a super-computer from a dying alien civilization inside the planet; his missionary zeal for pure knowledge leads him to offer himself in the ultimate act of sacrifice, descending deep into the bowels of the runaway planet.And they really do look like bowels - glowing red and filled with plastic tubing, a triumph of low-budget ingenuity from the Godfather of Spaghetti sci-fi thanks to his resourcefulness as a special effects wizard, working miracles out of a few toilet rolls and a vacuum hose. Amidst the relentlessly talky script and the pointless romantic interludes, there's a strange, almost quasi-revolutionary thread against the military industrial complex, but that's the crazy Italians for you. So, from the man who would one day direct Cannibal Apocalypse comes an early one in the insanely huge Antonio Margheriti catalog: the 1961 Battle Of The Worlds.

I guess every great actor is allowed at least one poor casting decision, and with this film, that distinction goes to Claude Rains. It's hard to believe the Professor Benson of this film is the same man who brilliantly portrayed Captain Renault in 1942's "Casablanca". Here he's one dimensionally annoying as a bull headed scientist who's undeniably impressed with himself and isn't shy about letting you know it - "There's only one opinion that interests me, and that's my own."Benson's mathematical calculations convince him that a body in outer space will come within ninety five thousand miles of Earth, even though colleagues and military strategists fret over it's seeming collision course with our planet. What Benson didn't count on, and by his own admission the only time he was ever wrong, is that once the asteroid reaches it's predestined location, it starts orbiting the Earth. With obvious implications that a guiding force is at the core of the mysterious body, Benson demands that Earth's 'High Command' not destroy it, but allow him and a team of his fellow scientists investigate.I always get a kick out of the way sci-fi flicks of the era took such liberty with the vast amounts of time involved in space travel, and reduced them to mere minutes for purposes of the story. In about the time it took to count down from ten to one, blast off, Benson's team was on the asteroid, investigating a cable laden labyrinth with an ominous red glow. With a destruct sequence in effect, Benson prefers to confront the truth of the mystery of the 'Outsider', while everyone else with him wisely decides that maybe it's time to go. On that note, one of the team members sadly concludes that Benson had a formula where his heart should have been, as the planet goes kablooey."Battle of the Worlds" is a gross exaggeration in selection of a title. Nothing on that vast a scale occurs, though there are occasional skirmishes between Earth rockets and alien flying saucers. If there's a positive to be found here, at least the sci-fi elements of the picture were a notch above other films of the era, as film making technology relentlessly moved toward breakthroughs that would appear in "Star Trek" in a few more years.