EARTH VS. THE FLYING SAUCERS (1956) **1/2 There's one great scene where the Pentagon brass are sitting around a big table deciphering messages from the aliens. The scientist figures out something like the attack is going to be when the sun is in perihelion. "When's that going to be?" The grizzled old general shakes his head, "It's the sort of thing that happens twice every three months. It's not specific enough information to go on." Some things never change, eh? Everyone goes on about Ray Harryhausen's great spaceships, and rightly so, but the special effects of every tourist attraction in Washington D.C. being rammed or blown up or tipping over is even better. I have no idea how he got that stuff done in pre-scientific McCarthy-era Hollywood. The narrator (Paul Frees, voice of John and George in the Beatles tv series) is perfectly computer-envy melodramatic, the plot silly but uncongested, it would seem that all of the elements for a classic sci-fi flick are present. Fred F. Sears, like Ed Wood, understood that you don't need good actors for this sort of film, in fact they're wasted or get in the way. Unfortunately what Wood understood that Sears (this was, incidentally one of ten films he directed in '56, he would die of a heart attack at age 44) didn't is that the actors have to be interesting; ugly, stupid, stoned, unconscionably boring, funny, good-looking, weird accents or hats....it doesn't matter, they just have to be striking. Unfortunately what we have here are classic Harryhausen scenes cut at 15-second intervals to Hugh Marlowe or Joan Taylor raising an eyebrow or squinting, thereby ruining the monentum.
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