1954's Killers From Space is Like Plan 9 From Outer Space Except It Was Directed By Billy Wilder's Talentless Brother
Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.
I cannot imagine how intimidating it must have been to be Billy Wilder’s older brother. How could any sibling, no matter how ferociously smart or talented, measure up to someone rightly revered as one of the greatest wits show-business has ever known?
If I were related to Billy Wilder I would want to stay away from show-business to avoid unflattering comparisons but the seven time Academy Award winning legend’s brother W. Lee wasn’t about to be deterred by his brother’s prestigious reputation.
Lee followed his younger brother into the motion picture business but the filmmaker 1954’s Killers From Space suggests is not the man behind Sunset Boulevard and Some Like It Hot but rather Edward Wood Jr.
Killers From Space was a family affair. Billy Wilder’s lesser sibling W. Lee produced and directed while Myles Wilder, W. Lee’s son and Billy’s nephew, co-wrote the screenplay, as he did for many of his father’s films. Judging by the film’s adorably amateurish aesthetic it seems safe to assume that Billy didn’t show up on set occasionally to ghost-direct or do uncredited punch-ups on the screenplay.
A wildly over-qualified Peter Graves stars as Dr. Douglas Martin, a nuclear scientist working on the atomic bomb tests that riveted science-fiction and horror filmmakers with their bottomless capacity for horror on an almost unimaginable scale.
While conducting research, the good doctor ends up in a plane that crashes, leaving its pilot dead but Dr. Martin unharmed except for a cross-shaped scar on his chest. Also, he begins behaving suspiciously, almost as if he died in the crash and then space aliens replaced him with a double they control through hypnosis.
That’s because (SPOILER) he died in the crash and then space aliens replaced him with a double they control through hypnosis.
The evil space aliens are from Astron Delta, a planet where everyone has crazy ping pong ball eyes that are almost, but not quite, facing in the same direction. Imagine a science fiction dystopia where everyone has Marty Feldman eyes and thick caterpillar eyebrows and dresses like Dieter from the Sprockets sketches and you have a good sense of these lunatics’ home world.
According to Wikipedia, the aliens’ signature bulging eyes are the product not of ping pong balls cut in half but rather re-purposed egg cartons. If anything, that’s even sillier and more ingratiatingly homemade. Calling Killers from Space a movie feels overly generous. It’s more of an earnest, albeit failed, attempt at cinema.
When W. Lee, a filmmaker who is NOT as talented as his younger brother Billy, first saw how utterly ridiculous and unintentionally comic the space aliens looked with their googly eyes he should have pulled the plug on the whole operation. The aliens are NEVER even remotely scary but they are unintentionally guffaw-inducing throughout.
If googly eyes were scary Cookie Monster would be a figure of absolute terror and not a lovable friend to children everywhere.
To even call these Poindexters killers seems unnecessarily generous. They seem less like cold-blooded executioners from beyond our imagination than intergalactic incels.
These nerds from outer space want to destroy the Earth so that they can take over but they’re also deeply unpleasant. The head alien geek condescendingly tells Dr. Martin, “We have a warning system similar to your primitive radar.”
Killers From Space takes what Roger Ebert referred to as the Fallacy of the Talking Killer to unintentionally comic extremes. The aliens want Dr. Martin’s knowledge of atomic bomb tests for their own sinister purposes so they don’t just tell him their evil plan; they damn near get out a history book and explain everything that has happened with their civilization since the beginning of time.
When the aliens tell our hero that, in addition to possessing a warning system far more impressive than our primitive radar, they speak every language, he inexplicably becomes enraged and threatens to leave.
“You can’t expect me to believe that! I’m getting out of here” he angrily insists before attempting to leave the underground cavern where he is being held.
This gentlemen recently learned of the existence of googly-eyed space alien in goth attire with the ability to resurrect the dead. I’m not sure why he can’t wrap his mind around the idea that these powerful and, let’s be honest, dorky creatures from another world might be aggressively multi-lingual. That’s a curious place to get skeptical.
He tries to run away but everywhere he goes he encounters giant animals eager to dine upon his sweet, sweet flesh. W. Lee adorably intercuts cute little grasshoppers and ants and other creepy crawlies with shots of Graves badly faking danger to try to create the illusion that he’s facing off against unfathomably vast monsters.
It doesn’t work. The mind and the eye stubbornly refuse to be fooled by such amateurish camera tricks. That doesn’t keep the scene from dragging on and on interminably.
The aliens want to use the giant insects to destroy every living thing on earth so that they can move in and take over. “We have been putting our plan to work for some time now” an overly chatty alien informs Dr. Martine. I’d guess that was Plan 8 or quite Possibly Plan 7 From Outer Space!
Dr. Martin’s contemporaries are understandably a little skeptical of his story about bug-eyed, exposition-dispensing aliens using giant insects to take over the world but he succeeds in stopping the aliens single-handedly using science all the same.
Like Plan 9 From Outer Space, Killers from Space subscribes to the curious notion that the best way to tell the story of an epic battle between planets and civilizations is through endless scenes of pasty white men bantering awkwardly in sparsely appointed rooms.
Killers from Space captured the imaginations of bad movie lovers and trash culture auteurs. It was roasted by the Mystery Science Theater 3000 offshoot The Film Crew in 2007 and then again in 2019 under the Rifftrax banner. In 2002, meanwhile, director Doug Miles and writer Tex Hauser re-dubbed the film, What’s Up, Tiger Lily?-style, into a raunchy gay sex comedy.
This spectacular turkey from the infinitely lesser sibling of one of our greatest storytellers enjoyed a robust second life as a target of derision and mockery. It’s seventy-one minutes of entertaining incompetence as well as a convincing argument in favor of nurture rather than nature. Not everyone is blessed with the same level of talent and ambition, even members of the same family.
Check out my newest literary endeavor, The Joy of Trash: Flaming Garbage Fire Extended Edition at https://www.nathanrabin.com/shop and get a free, signed "Weird Al” Yankovic-themed coloring book for free! Just 18.75, shipping and taxes included!
Or, for just 25 dollars, you can get a hardcover “Joy of Positivity” edition signed (by Felipe and myself) and numbered (to 100) copy with a hand-written recommendation from me within its pages. It’s truly a one-of-a-kind collectible!
Or you can buy The Joy of Trash from Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/Joy-Trash-Nathan-Definitive-Everything/dp/B09NR9NTB4/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr= but why would you want to do that?
Check out my new Substack at https://nathanrabin.substack.com/
And we would love it if you would pledge to the site’s Patreon as well. https://www.patreon.com/nathanrabinshappyplace