Teenagers from Outer Space

Poster tagline: THRILL-CRAZED SPACE KIDS BLASTING THE FLESH OFF HUMANS!!! ___ You’ll forgive me coming on strong right out of the gate, but the overall rating in this case is absolutely overblown, and the FilmBooster member with the username “vypravěč” cannot have seen very many low-budget sci-fi films from the 1950s, or else they wouldn’t be posting such ill-founded nonsense. I consider myself a seasoned viewer of “Golden Age” sci-fi from the 1950s to the first half of the 1960s, having watched about 190 films from that hallowed period, and I can say in good conscience that this one is among the worst. Everything’s wrong here, from the stilted actors to the non-existent narrative to the monotonous soundtrack and the god-awful special effects (to wit: the “Gorgon”, a monster they cheaped out on by taking an amateurish frontal projection of a crayfish and shoddily grafting it into the scene, letting it hang in mid-air). The death blow is dealt by the static direction, which has people standing around and blathering on a set covering five square meters (in the opening scene). Don’t get me wrong, I love the naive B-movie poetry of low-budget sci-fi – but I need to see a bit of craftsmanship, a bit of passion for what they’re doing (Bert I. Gordon was certainly hopeless as a film-maker, but he made his films with love and believed in them), yet none of this can be found here, and no one invested the least bit of filmmaking skill in it. I only very rarely give Boo!, because even the worst garbage took some effort to make; hence, I shall give one ashamed star for the unintentionally funny alien weapon turning people into bleached skeletons and for the absence of a happy ending. (03/30/2020)