- Original theatrical poster - image courtesy of Iphotoscrap
What an odd little movie this is, ambitious beyond its reach and yet, for so many shortcomings, strangely affecting. That is, at least for this hardened fan of cinematic camp, a taste that thrives on the kind of absurdities – some intended, some not – that Teenagers from Outer Space trades in.
I can’t pretend that I didn’t laugh out loud several times throughout, and probably in ways the filmmakers would have found to be anything but flattering. That being said, the film is so eager to please that I couldn’t help but melt into a kind of endearment to it, and I’d much rather watch a flawed, no-budget movie like this than some soulless big-budget blockbuster any day of the week.
The teenagers of the title are a group of humanoid aliens who’ve been searching the galaxy for a planet on which they can raise their race’s primary food source – the gargons, lobster-like creatures that will eventually grow to several thousand feet in length.
Landing in a remote area outside Hollywood, they deem Earth suitable to their needs, but Thor (Bryan Grant) and Derek (David Love) butt heads when the former contemptuously disintegrates a nearby dog. Finding the name-inscribed collar left behind with a pile of bones, Derek infers that the planet must be host to intelligent life, and thus unsuitable for their farming needs. Proud of their superior race – in which there are no families, friendships, or love – Thor and the crew scoff at Derek, who, after a failed mutiny, manages to escape in hopes of warning the locals.
Silly enough in concept to attain some kind of classic status, this plot is made all the more grin-inducing by the serious, downright ponderous attitude struck by the actors, who emphasize every syllable as if they were reciting passages of Shakespeare through phonetic memory alone. This strange manner of performance works because this is, after all, an alien race, despite the fact that they look exactly like humans dressed up in decorated flight suits, but it’s also an appropriate fit to the film’s generally weird ambiance.
Fans of Night of the Living Dead will be quick to recognize the score from that film present here, as it was a popular selection of stock music used in numerous B movies of the day. These dramatic crescendos of doom lend the film a weight and urgency that would otherwise be beyond its grasp.
If the concept of a giant lobster tickles your fancy, worry not: Teenagers from Outer Space delivers the goods, albeit with one of the most, um, special, special effects this sci-fi veteran has ever had the pleasure of encountering.
I mean not to be hard on the film, which is actually quite admirable in how much it achieves with so little. Extreme guerilla filmmaking tactics were used to procure locations for shooting, while the props are often so obviously fake and the avoidance of special effects so awkward (particularly the climax, which is limited to shots of people looking at the spectacle the film can’t afford to show) that you’d be foolhardy not to go with it.
Unfortunately, that’s not how audiences saw it in 1959. The film performed so poorly that the director suffered a mental breakdown, eventually proclaiming himself the second coming of Christ and committing suicide a decade later. Such tragedy can’t help but affect one’s viewing of the film, which, for all its limitations, is rooted in a kind of empathetic moral justice, what a kindly reviewer of the LA times described as “astonishing sensitivity.”
MST3K is one of the few TV shows I’d want to take along to a desert island, but this is a case where I prefer the film itself. There’s charm to be found in its vain stabs at profundity, and a lot of fun, too.
Teenagers from Outer Space is available for free through the public domain ( click here).
Teenagers from Outer Space. Dir. Tom Graeff. Perf. David Love, Dawn Bender, Bryan Grant, Harvey B. Dunn, Tom Graeff, King Moody. Warner Bros. Pictures, 1959. Running Time: 86 min.
