Return To Planet X!

I got hold of a DVD copy of the sci-fi classic The Man From Planet X. I've had this on VHS for several years and enjoyed it. Watching it again, I was struck by the atmosphere of the movie, the somber mood which enhances the mystery.

To be honest as a sci-fi movie it's limited. Apparently it's the first to trade in this stuff by a small margin, beating The Day the Earth Stood Still by a few months. It's nowhere near as good as that classic, but it's interesting in its own way.

Robert Clarke does the best acting job I've ever seen him do, and that might must be the result of some good direction from Edgar Ulmer, a quality talent relegated to B movies, but a director with real flair. Sadly Clarke is often directing himself and that doesn't seem to bring out the best in him.

William Schallert is on hand as the obligatory baddie, and he does a really top notch job. A face you've seen a thousand times, this time he's got an edge we don't associate with his good-neighbor mug.


Everyone else is adequate and keeps the story moving. But that's the problem. There's not really all that much story. A mysterious planet is heading for the Earth and an astronomer has made some intriguing deductions about it, so Robert Clarke as a reporter with some ties to the guy goes to Scotland to get the story. He meets the daughter who has grown up into a love interest and Schallert who is a down-on-his-luck guy with a bad rep and is helping the astronomer at his remote tower lab. The town folk are typically nervous about what is going on. A ship lands and quickly a little big-headed alien appears and the story unfolds. Whether the alien is a threat is seemingly solved.

It's a decent movie, with some outstanding images of remote landscapes. As a movie I give it a solid grade, but as a sci-fi flick I'd have to give deduct a few marks. The weakness is in the alien design. The alien is never more effective than he is in the movie poster. He looks weird, but that's about it. He doesn't speak and he doesn't really do anything all that overtly interesting, save walk around. It's great to look at, but it doesn't come to much as the film unfolds. He seems frankly disinterested in humans and certainly doesn't seem intrigued by heaving bosoms as the poster suggests.


On an ironic note, the comic book adaptation from Fawcett is getting reprinted along with several other vintage movie comics. See this link for details.

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