Schlock Corridor: Day Seventeen

INVISIBLE INVADERS

"Maj. Bruce Jay and his team of scientists must defeat an invading horde of invisible creatures from outer space capable of reanimating human corpses."

Invisible Invaders begins with John Carradine playing a confused actor who stares directly at the camera because he has no idea what he's doing surrounded by a bunch of haphazardly placed scientific equipment, then he's murdered by a spinning newspaper that boldly displays the headline "Noted Scientist Killed In Atom Lab Explosion" accompanied by a file photo of Carradine to clarify matters for anybody who may be confused.

Then Carradine rises from the grave to pay a visit to one of his science friends late one night. He confides in his beaker buddy that he is not actually John Carradine, but an invisible alien from Earth's moon who has inhabited the dead actor's body to deliver a dire warning to all humans everywhere: surrender in 24 hours, or we will wreck you shit, because you guys are getting close to building rocket ships, and the threat of humans gallivanting about in outer space can not be tolerated. Then he fucks off back to his grave, neglecting to leave his pal with any evidence of the existence of these alien overlords, which makes his job of convincing the governments of the world to surrender to a cabal of invisible extraterrestrials from our very own moon quite the uphill battle.

Needless to say, Science Man fails in his noble task, and true to their word, the Invisible Invaders reanimate human corpses all across the world, laying waste to civilization with a vengeance. As everything falls apart, Science Guy gathers his daughter, his evil twin, and John Agar, and they all take refuge in a military bunker to develop a liquid plastic that they use to kidnap one of the killer corpses, interrogating the invisible puppet master hiding in its flesh. The interrogation doesn't go well, because the alien is an asshole, and Science Guy's evil twin gets in a fight with John Agar, because he'd rather get strangled by his new alien masters than spend one more miserable moment in the presence of the star of The Mole People.

The melee damages the bunker's PA system, sending shrill feedback into the snooty alien's holding cell, and this hurts his sensitive moon ears, giving Science Guy the inspiration to build a boss-looking sonic rifle that the survivors use to kill a bunch of aliens and then blow up their mother ship, which was conveniently located about a mile away from the bunker, parked under a tree. The day saved, our heroes are invited to a ceremony at the UN headquarters in New York City, where they look very bored while listening to our helpful narrator wrap up the plot as quickly as he possibly can because the production obviously ran out of money to film the last three pages of their script.

Invisible Invaders is basically Plan 9 From Outer Space if the aliens weren't completely incompetent. It's literally the same idea in both movies: manipulating the recent dead to rise from their graves and attack the living in order to stop the human race from developing some scientific breakthrough. In Invisible Invaders, it's manned spaceflight, and in Plan 9, it's a fictional material called "solaranite". Only the aliens in Invisible Invaders aren't fucking around, resurrecting millions of corpses to annihilate humanity, as opposed to Plan 9's three. Both films also rely on overwrought narration to explain away large swaths of the plot they didn't have the budget to actually film, which I found amusing.

Unfortunately for Invisible Invaders, despite its slightly larger budget and better special effects, it's a much less entertaining motion picture than Plan 9 From Outer Space. Neither film is actually what one would call "good", but Edward D. Wood, Jr.'s Plan 9 is almost endlessly rewatchable and incredibly charming in its own strange manner. There's a beating heart behind that film, one man's passion to realize his cracked vision on celluloid, and you can feel that passion in every frame of Plan 9. Invisible Invaders is mostly inert, mechanically telling a story in the quickest, most efficient manner in order to finish the product and move on to whatever's next. It's not bad, but it's got nothing else to offer, either. It just exists, you view it, then you go do something else, and the experience leaves no impression whatsoever.

Plan 9 From Outer Space sticks with you. You'll never forget it. Invisible Invaders is so inconsequential, I didn't realize I had seen this movie before (nearly twenty years ago) until I saw the nifty-looking sonic gun make an appearance in the last ten minutes. That was literally the only thing in Invisible Invaders that left the slightest impression in my brain, and that's just sad. I blame John Agar.

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