I love 1950s sci-fi and horror movies. The anxieties over the newly discovered nuclear powers and the real possibility of space exploration created some wonderful films. A lot of those films were decidedly low-budget, but they still managed to create some pretty terrific special effects.

Invasion From Mars isn’t a particularly good film. Its story is pretty basic, and its low budget is a little too present, but there are some good sets and the alien design is wonderful.

David MacLean (Jimmy Hunt) is a young boy who loves astronomy. Lucky for him, there is a giant telescope in his hometown. One night he’s awakened by a terrible thunderstorm. He looks out his window, and he sees a flying saucer touch down on a sandy beach just behind his yard. He tells his dad about it, and he promises the boy he’ll check it out in the morning.

But Dad is a bit of an astronomy nut himself, and he decides to check the story out that night. He isn’t back when his wife wakes up, so she calls the police. They check out the spot David said he saw the UFO land, and they, too, disappear.

Later that morning, Dad shows back up, but he’s acting strange. He shouts at the boy to never mention what he saw again and gives him a good smacking when he asks questions. Dad’s also got a weird scar on the back of his neck.

David almost immediately figures out what’s going on and runs to the cops. They get him to talk to Dr. Pat Blake (Helena Carter), who believes his story and gets the military involved. They’ll blast a hole in the sand and discover a series of underground tunnels and eventually the Martians.

Most of the Martians are dudes in goofy-looking suits, but the king (or emperor? or something) is this big, round head with a human face, spray-painted gold, with some tentacle-looking things sticking out of it, all encompassed in a glass dome. It is kind of awesome. The cave system is pretty cool too. It’s covered in these wild bubbles.

The story is all standard stuff. I did appreciate its similarities to Invasion of the Body Snatchers with the aliens basically controlling humans and it being difficult to tell who was ok. When the military comes in, we see a lot of stock footage of tanks and other armored vehicles moving about. And when I say a lot, I mean a whole lot. They keep cutting back to tanks, but because it is all stock footage, we don’t see them interact with anything else in the film. They also reuse a lot of footage of Martians and soldiers running around in the caves.

It gets a little dull after a while, but those sets do look good, and the little Martian is awesome.