KILLERS FROM SPACE (1954)

Before he landed his lucrative gig on TV's “Mission: Impossible,” Peter Graves spent years acting in low-budget, black-and-white sci-fi dreck. KILLERS FROM SPACE is a good example: cheesy script, all-white cast, bargain-basement acting, static camera work, gobs of stock footage, riotous-looking aliens, and Atomic Age paranoia that now seems quaint.

The plot: Dr. Douglas P. Martin (Graves) is in Soledad Flats, Nevada, monitoring A-bomb tests by air. When a test goes wrong, his survey plane crashes in the desert. The plane is wrecked and the pilot incinerated, but Martin is nowhere to be found. He turns up at the Army base, intact but for two things: a fresh surgical scar on his chest and a lack of memory regarding what happened to him.

It turns out, there are space aliens occupying a cavern beneath the Earth's upper crust. The sun on their planet is dying, which necessitates relocating all one billion of their race to a new planet: ours. To ensure minimal interference from us humans, the aliens have bred an army of gigantic reptiles and insects they will unleash on the Earth's surface. After they've explained all this to Martin, the aliens erase his memory and cut him loose (instead of doing the smart thing and killing him).

Item: Dr. Martin's survey plane is called Tar Baby 2. Did that racist phrase mean something different in the '50s?

Item: the wall map in Dr. Martin's office has the Santa Fe Railroad logo in its bottom left corner. Is it the same map that Ed Wood used in Plan 9 From Outer Space?

Item: Dr. Martin's memory returns only after he is involved in a car accident. The film never explains why.

Item: the aliens have big, bulging eyes and Groucho Marx-like eyebrows. And their suits reminded me of The Phantom.

Item: Dr. Martin was killed in the plane crash and is only alive now because the aliens operated on his heart (hence the scar). It's never explained how his body stayed intact in a crash that reduced his pilot to ashes.

Item: when the alien scientist hands Dr. Martin a set of calculations (on what looks like a sheet of tinfoil), they are written in Earth numbers.

To his credit, Peter Graves remained stoic throughout this turgid 71-minute exercise. Still, it's amazing he ever had a respectable acting career when he starred in so much crap.