By JOHN BILLINGER
In the 1950s, drama films about teenagers were becoming popular, with films such as Rebel Without a Cause, The Wild One and Blackboard Jungle. Also in the 1950s, science-fiction films were quite popular. You had your giant monster features like The Giant Claw (which I reviewed last October) or Godzilla, or regular human-sized monsters like Creature from the Black Lagoon – and, of course, alien invader movies like War of the Worlds and The Day the Earth Stood Still. With this climate, we got a few films that combined the separate genres of teen films and sci-fi. These films include cult classics such as I Was a Teenage Werewolf, I Was a Teenage Frankenstein (real creative titles), and today’s weird example, 1959’s Teenagers from Outer Space – which was a $20,000 independent film written/produced/filmed/edited/directed by Tom Graeff (he also plays a reporter in the movie).
The plot for the film is as follows:
A group of aliens (who, of course, look like humans) land on earth. The reason they’ve come to earth is they’re looking for a suitable environment to raise their pet monsters, the Gargons, which are a lobster-looking monster. The lead alien character Derek (played by David Love) goes on a temper tantrum and defects from the group. The rest of the aliens at first want to leave him, but then they find out he’s the son of their leader, so they kind of have to find him. Meanwhile, Derek meets and falls in love with a human girl named Betty (played by Dawn Bender). Add in aliens using a ray gun that turns people into bones and a giant lobster monster on the loose, and you got yourself something resembling a plot.
The story is wordy. The characters talk a lot. In the first five minutes, the alien characters talk, talk and talk, like they’re in some kind of Arthur Miller play. The whole time watching I kept thinking, “When’s the lobster going to grow to full size and start killing people?” And these aliens try to sound philosophical, but it just sounds so awful. Here’s an example (for context, one of the aliens whose name is Thor, just killed a dog).
Derek: I have found evidence of intelligent beings on this planet.
Thor: Of what concern are foreign beings?
Derek: Of none to you, Thor! Just as you were so unconcerned when you destroyed this small creature. So bravely.
Thor: It was no more than an insect.
Derek: But it had life. And that life you had to take to satisfy your endless hunger for killing!
Maybe dialogue would’ve been fine if the actors could act, but they can’t. Everyone (not just the aliens) gives a wooden, dead performance. I don’t know what direction Graeff was giving his actors, but it wasn’t good. The only person I believe gives a passable performance is Dawn Bender, who does a commendable job of working with the script. She plays a valley girl-type character, and in a film where most of the characters give as much personality as a muddy puddle, she’s a breath of fresh air.
The film’s low budget also took a toll on the effects, and it quite possibly spawned the lamest 1950’s monster, the Gargons. They start out as regular-sized lobsters, then grow bigger. And that’s it. Most of the time you see them, it appears they’ve been superimposed onto the background, and in others, it looks like they held a lobster over a spotlight. Then there’s the alien’s death ray gun. Here’s how it works. They point it at someone, then a shot facing the alien head-on as they blast the gun, and then cut to the person they were pointing at being turned into bone (along with a music cue of dun, dun, dunnnn). Thing is, if you look closely at the skeleton, you’d notice the skeleton has screws at the joints, and a hook on its head, meaning they took it from a classroom or something.
Reading back on everything I had written, a part of me thinks maybe I’m being too hard on it. Making a movie, especially a low-budget film is not easy, and director Tom Graeff was indeed a one-man band. He was born in 1929, attended UCLA in his teens, and slowly throughout the 1950s, he was rising through Hollywood. After working on a 1956 Roger Corman film called Not of This Earth, he decided to make his own science-fiction film starring his boyfriend Charles Kaltenthaler (billed under David Love). Graeff didn’t have a lot of money to shoot this film, so he had some of the cast provide some of the budget and used some shady dealings to cut costs. For example, he convinced an elderly woman he was currently a UCLA student (he had long graduated at this point), and the woman allowed him to film in her house for free – even allowing them to use the electricity. Eventually, the film was finished and was surprisingly purchased and distributed by a major studio, Warner Bros. They bought it, not because they thought it was good, but because they needed a second film to bill for a double feature release of Gigantis The Fire Monster (an Americanized dub of Godzilla Raids Again).
Sadly, Graeff did not profit from its release and was sued by some of his investors for not giving them the profits they were supposed to receive. He later suffered a mental breakdown and went public by claiming he was Jesus Christ the Second. He even tried changing his name to that (which didn’t work). He disappeared into obscurity for a few years, re-emerging in 1964 to work as an editor, and in 1968, he attempted to sell a script for $500,000. He claimed high-profile directors like Robert Wise and Carl Reiner were interested, but whether that was actually true is unknown.
But if there was any actual interest, it dissipated when the Los Angeles Times publicly outed him as the man who did the Jesus Christ Two stunt. Two years later, he committed suicide at age 41. Eventually, Teenagers from Outer Space wound up playing on television, getting a cult following, and received increased exposure after being shown on the show Mystery Science Theater 3000.
Overall, I have mixed feelings regarding this film. On one hand, I don’t think it’s good (for all the reasons I stated above before I started talking about the director). But on the other hand, it’s not that bad. They didn’t have a big budget, so what are you expecting? Graeff clearly did the best he could under the circumstances, and the fact he delivered a film that has a coherent story and is fun in a campy sort of way at times, says a lot. There are far worse examples of films from this time period that had a similar budget (see The Beast of Yucca Flats or Manos: The Hands of Fate). I think maybe if Graeff had a more-experienced writer compose the script and more experience behind the camera, perhaps he would be remembered more fondly than he is today. I don’t have too much more to say about this film, except that for what it is, I think Tom Graeff delivered a terrible but fun film (even if it was unintentional).