Teenagers From Outer Space.

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https://www.amazon.com/Teenagers-Outer-Space-Dawn-Bender/dp/B00008AOV9

When I was six years old, Channel 4, WTAE, the ABC affiliate here in Pittsburgh played Teenagers From Outer Space as it’s Sunday afternoon movie. 

The next day in school, all my fellow second grade classmates could do was … talk about Teenagers From Outer Space.  Somebody asked me, “Did you see where the lady in the swimming pool got it with the ray gun?”

Yeah, I saw it.  Now the movie in question was second bill drive-in movie fodder for the Godzilla sequel, called Gigantus The Fire Monster here in the US, don’t ask me why.  But talking to my friend in school that day, I realized I wasn’t the only one who saw Teenagers From Outer Space and got totally freaked.  It was the moment I first grasped the power of cinema.  Move over Ingmar Bergman.  Make room for Tom Graeff.

Here’s the set-up.  A flying corkscrew lands on Earth, (a clever variation of the flying saucer theme), and the mission of the crew is to determine if an animal they raise for food, the gargon, can survive in Earth’s atmosphere.  If the gargons can live and grow then Earth will be used as grazing pasture and to hell with what the Earthlings think.

Lovers of sci-fi and horror films are a particular breed of film fanatic.  We love it when somebody enters a spaceship and we hear spaceship noises.

We love it when the screen remains black but we hear a hum, which to our ears is electronic and hence new and futuristic.  Think Outer Limits.

So I want to show you something Tom Graeff does in his beginning that I find exceedingly clever.  When the space ship opens up, the first thing we see is this white, smooth, impersonal orb rising.  And the dog starts going crazy.  When I was six years old and saw that for the first time, it scared the bejesus out of me.

Then the spaceman shoot the dog and turns it into a pile of bones.  I'm freaked again.  What Graeff had to work with looks like some Air Force helmet and mask used by high altitude pilots.  And if that was the first thing we saw, everybody in the audience would go phhhh ... 

But Graeff withholds our first look at the helmet with the weird, and then the shocking.  Then he weirds us out again with a second shot of the helmet.  He creates an alien image where in fact he had nothing in the wardrobe that even came close.  That takes some imagination.

Robin Bales over at his review YouTube channel Dark Corners does a piece on Teenagers From Outer Space and he gasses all over it.  It’s a funny review, and I understand where he’s coming from.  I could spend my entire time here pointing out the howlers. 

The wire attached to the top of the skeleton’s head?  Oh that’s a good one.  Or how about … what does that say?  Multichannel Mixer MCM – 2?  Here we have incontrovertible, photographic evidence that the sound system for The Grateful Dead came from another planet.

Yeah, it’s easy to whack away at a movie like this, when the budget is so small that by the end it’s like listening to the radio.

One thing, in Mr. Bales’s criticism of the movie however, was how the characters were always showing up at places late and missing each other, and Mr. Bales found this to be some kind of a flaw.  Ladies and Gentlemen of the jury, I submit … it’s the best thing about this movie.  Those scenes of near misses create a great a deal of dramatic tension and suspense.  It’s what makes Teenagers From Outer Space the fast eighty six minutes it is.  Thor the psycho killer?  He was here a second ago.  You just missed him.

A friend of mine used a word in describing another movie, but I think it’s appropriate: propelled.

Thor passed out in the open doorway makes the nurse hurry to him.

Everybody is in a hurry.  A lot happens.  By 6:07 into the movie we have a rebellion on our hands.  Then an escape.  By 11:06 we’ve seen major reversals of fortune as the arcs of the characters fluctuate wildly.

It becomes a pursuit even though our hero Derek isn’t aware of it at first.  The name of the game is … information.  Information known or not known, information withheld.  The audience learns Derek is really the son of the leader of The Space Aliens even before Derek does.  Then there’s Betty about to tell Joe the disintegrator ray doesn’t work.  Derek stops her by saying, ‘Trust me.’

Derek and Betty.  They’re soul mates from other worlds.  Here Graeff lays the romanticism on really thick.  And Joe.  Derek stole your girl, you poor schmuck.  Which is doubly funny since Graeff and Robert Kal-ten-thaler, David Love in the movie, where a gay couple.  That almost makes Graeff and Kal-ten-thaler LGTB pioneers – they were putting their relationship out there for the world to see.

A little cos play, buddy?  In a way the movie is patterned after some Warner Brothers crime drama from the late forties.  I mean how many times have we heard the wounded bad guy with a gun say take me to a doctor.

So in Tom Graeff’s well put together, wildly melodramatic sci-fi thriller, with a world building backstory to boot … we see

Gunfire with scratch-on-film bullets.

A nurse getting pistol whipped … with a ray gun.

And the local NRA chapter getting attacked by a giant lobster

Teenagers From Outer Space the movie has two big things going for it: it’s a triumph of guerilla filmmaking on a 14,000 dollar budget.  Graeff even conned some little old lady to use her house for scenes by telling her he was a UCLA film student.  He wasn’t.

But more importantly, this movie is a masterpiece of editing.  Not a single cut runs too long.  All the scenes snap together like Leggo pieces making Tom Graeff the auteur you’ve never heard of.  It’s the only feature film he ever completed picked up by studio.  Maybe the real tale is he put all his insides up on the silver screen, and that’s a dicey proposition for a guy who later becomes mentally unstable.  But he did have the touch of a talented film maker.  And there are some movies out there from name directors, with big stars and big budgets, that haven’t been viewed nearly as many times over the years as Teenagers From Outer Space.  It’s one of those rare B-movies that has that … something special about it: it survives.

Now if you’ll please excuse me, I’m having lobster for dinner.