• The Flying Saucer-1950: SciFi Movie Review

    [rating:.4/5]

    The Flying Saucer. Sounds pretty exciting doesn’t it? This movie is not. I couldn’t even finish watching it; it was so boring. I got about halfway through and gave up. I know that sounds as if I just don’t care, and that’s probably about fifty percent correct, but it was too painful to watch. I’ll detail as much as I can remember though, which isn’t much because I lost interest within the first ten minutes of the film.

    The movie begins with about thirty seconds of exciting footage of a very crappy flying saucer being seen by dozens of people, and it makes extremely annoying sounds. If that happened here in my small town we’d probably just shoot it down because it would bug the crap out of us. The rest of the movie that I made it through was entirely devoid of flying saucers, despite the very indicative title of “The Flying Saucer.”

    Our puffy haired hero is sent off to Alaska by the CIA to investigate sightings of a flying saucer, and watch out for dreaded evil Soviet spies. Apparently Alaska is rife with Russian spies, because, well you know, they can see Alaska from their house. Fluffy head guy is accompanied by his beautiful accomplice who poses as his private nurse. It’s a lame facade, as he’s constantly kissing her and rolling around in the Alaskan grass. The next twenty minutes of the movie consists of them boating around Alaska and wandering to and fro, abandoned completely by any signs of flying saucers, or anything at all resembling science fiction. They have a freaky looking servant dude with ears the size of flying saucers though, and we start to suspect that he is indeed part of the Soviet scourge, although his accent changes in every scene.

    The first indication that something is up with Bigears is when he abandons the fake nurse to be possibly eaten by a bear, and then tries to stab her in the back but is scared off by the sound of a boat horn. At this point, I couldn’t stand anymore and was just hoping that he’d kill everyone and himself, and then I would see “THE END” in big white letters on the screen. No such luck.

    Next we follow Poofy hair guy on a whirlwind trip to Juneau where he visits every bar looking for old friends. This is depicted by still shots of neon lights with the names of bars and small talk in the background of him asking whether anyone knows where they are. I kept thinking he should be looking for a place to get a hair cut, but that never happened. By then my yawning attack had hit a maximum high and I just had to pull the plug on the whole thing. I’m sorry, I know that’s lame. I’m a huge lover of old SciFi and it pains me to admit it, but this was so bad that I couldn’t even enjoy making fun of it. If you ever watch the whole thing, you have more guts than I do.