As Good As It Gets

Although it has its amusing moments, in eneral the plot does not convince.

It's a good bad... and worth a popcorn matinée. While it's easy to lament what could have been...

It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

A planet is orbiting dangerously close to planet Earth and a mysterious spaceship has landed on the Scottish Moors...Friend or Foe?Breaking it down you find that The Man from Planet X is a standard sci-fi movie that would often be bettered the longer the 1950s boom of sci-fi films continued. However, this is in no way a bad thing given the guile and craft that went into making it a picture of worth.Edgar G. Ulmer and his crew are armed with a $100 budget (exageration of course, but you understand I'm sure) and almost make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. Working with old sets that were used on Joan of Arc (1948), the pic is a lesson in low budget film making of note. Ulmer brings a plethora of fog and mists to cloak the sets, while he shoots his cast in low lights and shadows to ensure his sci-fi tale never has a chance to be found out as a cheapie.As it happens the story is decent enough. Alien visitor from a dying planet needs something, but what? He can't communicate vocally and of course the humans meeting the visitor have different agendas. There's some suspense, a little bit of nutty science, and even some sexual flirtations. All in all a good solid sci-fi picture, one that showcases the unheralded skills of its director. And not even a papier-mâché headed alien can under value that fact. 7/10

The Man From Planet X (1951) ** (out of 4) Early invasion film from director Edgar G. Ulmer is somewhat better than it probably should be but it's certainly no classic. A Scottish community is shaken when a UFO lands and a weird looking alien is found. It seems the alien comes in peace but no one is certain why he's there and things take a turn when one scientist goes to abuse him for knowledge. THE MAN FROM PLANET X suffers from a very low-budget that doesn't allow it to do much but as is usually the case, the director manages to add a little more style thanks to some creativity. I think the best thing about the film is the actual look of the picture. The setting is a very small town and I thought Ulmer managed to build up a nice atmosphere. The fog machine he bought was obviously extremely good as there's all sorts of thick fog running throughout the film. I thought this helped give it a pretty good look but of course it also covers up some of the limitations of the budget. The actual alien is hotly debated among sci-fi fans but I personally liked it. Yes, it looks cheap but at the same time the motion-less face was actually quite creepy and there's no question that it's original looking. I also enjoyed the cast with Robert Clarke doing a nice job in the lead. He was in several of these low budget movies and I've always enjoyed him as an actor. Margaret Field, Raymond Bond and William Schallert are good as well. The biggest problem is that there's really not too much that happens. The majority of the film is taken up with dialogue with people talking about everything that's happening instead of the viewer actually seeing very much of it. This was often the case with films like this and thankfully this here only runs 70-minutes. THE MAN FROM PLANET X isn't a classic by any stretch of the imagination but fans of the genre should get a few kicks out of it.

The Man from Planet X (1951)Edgar G. Ulmer is one of those B-movie directors who has a bit of a fan club based on a couple of key films--in this case "The Black Cat" and "Detour." Both are great--unqualified, compromised, odd, vaguely daring, and vaguely cheap.I wish I could say the same for this one. This just looks like a step, or half a step, above "Plan 9" and that ilk. The acting ebbs and flows, the props are embarrassingly cheesy, and the plot is plain old simplistic and dumb. Of course, that's giving it no credit for pushing some boundaries the way Jules Verne did in fiction, because "Planet X" is an early space film. It's set on earth, but it deals with that big one--what if an alien lands. In fact, it isn't that far off from Ed Wood's "Plan 9 from Outer Space," which came out 7 years later. So Ulmer is cutting edge! But wait, what about "The Day the Earth Stood Still," which for all its cheapness is totally fabulous, and came out in that same year, indeed six months earlier, in the summer of 1951? Yes, something was in the air.There's no sense dissecting this film, but just be warned it's not a high quality flick, and as a cult flick it lacks some of the idiosyncrasies and brazen edges of a film like "Detour," which is a paradigm of great and awful B-movie ingenuity.

If this film had come out in the mid-50's, it could be dismissed as another low-budget, silly outer space invasion movie. However this movie appears to have been the first of such space invasion movies. It opened in March of 1951. Later that year came the openings of "The Thing from Another Planet" and "The Day the Earth Stood Still." Two other 1951 films, "When Worlds Collide" and "Superman and the Mole Men" have some space invader elements, but don't quite qualify for the genre.The fact that it was shot in six days on a budget of $43,000 makes it more amazing. Compare that to "The Thing From Another World" ($1.6 million) or the "The Day The Earth Stood Still" ($1.2 million). While none of the technical aspects come near those two movies, the movie does have an interesting style and look that foreshadows the 1953 classic "Invaders From Mars" and even has elements from "Invasino of the Body Snatchers".The movie is a little ambiguous about whether we are dealing with unfriendly (a la "The Thing")or friendly aliens (a la "The Day"). It seems a bit schizophrenic here with an alien that can be scary in one scene and downright adorable in another. Not having any prior such movies to really go by, the writers seem unsure in which direction to go.Robert Clark is fine in the lead as a newspaper reporter. Margaret Field (Sally Field's mother) is good as the female love interest. William Schallert (Uncle Martin or Papo on "The Patty Duke Show) stands out as a surprisingly creepy scientific assistant. What really carries the film is Edgar Ulmer's energetic direction. Ulmer ("Black Cat" "Dishonored Lady" and "Detour")always keeps the viewer on their toes, inserting off-beat and unexpected material in nearly every scene. It is a must for film history buffs and others will find it engagingly silly.