Radar Men from the Moon: Chapters Nine to Twelve (Fred C. Brannon, 1952)

Chapter Nine: Battle in the Stratosphere

...but the airborne Ted drops a grenade upon the aggressor vehicle, crippling it, before returning in time to help re-attach the stricken Cody's errant air line.  Repairing the damage done to the Juggernaut, Cody and Ted make it back to the rocket ship with their looted lunarium and prepare for blast-off with the captured moon man (whose spacesuit the Commando is still wearing) still aboard: "We're taking you with us.  And you better get back to your quarters until we get started.  Get goin'!" barks our hero when the kidnappee inquires as to whether he may return home now that the raid is over.

(And hold on a minute: this primitive rocket really must have TARDIS-like transcendental inner dimensions if it contains quarters for four crew members and a captured alien)

Understandable aggrieved, the hostage turns hostile - coming back through the airlock swinging with an iron bar and clouting all and sundry until the two-fisted Commando slugs him and then plugs him, shooting him through the heart.  As he and Ted bundle the corpse out, Joan asks

"What'll they do with him, Hank?"

"It's just like a burial at sea, Joan.  Only his body will float around in space forever."

Saturday matinee kids' fun!

As they head back to Earth, Retik contacts Krog and orders that the ship must not be allowed to land with its load of lunarium that could be turned against them.  With both his life and the survival of his species at stake, Krog computes the incoming course of the rocket and sends Graber and Daly in the laser truck to intercept and destroy.  Winging and crippling the incoming ship, the deadly duo get into a gunfight with Cody, who has soared downwards via jetpack to stop them.  As the wily Commando uses the shelter of a boulder to hide from both their revolvers and ray cannon, Daly takes aim at the cliff face behind him and unleashes a blast that brings the mountain tumbling down atop him...

Chapter Ten: Mass Execution

...but he moves like lightning, quickly cleaving to the cliff and hugging the rock face for dear life as tons of stock footage earth and rock fall behind him.  His distraction ploy has luckily worked, as Graber and Daly find to their chagrin that in the mean time the damaged ship has managed to make a landing on the other side of the mountain.  As they return to the Krog-cave with the bad news that the lunarium is now in the hands of the government, Krog radios his superiors and a raging Retik declares that he is descending to Earth to personally take charge.  Must all evil leaders be surrounded my incompetents?!?

Meanwhile at Cody Laboratories, Cody and Joan are also reporting to their higher-ups in the shape of Agent Henderson who informs them that TOP MEN are working on lunarium-powered atomic ray guns for Uncle Sam.  As Henderson asks for a briefing on the story so far, the Commando delivers him a reminiscipackage of footage from previous episodes.  Yes, folks, this is a clip show recapping chapters one to nine: necessary for people who'd missed out I guess, but a tad interminable for the dedicated watcher.  As 'The One With All The "Previously On..."' unfolds, Cody suddenly remembers that he managed to retrieve one of the Selenites' ray pistols.  As he shows it to Henderson. Daly and Graber lurk outside and decide to use one of Cody's own tricks against him by attaching a canister of gas to the lab building's ventilation system with something much deadlier and less funny than nitrous oxide.  As a stifled Joan collapses to the floor and Henderson struggles with a door secured from the outside before plummeting groundwards himself, Cody tries to reach for the telephone before slumping unconscious...

Chapter Eleven: Planned Pursuit

...but not before triggering the alarm system, which brings a policeman (or maybe a campus security guard - surely no police response time is this fast!) racing to the scene, unlocking the door and dragging Cody, Joan and Henderson to safety.  Leaving the still unconscious Henderson to the tender ministrations of the rent-a-cop, Cody and Joan pursue the fleeing thugs.  Commandeering the officer's black sedan, they give chase through the streets of the city exchanging gunfire and even lobbing canisters of tear gas (apparently any law enforcement vehicle contains an array of such devices, possibly just adjacent to the Bat-shark repellent spray) before both cars are caught by the fuzz and all parties arrested.

Returning to the lab after managing to talk his way out of serious charges ("As soon as I convinced them who I was, everything was alright" - because TWOC-ing a cop car and wreaking carnage in a public place is A-OK if you're a dude with a jetpack), Cody informs his trusty pals that his new cop buddies have agreed to tail Graber and Daly in an effort to trace the secret base.  After being wirelessed with the route of their car, the rocket man makes another super soaraway spurt into the sky to locate their destination.  Finding the cave, Cody stealthily listens in on Krog and his underlings and hears that our glorious leader Retik (I, for one, welcome our lunar overlords) has already made planetfall - "He came down in his personal rocket ship.  He landed it in the cave on the east side of the old Mount Henry mine" supplies Krog helpfully.  Learning that Retik has brought four more atomic cannons with him, Cody decides not to wait and steps out of the shadows gun in hand to apprehend these villains.  This of course sets off yet another frantic flurry of fisticuffs during which he grapples with Graber only to receive a punch to the helmet (OUCH!).  A clout from Cody sends Krog careering backwards into a bank of equipment which explodes in a flurry of electrical arcs and sparks that would make Kenneth Strickfaden proud and he falls down dead,  Seeing this, an enraged Graber picks up a chair and uses it lion tamer style to pin Cody and force him back towards the same machinery - which again erupts in a shower of sparks...

Chapter Twelve: Death of the Moon Man

...and a crash and flash in the pan is ours as the rocketeer's trusty suit saves him ("There was enough metal in my flying suit to partially ground the current so I was only knocked out, but the other man was killed instantly" our scientifically illiterate inventor informs us).  Back at the lab, he relays the gathered data to Henderson and together they hatch a plan to capture the original ray cannon from the late Krog's now abandoned base and train it on Retik's location in the Mount Henry mine before he can gather enough men and vehicles to unleash his deadly arsenal of four van men of the apocalypse.

After a phone call from Al at the cafe in which the restaurateur relays that a recruitment drive of hell drivers is occurring in his establishment, Cody and Ted decide to rush over and apprehend them only to result in yet another bar tea room brawl that results in a lot of broken furniture (most of it over our heroes' heads) and the goons getting away.  What must Al's insurance claims look like?  Pursuing them along a winding road, Cody leans out of the car window to unleash a flurry of gunfire which wounds the driving Daly and sends the mookmobile into a swan dive over the edge of a cliff to erupt into a fireball as it crashes nose-first into the ground.

"No chance of getting them out of that!" comments Ted as he looks over the edge at the blazing carnage below.

"No.  Let's go after Retik!" says our pragmatic lead.

Convening with Henderson's men outside the mine, Ted 'n' Cody decide to take a closer look and head into the mountain clad in suits and trilbys and packing heat - for all the world more G-men than spacemen - and quickly get into a gunfight with Retik and his remaining lunar henchmen.  As the Selenite sub-boss is swiftly dispatched, Retik makes for his rocket in an attempt to break the surly bonds of Earth and touch the face of Zod - but the agents train the lunarium-powered cannon on his fleeing ship and blow it to pieces.  Thus is the rather perfunctory end to this twelve-chapter space saga.  Bit disappointing, really.  Lot of that about, lately.

Radar Men from the Moon not only neatly repurposed footage from King of the Rocket Men, but also introduced the character of Commando Cody who would return in the following year's Commando Cody: Sky Marshal of the Universe played by Judd Holdren (with Aline Towne returning as Joan Gilbert).  It would be re-edited and repackaged in 1966 as a 100-minute television movie under the not as punchy title of Retik the Moon Menace.  Mostly good old-fashioned pulpy fun, its behelmed and bejetpacked lead would cut an inspirational silhouette that spawned other armoured flying heroes and anti-heroes.

It is the way.

Radar Men from the Moon: Chapters Six to Eight (Fred C. Brannon, 1952)

Chapter Six: Hills of Death

...and so we get another patented duck, tuck and roll out of a speeding vehicle just seconds before it passes over a precipice.  As Ted and Cody try to think up a good excuse to give the owners of their regular car rental firm (probably - seriously, these guys go through some cars), Graber and Daly return to Krog's Batcave-style hideout proudly brandishing the stolen payroll.  The brief joy at a job mostly bungle-free and relatively competently done is sadly interrupted immediately by an incoming message from Retik who's just got to a message to Krog.  Oh Lord.

Opening the conversation with the everyday question of "Do you have an atomic bomb powerful enough to start a volcanic eruption in the Mount Alta crater?", the lunar lunatic sets out his plan to create tectonic havoc setting off a chain reaction of earthquakes and tsunami to disrupt terrestrial life long enough for the invasion campaign to begin.  And so the henchmen charter a small plane with a 'nuclear device' of an unfeasibly small and inoffensive looking size.  They orchestrate these manoeuvres in the light, dropping their Little Boy with its kiss that's never ever gonna fade away right into the mountain.  Oh, and presumably this is the Mount Alta in Washington state rather than the one in New Zealand: their small craft doesn't look like it's carrying enough fuel for a cross Pacific hop.

And so the destruction, dogs and cats living together and mass hysteria begin, in a hail of stock footage.  Discovering by the caprice of chance that the second airport that he checked hired a plane to two suspicious dudes, Cody takes Ted with him to check out the nearby Al's Cafe, wherein the proprietor of the property (Ted Thorpe, but you can call him Al even if you're not his bodyguard) confirms their suspicions.  However, our heroes' hopes for a hot beef sandwich are foiled even worse than that time I felt ill in York (don't ask) when the goons enter, knock Cody out in yet another punch-up, and whisk Ted away as hostage.  Having none of this, Ted decides to up his concussion insurance by making his second leap out of a moving vehicle that morning while Cody straps into his rocket pack and sets off in flying pursuit. Swooping in on the fleeing felons, he chases them into the foothills (....OF DEATH!) of Mount Clark whereupon he's waylaid by Graber, bricked in the head and tossed over the edge...

Chapter Seven: Camouflaged Destruction

...where he plummets earthward very slowly with an upward-scrolling back projection of a mountain behind him before engaging his rockets, in a sequence that would not - nay, could not - be bettered until the unbridled genius of Kirk and Spock's jet-powered Yosemite escapades in the opening sequences of Shatner's Star Trek V: the Final Frontier.

Returning to Al's Cafe, he questions both Al and a helpful mechanic (who, with his leather jacket 'n' fedora combo, is clearly rocking some Indiana Jones cosplay) who tells him of the two wise guys asking about some special work on a truck the day before - whereupon he had directed them to Benson's garage on the other side of town.  This is no regular lorry, though, but Krog and Graber's A-Team style modified van which contains the atomic death ray behind a flimsy facade of radio parts.  Popping back to the lab for a quick chat with Joan, the Commando informs her of his plan to track the truck and then deploy Ted who is standing by at the airfield with a plane ready to bomb it.

To bomb the truck.  To drop bombs upon the vehicle carry the nuclear laser machine.  This man is, apparently, a scientist.  To be fair to hi, though, he's been punched in the head a lot and fallen out of several fast-moving vehicles this week.  His brain's clearly going.

Cody mounts the air once again, keeping in contact with Ted's bomb plane via radio until he spots the laser lorry - upon which he makes an aerial hookup with the plane, taking on bombing duties (which entail manually dropping very small grenades out of the window) while Ted continues at the controls.  The villains swing their truck around and take aim with the atomic laser, as Ted sets the plane on a dive-bomb course straight at the target and the ray fires, destroying the plane...

Chapter Eight: The Enemy Planet

 ...and with cry of "Better bail out!" Cody pulls on his helmet and soars from the plummeting plane while Ted parachutes safely to the ground (using the same footage of a parachutist gently landing as we saw for Joan in an earlier instalment) just before the aircraft's destruction.

Back at Cody Laboratories, the Commando and agent Henderson decide that offence may be the best defence, and that rather than sitting around like tin ducks in a shooting gallery their best bet is to mount another expedition moonwards to attempt to steal a supply of lunarium so that they can manufacture their own atomic ray weapons to battle those of the radar men.  Calling on his trusty crew of Ted, Joan and pilot Hank, Cody preps his rocket for a return-a to Luna.  Soaring once again through the brightly-lit depths of interplanetary space, they land in a canyon.  Cody takes another recon flight, and spots a spacesuit-clad guard standing sentinel over the valley, and swoops in to tussle with him.  Quickly subduing the alien during their brief fight by tightly grabbing his air line and suffocating him, Cody disarms him of his laser pistol (say: what happened to the ray gun that he acquired from the last moon man standing point that he fought with on the previous trip?  I seriously thought for a minute that this was a continuity error, and this fight footage had been spliced in to the earlier episode by mistake, until it ended differently without the villain being pitched over the cliff....).

Having taken the lunarian prisoner, Cody dons his moon spacesuit while Ted wears the Commando's rocket man outfit and they both make for the moon city.  Gaining access to the lunarium store through being mistaken for the guard he's posing as, Cody lugs a crate of the stuff out of the airlock and is met by Ted, but declares that the "stuff's so heavy it'll take us a week to lug back to the ship!" - proving that we can add knowledge of how gravity works on the lunar surface to the list of things that have fallen out of his head of late.  Somebody strip this man of his Scientist's Club member card.

Stealing one of those cool Juggernaut moon tanks, the pair race (relatively quickly, this being the moon and all) back toward the ship with the trunk of lunar junk in tow.  Pursued by another tank along a quite nicely-maintained road for the moon, their getaway vehicle is crippled by a laser blast.  As Ted takes to the air with the jet pack, another blast sends Cody reeling to the floor, struggling for air as a slice of poetic justice sees his suit's oxygen line ripped...

To be concluded...

Radar Men from the Moon: Chapters Two to Five (Fred C. Brannon, 1952)

Chapter Two: Molten Terror

...in which we discover that the resolution to last week's astounding "how did he get out of THAT?!?" cliffhanger is: Commando Cody dove and did a stomach-skid (in brand new footage, natch) across the floor of the room so that he wound up sheltered behind a completely different piece of machinery to the one that Retik disintegrated with him patented lunarium disintegrator pistol (which, unlike Marvin the Martian's, doesn't actually disintegrate itself).  Dodging through the hatch, out intrepid hero finds himself safe on the lunar surface (which, with it's cloudy starless skies and look of the Californian desert, probably is pretty safe compared to how it looked when Messrs Armstrong, Aldrin et al experienced it).

Soaring through the sky (via the patented dummy-on-a-line technique debuted in Adventures of Captain Marvel that still looks pretty great), Cody gets back to the ship and explains to the rest of the team what's happened.  Figuring that the lunar stronghold is probably pretty impervious to the "light machine gun and some hand grenades" that they've brought along - and which sound totally safe and sensible to have in a pressurised environment on the moon, just in case of accidents - the gang figure that their best bet is to try to get hold of the moon mens' own atomic cannon ("If I could get hold of that, it would be easy to blast open their pressurised buildings and really put them out of action!" opines Cody).  But how to put the lunar strangers out of action for long enough to get hold of the ray, we may ask?

"That may not be too tough.  We brought some nitrous oxide with us, didn't we?"

Planning a laughing gas party aboard the shuttle, eh Commando?  Sadly, before they have the chance to get that party started and maybe wind up with the male members - cough! - of the crew triple-teaming Joan (an airlock in an airlock?  How neat), they decide that the funny stuff is better utilised by connecting the gas tank to the city's air intake.  Absurdly, this seems to work, and Cody manages to get hold of the cannon and reach the outdoors long enough to be pursued across the Mare Tranquilitatis (well, it is now, half the inhabitants are knocked out) by a neat-looking laser tank.  Sheltering from the encroaching death ray blasts in a nearby cavern in a cliff, Cody and his sidekick Ted find themselves fleeing into a dead end pursued by molten rock as the tank focuses its beam upon the cliff and begins to melt it...

Chapter Three: Bridge of Death

...and so our daring pair dart to safety down a convenient tunnel that we just didn't see at the end of the last one due to the camera angle.  Sadly, the atomic ray gun that was the object of this entire quest has been lost in the flow (which can happen to me, sometimes, listening to good music).  Heading back to the rocket, they begin readying for take-off and return to Earth, unaware that cold alien eyes are watching - for a lunarian guard is observing them, and reports the location of the craft back to his superiors via a very neat belt-mounted wind-up radio (proof, if proof be needed, that Trevor Baylis was very likely an alien or had access to alien technology: get Georgio Tsoukalos on this now!).

Thankfully, Cody is in the middle of a quick aerial reconnaissance and sweeps to conquer, tangling with the goon and knocking him over the edge of a precipice before stuffing the scout's laser pistol into his belt as a substitute for the mislaid cannon.  Flying back to the ship, the crew become airborne (can one do so on an airless satellite?) just in time to avoid fire from the lunar tank (a repaint of the Juggernaut vehicle from Republic's earlier serial Undersea Kingdom).  Retik radios his Earth agent, the cadaverous Krog (Peter Brocco) and commands that Cody and his crew be destroyed, to which end henchmen are dispatched with a bomb to destroy the rocket upon landing.  Botching the job due to the landing site being guarded by police officers, the mooks are pursued by Cody in a car chase which culminates in them detonating their deadly device upon a rad bridge as the Commando closes in - sending his vehicle plummeting over the abyss...

Chapter Four: Flight to Destruction

...and with one bound, he was free!  Yes, it's the classic 'he jumped from the car just before it went over the edge' reveal.  It feels almost like seeing an old friend, for i'm certain King of the Rocket Men employed the self same manoeuvre.  Cody returns to the lab to consult with agent Henderson, wherein they assess the situation and discount the idea of mounting a full scale assault upon the moon as any space forces Earth deploys would doubtlessly be instantaneously annihilated by Retik's defences.  Deciding that the best bet is to trace the Selenite agents here at home.

Meanwhile, Krog and his main hireling Graber (The Lone Ranger himself, Clayton Moore) are also locked in debate as to how best to proceed.  Krog wants a new truck with which they can deploy their refurbished atomic cannon, yet balks at Graber's suggestion that he sell "some more of those jewels that you brought down from the moon".  Likewise, Graber is reticent to take up Krog's plan that he take up his occupation of bank robbery, what with him being out on parole and all (I guess the authorities take armed robbery a lot more seriously than conspiring with spacemen).  Reluctantly, he agrees to be the getaway driver but the bungled heist ends with the cops gunning down the robber as he tries to ride on the running board of the auto, and he ends up broken like his dreams on the boulevard, face down in the street with a gun in his hand and his Mama cries.

Plan B from outer space is to kidnap and ransom Commando Cody - whose life is estimated to be worth the princely sum of $100, 000 dollars.  Proving once again that Cody Laboratories - developers of top secret space age shit - really need to beef up their security, they gain solid gold easy access only to find that Cody isn't present.  After a bar room brawl style punch-up with Ted, they decide to make the best of the situation by taking Joan as a lure.  Whisking her away in a chartered plane from East Side airport, Graber finds his aircraft being pursued by the revenge-fueled rocketman.  After a brief exchange of aerial gunfire, he wrenches the steering wheel out and parachutes away, leaving Joan and the Commando (who has swooped into the plane only to be given the rather Captain Obvious explanation of "he wrecked the controls!" from Joan upon finding no navigation mechanism) in a dramatic death dive that ends with the plane crashing straight into the dead leaves and the dirty ground...

Chapter Five: Murder Car

...but we know they're not around, as Cody gets Joan strapped into the spare 'chute and out of the plane before Junior Birdman-ing the hell out of there himself.  Managing to both land safely after the plane has totalled into the rocks, Cody takes back to the skies to search for the errant Graber, who has managed to flag down a passing car and ask for a ride into town.  However, this vehicular Samaritan soon learns the Jim Halsey way that one should never pick up hitch hikers as Graber produces his piece (no, his gun - though I have heard some hitch hiking horror  stories in the past, it's usually the driver who wants his gearstick handled as a display of gratitude) and opens fire open the pursuing Cody, managing to wing and ground the flying ace.  The last we see of the driver, an innocent lost amidst all this madness, is Graber holding him and gunpoint and growling at him to "Keep drivin'".  So he probably did rape and kill him.  Or kill him then rape him.  Yeah, he looks the type.

A new ploy to secure funds is landed upon when fellow henchman Daly (Bob Stevenson) reminds Graber about "that payroll job Duke was trying to get you in on", and so a ransacking of the coffers of the Western Wholesale Supply Company is staged and predictably bungled - the thieves' car ploughing off road and into a tree, killing one stooge (presumably Duke) and rendering Graber the newest patient of the prison infirmary.  However, Daly has been tipped off by a inside informant about plans to transfer Graber under guard to a private sanitarium (and, as Dr Loomis certainly knows, transporting your murderous psychos between institutions is a risky business) and thus intercepts the ambulance, gunning down the guard and liberating his comrade in crime.  Hearing over the police band radio that the cops and Commando Cody are in swift pursuit, Graber flees leaving Daly to be decoy driver in the thief-driven ambulance (with silver sunshine smiles).  When he sees the car containing Cody and Ted up ahead, he sets the course dead set on destruction, bailing out onto the roadside to leave the vehicle as a battering ram that crashes into the oncoming auto sending both crashing over the brink...

To be continued...

The Strange World of Planet X ([a.k.a.: Cosmic Monsters] Gilbert Gunn, 1958)

"Since the world began, every inventive man has constantly pushed forward into the unknown.  One by one, the frontiers of science have fallen before him - the science of speed, travel, radio...  Now he stands on the threshold of a new age.  A terrifying age.  Man goes forward into the unknown, but how does the unknown react?  The unknown planet: Planet X!"

The 1950s were a good era for science fiction and fantasy to make the transition from the flickering small screen hearth of television to the cinema of the masses.  In 1955, Hammer Studios had adapted Nigel Kneale's 1953 BBC serial The Quatermass Experiment into the proudly X-rated Quatermass Xperiment and ushered in the age of Hammer Horror, and would likewise option Kneale's 1955 continuation Quatermass II (as the 1957 Quatermass 2) as well as his teleplay of the same year, The Creature (as The Abominable Snowman [also 1957]).  The realm of the phantastique was not the sole province of the BBC, however, and the ITV network soon got in on the act with the six-part 1956 serial The Trollenberg Terror by Peter Key and the same year's The Strange World of Planet X.  Penned by actress and writer Rene Ray - making it a rare early example of a female-authored slice of SF television - and directed, like The Trollenberg Terror, by Quentin Lawrence for the ATV stable - Planet X is sadly , like many TV series and serials of the 1950s, lost.  However, along with its stablemate, it would also be translated from small to big screen in 1958 via Ray's novelisation of her scripts the previous year - adapted by Paul Ryder (no, not the one from the Happy Mondays) and Josef Ambor.

Whereas The Trollenberg Terror would be helmed in its cinematic incarnation (also known in the US under the more lurid title of The Crawling Eye) by its original television director Lawrence for Robert Baker and Monty Berman's Tempean Films, The Strange World of Planet X (or the more prosaic Cosmic Monsters) was overseen by Scottish director Gilbert Gunn (miscredited on the US VHS release as 'Gilbert Dunn') for independent producer George Maynard - both films would be distributed by the Hyams brothers' Eros Films in the UK and Distributors Corporation of America in the States.

Somewhere deep in the heart of the monochrome 1950s English countryside, the driven Dr Laird (played by the fantastically-named Alec Mango) is performing experiments in magnetic fields*, much to the chagrin of the locals - rural types, farmers, tinkers and so on - as they keep blowing out the vacuum tubes of their television sets, and to the detriment of his lab assistant Sayers who is injured by the arcing and sparking of the malfunctioning machinery.  Much to the spluttering consternation of Laird and his chief assistant Gil Graham (Forrest Tucker, of both The Abominable Snowman and The Trollenberg Terror) Sayers' replacement arrives in the both female and French form of Michele Dupont (the authentically Gallic Gaby Andre, her dialogue dubbed by a British actress whilst retaining references to her nationality and a French accent).  As the trio demonstrate the scope of their experiments' abilities to Brigadier Cartwright (Wyndham Goldie, in his silver screen swansong), who is interested in the possibility of 'action from a distance' military applications, a sudden violent electrical storm above the building causes an enormous feedback loop in the equipment.  The morning papers carry the news of not only environmental disruptions both on land and at sea, but mass UFO sightings around the local area.

This is due to the arrival of a strange visitor from another planet (Martin Benson, the ill-fated gangster Solo from Goldfinger [Guy Hamilton, 1964] and Father Spiletto in The Omen [Richard Donner, 1976]) on a mission to stop humanity's destruction.  This Klaatu from Nabiru adopts the not-at-all inconspicuous pseudonym of 'Mr Smith', putting him on the radar of security man Jimmy Murray (Hugh Latimer) when he begins questioning Graham and Dupont about their top secret work.  Having to convince that he isn't a spy, but an alien agent of another kind, he delivers the news that the experiments could not only have disastrous results including affecting the Earth's axis but have already had a devastating effect upon the ionosphere - allowing in powerful cosmic rays that, rather than bestowing the powers of the Fantastic Four upon those with whom they come in contact, have turned a local forest-dwelling vagrant into a radioactively burned maniacal rapist and mutated the local bug life into insectoid monsters.  When the now clearly derangedly single-minded Dr Laird ascends into full mad scientist mode, shoots a superior in order to continue with his prohibited experimentation Smith is given permission to stop him and so calls in a flying saucer drone strike to decimate the lab.

Featuring great b-movie sequences of the local armed forces facing off against giant insects and the local teacher (Patricia Sinclair) being menaced in her schoolroom by menacing invertebrates, as well as a cast of familiar faces such as Dandy Nichols and Geoffrey Chater, this is a great slice of schlock with a message a la Robert Wise's seminal The Day the Earth Stood Still delivered in inimitable British quota quickie style.

*(My personal favourite Magnetic Fields experiments are 'Let's Pretend We're Bunny Rabbits' and 'Born On A Train')