Somehow I made it through this piece of shit. I'm not sure how, and at no point did my skull erupt with high pressure streams of blood. Have you ever cleaned a cast iron skillet and then put it back on a stove burner to dry, and then waited for all of the little drops of water to sizzle away before shutting off the burner? If it were to take seventy-three minutes for those little water drops to evaporate, and if your upstairs neighbor were to simultaneously disassemble his water heater with a Dremel tool, then for all practical purposes, you'd have just watched Phantom From Space.
On the other hand, if you're a fan of many repetitive minutes of uninteresting characters sitting around offices and making dry observations that run the gamut from nonsensical to irrelevant, then perhaps your reaction will be different. For me, there isn't anything to latch on to here. By the time it reaches what's supposed to be its payoff, I've already been bludgeoned into numbness.
That's not to say I didn't learn a few things. For example:
- UFOs traveling down the Pacific coast appear as perfect sine waves on oscilloscopes.
- There is a scientific distinction between a "genuine disturbance" and "interference," although it's not clear what that distinction might be. Perhaps it's like the difference between "static" and "Neil Diamond" on a car radio.
- When space aliens attack people on a picnic, it is essential that the survivors are interviewed to get a composite sketch of a guy in a scuba diving helmet with tubes sticking out of it. This can be used by the authorities to distinguish the assailant from other people who happen to be wearing scuba helmets with tubes sticking out of them.
- When an object is highly radioactive, it is perfectly safe to pick it up, so long as you use gloves or two sticks. It helps if you stand near it and smoke a pipe.
- When invisible aliens kidnap women scientists, they will always return her to the laboratory she was taken from. The reason for this ploy is to give earth men the opportunity to walk around shouting "Barbara" for five minutes.
- Invisible aliens will attempt to communicate by tapping scissors on desktops. If you use an ultraviolet light, you can see their hand holding the scissors. However, dogs can see them without an ultraviolet light.
- Humans are carbon based. Aliens are invisible, so therefore they are made from silicon.
- When aliens have opposable thumbs, we can conclude that they must be much smarter than humans. Using this inferential technique, we also know that aliens with nipples must excrete Brillo pads and prefer Budweiser to more expensive brands. Perhaps this film inspired the Intelligent Design movement.
- A spaceship which no one has seen yet must be magnetically propelled as opposed to atomically propelled.
- When invisible aliens die, they become visible despite the fact that they're made from silicon. After about thirty seconds, they will emit steam and then evaporate. There appears to be ample time to soften up a package of hot dog buns.
There's also lots of time spent on radio trucks driving around. They say things like Come in mobile seven, over, and then mobile seven says things like We read you mobile one, over. I was hoping mobiles two through six would jump in to liven things up, but no such luck. Maybe they were at home organizing their stamp collections.
Finally, there's a score by William Lava, whose name you might recognize from the Warner Brothers cartoons that were made in the 60s after Carl Stalling left. In other words, the Warner Brothers cartoons that really, truly sucked. The music in Phantom From Space isn't as bad as that, and at least there's a theremin.
But that's really it. After the alien has steamed up and evaporated, there's an awkward pause. A cop lights a cigarette, and a scientist guy says: Well... it's morning. And you really can't argue with that.
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