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1954 American Film
Richard Denning, Virginia Grey, Kathleen Crowley, Richard Reeves, Robert Ruark, Steve Pendleton. Directed by Sherman Rose.

The film starts out with a woman awakening from a failed suicide attempt using sleeping pills. Upon leaving her apartment she finds that the city she live in is vacant. She wanders quite a ways through empty streets until she discovers her first gruesome evidence of a dead body, or two, hinting at some danger that may still linger.

She encounters, and is chased by, a lone man where after a brief stand off decides to risk that this stranger is not a part of the menace that may surround them. Together they begin a more deliberate and cautious search for the reason the city is abandoned. In a hotel they encounter another couple and with the help of discarded newspapers they piece together the story that the city has been invaded by an unknown, possibly foreign, enemy. At one point they site a metal clad figure patrolling the building rooftops and begin to correctly speculate that the invaders might not be of this Earth.

There are also a few scenes that take place at a military research facility where one of the fallen invading robots is being studied as an attempt to reveal some weaknesses. There is some reasonable speculation and argument as to whether the robots are the invaders themselves or simply their remote weapons.

The film actually begins well with a number of possibilities for plot development. The robot monsters are reasonably well done for the time the film was made and in some ways are down right spooky. The bad parts of the movie are the stereotypical interactions between the trapped humans in the city. Especially when a gun toting fugitive enters their midst. The "cat and mouse" game between the robots and humans, although reasonably well done, could have been developed even better.

All and all, its a movie well worth watching, especially if your into nostalgic 50’s movie sci-fi. The film ends (not surprising considering the date) with the same kind of cold war era "watch the skys" message reminiscent of the classic film The Thing.

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