Stars: Hugh Marlowe, Joan Taylor, Donald Curtis, Morris Ankrum, Charles Evans, Larry Blake, Thomas Brown Henry, Harry Lauter, Grandon Rhodes

Director: Fred F. Sears

Summary: Zombie aliens arrive at a U.S. Army base to seek help for their dying planet. But the Army greet them with gunfire...

Space scientist Dr. Russell Marvin (Hugh Marlowe) and his wife Carol (Joan Taylor) are working on a secret missile project, but every time their rockets are launched, they are intercepted and destroyed by the more advanced technology of mysterious flying saucers hovering near the Earth. The alien race has completely surrounded the planet, giving the Earth sixty days to surrender. The enemy spacecraft appear indestructible, and Marvin sets out to find a weapon that can defeat them. The special effects of stop-motion animator Ray Harryhausen are legendary, most notably in the scene in which flying saucers attack the Capitol building in Washington, D.C.

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Notable neither for its director nor its stars, Earth vs the Flying Saucershas been given the widescreen DVD treatment rather because of its special-effects man, the legendary Ray Harryhausen.

A Twilight Zonestyled voiceover introduces Dr Marvin Russell and his wife of two hours as they're buzzed by an overhead flying saucer--the first of many. When a translation device reveals the saucer-occupants' fiendish plan to take over the world, it's time for a good old army-alien punch-up. Cue screenfuls of avuncular patriarchs, loads of techno-flannel space-speak and plenty of gratuitous American-monument destruction.

A by-numbers B-movie, this is only really notable for Harryhausen's stop-motion FX work--and though this, his fifth feature, isn't a patch on his later Technicolor masterpieces, his trick of demolishing facsimiles of recognisablelandmarks is cited by many premier filmmakers as being hugely influential on their work. This is very much of its time, the saucer-people arousing few of the thrills engendered by his later creations (Sinbad's Cyclops, for example). And with Cold War fears now just a memory, the Ruskies, or rather aliens, can no longer prevail upon a zeitgeist of xenophobic paranoia for their power.

On the DVD:Earth vs the Flying Saucers's black-and-white picture is clean and crisp in this anamorphic 1.85:1 widescreen transfer and the Dolby digital mono soundtrack is clear enough. The theatrical trailer will please fans of kitsch, as will the featurette "This Is Dynamation" produced at the same time as the first Sinbadmovie. The real corker here though is the generously proportioned documentary "The Harryhausen Chronicles": narrated by Leonard Nimoy, it features a stellar cast of devotees (George Lucas among them) waxing lyrical about the influence of Harryhausen's films, and allows the man himself to ramble fascinatingly over clips of his filmic canon. If you're a fan, it's Harryhausen heaven. --Paul Eisinger

Aspect Ratio:	1.85 Wide Screen
Main Language:	English
Region:	Region 2
Special Features:	Harryhausen Chronicles, Earth vs Flying Saucers Featurette, This Is Dynamation Featurette, Photo Gallery, Trailer
Subtitles:	Arabic, Bulgarian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Italian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish
Year:	1956
Release Date:	October 14, 2002
Runtime:	79 minutes
Certification:
Catalogue Number:	C D R 11102
Keywords:	Earth, General, Flying, Wide, Screen, Fiction, Science, Saucers, Horror, Sci, Fi, Vs
Genre:	Science Fiction