Invaders from Mars

 



 

Every few months, Channel 9, in Los Angeles would show the movie “Invaders from Mars”.  The movie would be on every weekday for that week beginning at 3 pm.    And every time it was shown, all the boys in the neighborhood would run to their TV. Can you believe watching the same movie repeatedly for five days? And then a few months later, “Invaders from Mars,” was shown again. This probably happened three or four times between the time I was in 3rd and 4th grade and each time, I would watch all five days.

I can still see the movie vividly today.  There is a thunderstorm.  The storm awakens this boy who looks out the window and sees a flying saucer disappear into a sand dune.  The boy tells his parents.  His dad goes to investigate and comes back like a zombie, not the same dad that had gone out to investigate.  Later, the same thing happens to his mother and then others in the town.  At some point the boy notices these two red holes in the head of each of these people who are no longer normal.  You can distinguish people, “good and bad”, by this mark. 

The boy sees a neighborhood girl get sucked into the sand.  He runs to the police who believe he is crazy.  Sooner or later, he is believed.  The army comes and surrounds the sand pit, ready to fire.  About this time, the boy and a scientist that believes him, are sucked into the sand.  Martians take them to a table with a drill where this item will be drilled into their skull.  About this time the army breaks in and saves them. They see this Martian leader who is encased in a glass bubble or something.  Everyone clears from the area and the army plans to blow up the tunnels and the spaceship.  You see the time clock working its way to zero.

In the last scene, the boy wakes up from a thunderstorm, runs to his parent’s room and they say it was only a dream.  He goes back to his room only to see the spaceship landing once again. 

What I remember most is this eerie music that occurred before the sand opened when people were sucked in, and at the end. 

I talked about this movie so much that Susan bought the movie for me.  The movie totally bored Susan.  She could not understand my lifelong infatuation with it.  We have not watched it again.  I must say that the special effects seem primitive some seventy year later.  You can see the zippers on the Martians costumes. 

Still, I feel a certain twinge, just recalling it.  For those of an impressionable age, like myself, the movie was a source of nightmares.  In addition to a fear of the unknown, the story worked quite effectively on the level of enemy infiltration. I was left wondering if my parents were not really what they seemed.  And now that this turns out to be true, I wonder if my subconscious was telling me something way back then

 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A memory about pets (Published Sept 13, 2021)

 The first pet I was aware of was my parents dog Taffy, a Chihuahua. Taffy died when I was around six and my mom almost immediately went to the pound and got a dog named Jinxy, I'm not sure why the name and if we named her or if she came with that name. Jinxy was a white, with some brown, Fox Terrier mix. She was a great dog but had two problems. The first is that she always urinated when anyone pet her. And when the door bell rang and she ran to the door excited, there was always an accident including urinating on several guests shoes. Because of this, Jinxy was confined to the service porch with our washer and dryer or the backyard. This leads to the second issue - She loved breaking out of the yard and run (sort of like Almas). Not to long after we got Jinxy, my parents did get another Chihuahua, which they named Chico. Jinxy was "my dog" while Chico was my parents. The dogs got along well and I've got cute pictures of them laying together. However, Chico always ha...
Read more

THE PACKAGE

  THE PACKAGE One day this package just arrived on our doorstep.  It did not look like the customary Amazon package we get at our door many days each month.   It had no return address, and my name was typed on an address label with no logo.  There was no postage on the wrapping and no indication that it was from FedEx, UPS, or any of the other courier services.  Perhaps a neighbor dropped off a gift, but why then the formal typed label?    The package was rather large and rather heavy.  There was no noise from shaking it so it was wrapped rather tightly.  There clearly was a box inside the wrapping.  My first inclination was to open it immediately but then I decided to wait for Susan in case she knew what it was or ordered it.  Perhaps she had ordered it specifically for me or for some occasion?   Susan arrived back from the market.  She had no idea what it was.  She had not ordered anything. Susan laughed a...
Read more

The Summer after the Summer of Love, Part I (Published Augst 23, 2021)

It was the Summer after the Summer of Love, 1968, I was eighteen, and five of us jammed into my 1961 Chevy Corvair and headed to San Francisco, the then action spot of the world as far as the five of us teens were concerned. Interstate 5 was not yet open all the way to "SF" as we in Los Angeles called it. There were almost no has stations and the freeway would stop and start taking you onto the old California Highway 33. It was along one these stretches of Highway 33, reminiscent of a John Steinbeck novel, that the car ran out of gas. I remember that Louise, my high school prom date was already not in the best of moods and running out of call in the middle of nowhere land did not help. Besides, it was after dark and about 110 degrees outside, at least so it seemed. The cars in those days had no air conditioning, or at least my old Corvair did not. After taking the rath from everyone in the car for not filling it sooner, an old man in 1950's pickup came along and offered m...
Read more