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IT CAME FROM OUTER SPACE

By Bruce Rux (amazon.com)

Ray Bradbury pens passable '50s sci-fi fare, but it's not what everyone cracks it up to be. The movie is more fun than actually good, but definitely worth a watch.

B-movie vet Richard Carlson has his not-quite-love-match with the always wonderful Barbara Rush interrupted by a flaming meteorite, near his gorgeous desert home. Faster than he can light a pipe and don a houndstooth jacket, professorly Carlson goes out to investigate. The thing is too hot to approach - and big, too.

But that's hardly the greatest of his worries. Before long, many of the townsfolk are acting unusually, and Carlson finds his tracks dogged by these zombie doppelgangers of their former selves (including the Professor from Gilligan's Island, Russell Johnson, himself). He figures out that the meteorite was actually a crashing space ship, and eventually manages to meet face-to-face with...well, a pretty horrible 3-D thing, living with its buddies in a nearby abandoned mine shaft. The aliens really aren't all that friendly - they're just not hostile, eager to get their ship repaired with their rented zombie-human space-car mechanics and escape this backward berg. The usual "Earthling, Beware!" zany hijinks ensue.

This is not a great movie. But it is a good one. The cast is good, the script adequate. The special effects aren't great, but they are at least interesting, and the atmosphere is pretty spooky. It's a lot of fun in 3-D, if you ever get a chance to see it in its original format.