Target Earth


Release date(s) November 7, 1954 (US)

Running time 	75 minutes

Distributed by 	Allied Artists Pictures Corporation

Directed by 	Sherman A. Rose

Produced by 	Herman Cohen

Written by 	Paul W. Fairman
                James H. Nicholson
                Wyott Ordung
                William Raynor

Starring 	Richard Denning
                Kathleen Crowley
                Virginia Grey
                Richard Reeves
                Robert Roark
                Mort Marshall

Target Earth is a 1954 science fiction film. It was directed by Sherman A. Rose and stars Richard Denning, Kathleen Crowley, Virginia Grey, and Whit Bissell. The film focuses on a deserted Chicago cityscape and a small group of people who have been overlooked during a mass evacuation due to an invasion of robot like beings from the planet Venus. The movie was based on the 1953 short story "Deadly City" by Paul W. Fairman.

Target Earth (TE) is not an innovative B-movie, but retains a little freshness in how it mixes a little of this and a touch of that from previous works. The final result is not too bad, despite its very evident small budget. The poster promises "Raw Panic," but doesn't quite deliver. There is, however, a generous helping of post-apocalyptic gloom, a big dose of pulp crime drama and some attempted dashes of robot alien sci-fi. Sprinkle in some non-wooden actors and you get a fairly watchable movie about a small group of people who find themselves alone in a big city, evacuated in advance of an alien invasion.

A woman (Nora) awakens from a failed suicide attempt (sleeping pills) to find the large city completely empty. All power and water off. Eventually she finds Frank (Richard Denning). The two of them explore the empty city together, eventually finding another couple, Jim and Vicki, living it up in the lounge of a luxury hotel. No one has any idea what happened. They were all asleep (or drunk or knocked out) when whatever happened happened. While making their way towards the edge of town, they're joined by a nervous little man named Otis. A robot appears, frightening them all into another hotel's lobby. A discarded newspaper tells of invasion by a mystery army. Otis gets spooked and runs outside. The robot zaps him dead. The others decide to hide in rooms upstairs to formulate a plan (if possible) for escape. Meanwhile, the army has captured a broken robot. (They've only taken the city, not the whole world) The army scientists experiment on it to see how stop them. The tests seem futile. The army will have to use nukes on the evacuated city if the robots can't be stopped.
That night, a shifty stranger intrudes and holds Frank, Nora, Jim and Vicki hostage, at gunpoint. His plan is to force the others out into the streets as a decoy so he can escape via the sewers under the aliens' lines. He's a wanted murderer, so his only hope to escape the authorities is to go under the aliens. Vicki challenges him, but he shoots her dead. In a rage, Jim fights with, then strangles the killer. The gunshots attract one of the robots, which pursues the three survivors up the stairs and onto the roof. It zaps Jim dead, but before it can get Frank and Nora, the army's loud-speaker jeeps come up the street. They're playing a special sound frequency which the scientists found out breaks the robots' "eye", incapacitating them. The robot falls over on its back. The world is safe.