In spite of the supposedly super-intelligent and ultra-menacing alien monster looking like a laughable and oversized vegetable with an angry face drawn on it, there are still several good reasons to watch this early low-budgeted Sci-Fi gem directed and produced by Roger Corman. For starters, there's the excellent ensemble cast! There are good roles and solid performances for Peter Graves, Beverly Garland, Corman's pal Dick Miller and – most of all – an exceptionally rare civilized role for Lee Van Cleef! Generally he only starred in raw westerns and exclusively depicted nasty villains, but here he's a respectable and clean shaven scientist. He even has a wife who genuinely loves him and remains faithful no matter what happens! Of course, he still remains Lee Van Cleef, so his character never smiles and nevertheless endangers the life of hundreds of other people. Another reason why this little gem plays in a different league than the vast majority of B-movies of the fifties is because of the clever and dead-serious script. As said, the monster may look silly, but the story behind it is tense, thought-provoking and compelling. Scientist Tom Anderson (Van Cleef) has been mocked for years regarding his theories about intellectual extraterrestrial lifeforms and how they could overtake our planet and save humanity from itself. From within his private home, Anderson has been corresponding with an alien from Venus and now helped it to hijack a NASA satellite and travel to earth. He believes that humanity should get enslaved by this super-intelligent creature and benefit from its wisdom and telekinetic powers, but his best friend Paul Nelson and own wife Claire desperately attempt to convince Tom that people should remain in control of their own emotions. This rather sober subject matter, in combination with a handful of deeply philosophical speeches and a few authentically tragic moments, leads "It Conquered the World" to be a much better Sci-Fi effort that it superficially seems. In the end, people are likely to just remember the goofy Mr. Potato Head alien and the silly bat-creatures, and that's almost a shame. Of course I understand that Roger Corman absolutely wanted to have a monster physically present in his film, in order to lure more people to the cinema, but in case the monster would have remained off-screen and hidden in its cave, the film might have been regarded as highly as contemporary classics like "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" or "The Thing from Another World".
Review of It Conquered the World
