Teenagers from Outer Space (1959 Movie)

DVD: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00004W1A5?ie=UTF8&tag=doc06-20&link... http://thefilmarchived.blogspot.com/

Teenagers from Outer Space is a 1959 science-fiction film about an extraterrestrial space ship landing on Earth to use it as a farm for its food supply. The crew of the ship includes teenagers, two of whom oppose each other in their activities. The independent film was originally distributed by Warner Brothers. The film was later featured in an episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000.

Teenagers from Outer Space was filmed on location in and around Hollywood, California, with a number of tell-tale landmarks like Bronson Canyon in Griffith Park and Hollywood High School giving away the film's hazy locale. One notable aspect of the film is that it was largely the work of a single person, Tom Graeff, who, in addition to playing the role of reporter Joe Rogers, wrote, directed, edited, and produced the film, on which he also provided cinematography, special effects, and music coordination. Producers Bryan and Ursula Pearson ("Thor" and "Hilda") and Gene Sterling ("The Leader") provided the film's $14,000 budget, which was less than shoe-string by the standards of the time.

According to Bryan Pearson, the crew employed many guerrilla tactics in order to cut costs. Director Tom Graeff secured the location for Betty Morgan's house for free by posing as a UCLA student (while Graeff had attended the school, he had graduated 5 years earlier). The older woman who owned the house even let the crew use her electricity to power equipment.

Graeff shot in many nearby locations — mostly in the vicinity of Sunset Boulevard and Highland Avenue — to double as more important city landmarks. Graeff's steady hand and framing kept most of the real locations under-wraps, creating a great low-budget illusion of a small town.

Other cost-cutting ideas didn't pay off as well: the space costumes were simple flight suits clearly decorated with masking tape, dress shoes covered in socks, and surplus Air Force helmets. The use of stock footage in lieu of special effects and Spielbergian "looking" shots replacing actual visuals of the invading enemy spaceships seriously undercut the urgency of the ending. Props included a single bolted-joint skeleton re-used for every dead body, a multichannel mixer that the producers made no attempt to camouflage (even clearly bearing the label "Multichannel Mixer MCM-2") as a piece of alien equipment, and the infamous dime-store Hubley's "Atomic Disintegrator" as the aliens' focusing disintegrator ray.

In an unusual practice of the era, Graeff also pre-recorded some of the film's dialogue for several scenes, and had the actors learn to synchronize their actions with the sound. The score of the film came from stock, composed by William Loose and Fred Steiner. Incidentally the same stock score has been recycled in countless B-movies, such as Red Zone Cuba, The Killer Shrews, and most notably Night of the Living Dead.

In June 1958, Bryan Pearson, who invested $5,000 in the production with his wife Ursula, took Graeff to court in order to gain back the original investment and a percentage of any profits. The Pearsons had learned that Graeff had allegedly sold the film (which was not true until early 1959), but heard nothing of their investment or the percentage of profits they were entitled to. The legal dispute dragged on for a year, and once it was settled (Pearson got his $5000 investment back but the judge ruled there was no profit for him to share in), Tom and the Pearsons, who had been good friends during the production of Teenagers, never spoke to each other again.

The film opened on June 3, 1959 to negative but not crippling reviews. The Los Angeles Times review of the movie stated "what a curious little film this is [...] there are flashes of astonishing sensitivity half buried in the mass of tritisms." And of the director, Tom Graeff, "when he stops spreading himself so incredibly thin, I think his work will bear watching."

The film failed to perform at the box office, placing further stress on an already-burdened Graeff, and in the fall of 1959, he suffered a breakdown, proclaimed himself the second coming of Christ. After a number of public appearances followed by a subsequent arrest for disrupting a church service, Graeff disappeared from Hollywood until 1964 and later committed suicide in 1970.

Category:

Film & Animation

Tags:

• giant
• lobster
• alien
• skeleton
• ray
• gun
• flying
• saucer
• uniform
• small
• town
• sabotage
• space
• monster
• disintegration
• mst3k
• boarder
• hitchhiking
• death
• of
• pet
• betrayal
• car
• over
• cliff
• police
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• killed
• telephone
• booth
• city
• hall
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• low
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• film
• chase
• contact
• b horror
• grandfather
• gas
• station
• power
• plant
• teenage
• girl
• hostage
• young
• nurse
• murder
• gunshot
• wound
• philosophy
• russia

[luvumo2day]

lot of toy guns. Is that a 1956 Rayomatic cigerette lighter / disintergrators gun?

[luvumo2day]

Is that Harry Connick Juniors Father?

[4ingP]

@TheTP54 You really like cars, don't you?

[iloveipodlinux]

Sometimes my friend and I like to pop on really crappy B-movies from the 50's-80's, during sleepovers just so we can feel like the kids on 90's tv shows who watched B-movies on Friday nights like "The Chainsaw Mama" and "The Bloody Hand: Part 7", both titles being bullshit but you get the point. Always makes me feel nostalgic. Don't know why.

[justlokng]

yeh, good classic sci fi !!! thanks for sharing !!!

[TheTP54]

* Correction... Watching the movie again, and watching only to try to identify the cars in it, I have to correct that the newest car seen is now a '57 Oldsmobile seen at: 0:41:14 parked in front of "City Hall."

[TheTP54]

the monster in this flick! Oh, the CARS in this movie? I think it's strange a bit, but I have NOT seen any cars newer than 1956. The Chevy that the reporter drives in the chase is the NEWEST car in the movie, a '56. The oldest, and The one I would love to own today is the '42 Olds Club Coupe that the Nurse was driving! MUCH more rare and valuable today even than the Doctor's '55 Caddy Convertible!

The Producer/Director of this flick has truly proven to me that he was a genuine Hollywood Homey!

[TheTP54]

When My Dad passed away and my Mom sold the house. It's now LONG gone, an apartment building there now. Sad, that was a GREAT house! Here's a fun fact, LOL! The MONSTER in the film was a shadow of what we used to call Craw-Dads, aka Crayfish. They were EASY to catch in the small creek that ran through Fern Dell in Griffith Park! All you had to do was tie a small piece of Hot dog on some string, put the string in the water, and within 30 seconds you'd have a crawdad!

FUNNY that they made one...

[TheTP54]

There's SO many landmarks in this film for me it's hilarious! Box Canyon, Hollywood High, De Longpre Park, The Blessed Sacrement School Admin building on Sunset...

This is like going home for me. I thank you so much for loading this... Until now, I never knew it existed. I can even tell you what streets are what when outside shots are made. For example, De Longpre park on De Longpre between Cherokee and June Street... I lived 1/4 of a block away on June Street between 1955 and 1969

See next

[dude40299]

Meant 1:25:30