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Directed by Sherman A. RoseCast
Richard Denning (Frank Brooks)
Kathleen Crowley (Nora King)
Virginia Grey (Vicki Harris)
Richard Reeves (Jim Wilson)
Robert Roark (Davis)
Mort Marshall (Charles Otis)
Whit Bissell (Scientist)
In my review of Fred Olen Ray’s ultra-cheapie Prison Ship, I discussed how a low budget doesn’t always have to cripple a science-fiction film: ingenuity and sincere effort can turn a few thousand bucks worth of capital into a decent bit of movie enjoyment. Unfortunately, the world of the low-budget genre film rarely has anything to do with ingenuity and sincerity and everything to do with lazily sliding by. Still, those rare films made with artistic care can give viewers hope…films like Target Earth.
Picture, if you will…
A woman wakes up in a shabby rooming house, an empty bottle of sleeping pills in her hand. She slowly rises from her bed to the lonely accompaniment of a ticking clock; she can hear none of the typical noises of the city of Los Angeles outside her window. She looks through her shades at deserted streets. She tries the water faucet, but no water comes out. The light switches do nothing. She walks outside and discovers a completely empty city, and she starts to run and run, searching desperately for another human and an explanation for the echoing, abandoned city.
This opening scene of Target Earth has a feeling of starkness and paranoia equal to anything in similar films such as 28 Days Later, The Day of the Triffids, or Omega Man. The first 
half hour of this meager-budgeted science-film from the early 1950s, when the genre had just started to enter its first great phase, contains astonishing work. The feeling of loneliness and fear is palpable. The woman from the opening, Nora King (played by Kathleen Crowley), eventually finds another ‘survivor’ of whatever has happened to Los Angeles, Frank Brooks (Richard Denning, later to play the Governor on Hawaii Five-O for all twelve seasons), who spent the previous evening unconscious after getting mugged and knocked out. They find two other people, drunken couple Vicki and Jim (Virginia Grey and Richard Reeves), partying it up in an empty hotel bar. Tgoether, they try to find some way to leave the city, but the cars have all had their distributor caps yanked off and nothing else has any power. They start to discover the truth: the city evacuated overnight because of the sudden arrival of a mysterious enemy “army” to the north…an army of robots who now stalk the streets eliminating survivors with their laser rays. The four people hole up in a hotel room to avoid the invaders and try to figure a way out of Los Angeles before the army chooses the nuclear option to eliminate the extraterrestrial force.
Target Earth is one of those “marvelous B’s” from the 50s that rises above the extreme limitations of its bottom line to turn into a fun and memorable flick. It arrived before the big science-fiction wave of the mid-50s hit, and it ranks as one of the first 
of the Cold War paranoia thrillers. Allied Artists released the film as an ‘A’ picture despite its budget, and it did brisk business, paving the way for many of the later low-budget wonders (and stinkers) of the decade, like Earth vs. the Flying Saucers and Invasion of the Body Snatchers (both 1956). Producer Herman Cohen, who would go on to produce a string of popular horror movies for teen audiences, like I Was a Teenage Werewolf (1957) and How to Make a Monster (1958) through American International Pictures, does wonders with his tiny budget, choosing to focus on the intense drama of the situation and the tension between the four leads rather than the epic implications of the story.
The four leads and first-time director Sherman A. Rose make a good show of the dangerous, claustrophobic situation. The first half-hour stays entirely with these characters as they try to figure out what has happened to their world. The feeling of the Cold War overwhelms these scenes as they make guesses as to what could have happened: Hydrogen bomb? Germ warfare? Is an attack imminent and that’s why the city was evacuated? Crowley and Brooks make appealing and realistic leads, even though the dialogue of the script occasionally falls flat. Brooks pontificating on how he thinks the invaders came from Venus is one of the film’s rare collapses into ‘expositionitis,’ where a character starts rambling out information he has no reason to know just because the script demands some back-story to explain its concept. They could have left the identity of the invaders alone entirely and it wouldn’t have affected the story.
Once the army appears, the film starts losing some of its earlier intensity. The military scenes expand the film from the clammy eeriness of the opening and feel much stiffer than the interplay between the survivors. The requisite scenes of “scientist explaining the enemy” are identical to any science-fiction film of the period, although having the smooth and serious Whit Bissell do the explaining does help a bit. (Bissell would later play the evil scientist who makes Michael Landon go all fuzzy in I Was a Teenage Werewolf.) It’s ironic how much more interesting it is to listen to Kathleen Crowley brood over the regrets of her life in a hotel room than watch Whit Bissell and some army brass play around with ways to destroy a killer robot.
Although an excellent film overall, Target Earth still unavoidably reveals its low budget in many places. For such a large-scale concept—Alien Robots Invade Los Angeles!—the production team shot the movie only seven days for a mere $87,000. The actors did most of their scenes in one take, and the sets were redressed from more expensive movies that had just finished shooting. Naturally, loads of obvious stock footage serves for most of the scenes of the military on the move. The army hired for the movie appears to numbers about five guys total, and they have their headquarters in a cramped brick basement. The look of the empty streets of L.A. were achieved by shooting early Sunday morning without filming permits. As for the attacking robot horde…
we never actually see it. Herman Cohen said: “We had to invade the city of Los Angeles with one robot.” That's right, the production team could only afford to construct one robot suit, built in Cohen’s garage, so only a single of the metal monsters ever appears at any time. The characters talk about seeing armies of them, and the military reports attacks on the horde of ‘hundreds’ of the invaders, but none of this gets on to the screen. Actually, the robot(s) and makes few appearance at all. Considering how clunky and silly the suit looks—a boxy contraption with duct tube legs and wimpy pincer arms—this works somewhat in the film’s favor. The most visually embarrassing moment in the movie comes when one of the robots (okay, the only robot) climbs a staircase and bumps into the wall, causing the whole cheap canvas set to jiggle.
After the muddled middle with the army’s experiments, the Target Earth has a surprising and thrilling last twenty minutes. The supposedly deserted city has an unexpected twist in store for the four survivors, who discover that killer robots and the looming threat of atomic annihilation aren’t the most immediate dangers they must face. The film noir innovation pushes the film in a completely new direction and right into a feverish and violent ending. Cohen and company could never have achieved an epic battle send-off for the film with the paltry cash on hand, but the double showdown and chase conclusion more than fulfills the audience’s thrill-quotient and wraps the movie up quite satisfactorily.
The DVD of the film available from VCI Entertainment is a marvel for such an inexpensive film of yesteryear. 
Presented in the original 1:1.85 aspect ratio, enhanced for widescreen TVs, and with impeccably clear picture quality, Target Earth probably looks better than it ever did in the theaters. The extensive animated menus show that a great deal of care went into manufacturing this disc, and that helps increase the enjoyment of the movie. The extras contain trailers, cast bios, and an informative commentary from Herman Cohen himself (pictured to the left) shortly before his death in 2002. Although sometimes the commentary track hits long lulls, everything Cohen has to say about the production of the movie and his long career as an independent producer is fascinating. For example, Cohen explains that the actor in the robot suit was the head bartender at a popular Hollywood nightclub who would give Cohen special club privileges as long as he put him in his movies. Rarely do old, inexpensive films receive commentary tracks on DVDs, and it’s a shame because behind every low-budget flick lurk great stories of how they were somehow willed—against all odds—into existence. The DVD and the film are a genuine find for lovers of Cold War science fiction.