Dotsthavesp I wanted to but couldn't!

Matialth Good concept, poorly executed.

Plustown A lot of perfectly good film show their cards early, establish a unique premise and let the audience explore a topic at a leisurely pace, without much in terms of surprise. this film is not one of those films.

Ginger Very good movie overall, highly recommended. Most of the negative reviews don't have any merit and are all pollitically based. Give this movie a chance at least, and it might give you a different perspective.

poe-48833 Say what you will, TARGET EARTH is definitely worth a look: the scenes of deserted city streets manage to convincingly convey a sense of desolation and all of the actors and actresses involved help make it believable. The invading Robot is what I call a RETROBOT: one of those early Big Screen automatons simple in design but still oh-so-cool. While we never get to see more than a single 'bot in a given shot, the Retrobot gets the job done. About as tight as they come, TARGET EARTH is the kind of movie I enjoy most: well thought out and put together with a minimum of means, but still infinitely more entertaining than 99.9% of the junk being computer-generated these days.

bkoganbing An advance party of a robot army from Venus has invaded earth choosing as its ground zero an unnamed midwest city. The city has been evacuated but some folks have been left behind. Kathleen Crowley, Richard Denning, Richard Reeves and Virginia Grey for one reason or another missed the evacuation.Action switches back from the story of these four to the scientists and military trying desperately to find a way to defeat these seemingly invincible metal creatures.There are holes a plenty in this cheap science fiction film. But I have to say I thoroughly enjoyed the quartet of survivors. They are really what Target Earth a real treat.

Theo Robertson Nora King , a young woman in Chicago has survived a suicide bid via a barbiturate overdose . Stirring from what would have been her death bed she knocks on her neighbours door and no one replies . She finds no one seems to be in her apartment block . Wandering the eerie deserted streets of the city she is startled to find another survivor called Frank Brooks Okay you've seen this type of set up before . Protagonist wakes up , thinks " Oh hold on something isn't quite right here " and finds that the entire population has been rendered blind / turned in to zombies / Daleks have invaded the world / insert your own scenario here etc etc . . It's not an original idea but it's a brilliantly effective hook that draws the audience in to the story which is why it's a common occurrence in horror and science fiction . Off the top of our heads we can name a very long list of books , films and TV shows throwing up this scenario Where this very low budget film works best is during the deserted city scenes . I know everyone quite rightly raves about Boyle's dead London scenes in 28 DAYS LATER but stop to consider how the problems and pressure were eased by the director shooting that film on digital video . With TE let me just repeat this is a very low budget movie and camera technology in 1954 would have been very primitive in comparison to now . Even more astonishingly the trivia section of this site states the production team didn't have permits so did what we would now describe as " guerrilla film making " and shot on location in Los Angeles very early on Sunday mornings . There's not too much in the way of panning long shots but at the same time these location shots are far more convincing than in bigger budget movies such as THE OMEGA MAN where you're constantly aware of cars driving by in the distance . As Nora meets with Frank they wander around Chicago bumping in to other occasional stragglers my attention was held one hundred per cent As you might guess for a low budget SF B movie the film can't really sustain this . Chicago has been evacuated because an alien invasion has taken place the night before . Even if you ignore the implausible idea that a large city of this kind can be evacuated in such a short period you can't ignore the fact that the film doesn't have the budget to make this invasion from Venus credible in any way and is confined to one robot . Worse than that this robot just happens to look like it was constructed out of cardboard by a group of primary school children and does tend to drag the film down after its effective first third . Likewise from a narrative point of view we have distracting cutaways to a military base where the military reference to the recent invasion and you're painfully aware that these scenes exist only to give away exposition . Might it not have been more efficient having the survivors run in to a military patrol who say something along the lines " Oh you're a handful of survivors we haven't evacuated and therefore you don't know what's going so here's the plot that needs to be explained to the audience etc etc ?This is a film that this pulp science fiction in its most low brow form and yet some of it works brilliantly , so much so that for the early period you think you're going to be watching some sort of lost classic . Such a pity TE can't sustain its early promise . One can't help thinking that maybe the production team might have gone back to the drawing board and deleted all the rubbish about cardboard robots from Venus and come up with a premise of survivors battling to stay alive in a world where civilisation and the rule of law have been consigned to history , but I guess audiences always flock to stories that have a nice happy ending ? Even if the events leading up to the end are very silly

Robert J. Maxwell Four people (Denning, Crowley, Grey, and Reeves) meet by accident on the streets of a city that has been emptied overnight of people, except for a few dead bodies. They learn from a newspaper that the city has been invaded and evacuated by everyone else. The cars have been disabled, so the four refugees hole up in the suite of a hotel, making do with candles, beer, and canned food. There WAS a fifth member of the group, a witless little character, but he ran out into the street and was rayed to death by a wandering robot. The invading army, as it turns out, consists entirely of these robots with their death rays. They're impervious to bullets and can destroy airplanes, presumably with the same rays. A gun-toting evil murderer invades the hotel sanctuary of the survivors and puts moves on Crowley (who has fallen in love with Denning after knowing him for only a few hours). The resulting fight sees Grey killed and Denning wounded before the burly Reeves manages to strangle the killer.The scenes of the survivors are inter cut with scenes of the requisite military and scientists trying just as hard as they can to devise a means of disabling these robots. They finally succeed -- surprise! When the robot army is exposed to sound waves of a certain frequency, it "cracks their cathode ray tubes." (Your television set is a cathode ray tube.) The army comes to the rescue at the last moment, too late, alas, to save Reeves but soon enough to whisk off Denning and Crowley.A cheap and boring movie, I found it almost impossible to watch. Well, sometimes the cheapness can't be helped. A budget will stretch only so far, as we all must know. But this thing could have been written and acted by members of the robot army, who look like they're made of Lego's or like unusually angular Gorts, although we only see one of them at a time.The dialog sucks. The plot is unoriginal. The special effects might better have been suggested than put on display. The logic of the plot is terribly flawed and the direction careless. (Carefully pruned, it might have been a decent episode of The Outer Limits.) I'll give just one example of a jarring lapse of common sense. The vicious murderer is holding the others at gunpoint and Grey suddenly remembers where she saw him before. He's the guy that murdered that hooker on Skid Row! That's right, admits the evildoer. His picture was all over the papers. They'll be looking for him on every street corner, Denning observes. Not if I slip out through the sewers and get out behind the enemy lines, the murderer sneers. The entire city has been evacuated and is now occupied by indestructible robots who kill people and repulse the military with unknown rays -- yet they'll be watching every street corner for some nobody who killed a hooker! Santa Clause could waltz past the army without interference under these conditions! Well, another example. At the very beginning, Crowley wakes up to find the city empty and she wanders the streets. She stumbles across a dead body and Richard Denning at roughly the same time. They introduce themselves and explain where they spent the previous night. Minutes of frippery go by while neither asks the question: WHAT HAPPENED? It could have been good, even with the inexpensive sets and the second-tier (but seasoned) actors. As it is, it's rather a painful experience except for those who really enjoy cheesy SF movies, and there seem to be legions of those.The producer, the late Herbert Cohen, provides an audio commentary on the DVD and he seems like a good-natured guy. He's generous with his credits and he didn't mind if people laughed at the crummy effects when the picture was released and he still doesn't mind.