I found this movie in one of those Mill Creek 50-packs. It's a low-budget sci-fi film that works better with ideas than special effects. As a MST3K fan I found myself riffing some scenes out of habit. But as flawed as it is, trashing it outright misses the better points.I don't know what movie Claude Rains thought he was in, because he truly brings his A-game as a curmudgeon. He's the professor (often in a hammock) who the futuristic government doesn't believe. Stuck in his belief of scientific fact, he is not taken seriously.Does Rains chew the scenery? Yep, but it's fun and funny. I felt he probably enjoyed this character. He gives Prof. Benson mannerisms and tics that a lesser actor would not have bothered with. So he is 2 of my 5 points, because is so fun to watch.

"CORNFIELD!!... YOU'RE WONDERFUL!" Claude Raines stars in a movie in which I was forced to watch with the volume set very high (at my mother's, who bought this terrible movie, wishes). I never really understood the plot as it doesn't seem explained much at all; the only things I got was that the world was in danger and a senile old man that everyone likes (despite his hatred and constant acts of crudeness to everyone else) is sent in to help. Then they enter a tunnel, with what looks like a bunch of children's toys holding it together, where the old man laughs again before going out with the planet. As said before, I never got the plot and I chose not to watch it again. If I put it up, I deal with Claude's bombastic insults towards his annoyingly "quaint" co-workers. If I put it down, I still won't get the plot as no one will be speaking.Thank goodness for Star Wars to come along and make a TON of more sense, as well as something likable.I also never truly understood what the song is playing in the opening titles. It sounds like she's saying, "We are but SPIDERZCH.." followed by a direct shout of the director's name: "ANTOOOOOOOOOINE!!!!!"

From Italian genre expert Antonio Margheriti, or "Anthony M. Dawson" as he was known to the English speaking world, best known for films about cannibals and killer fish. In 1960 he started an entire genre of spaghetti sci-fi films with Assignment: Outer Space. It was a typically Italian exercise in creating something out of nothing, and not surprisingly at a time when any film with Hercules in the title meant instant box-office, it was sold around the world. For his second space opera Margheriti was handed a bigger budget - which means he was given slightly more than nothing - to create an ambitious, not to mention enjoyable, effects-filled no-brainer: the 1961 Battle Of The Worlds.More moolah meant star billing for an imported American actor. So, almost 30 years after playing The Invisible Man, aging raconteur Claude Raines plays Professor Benson, a cranky, wordy, gas-filled yet sympathetic egghead in Mr Magoo glasses who detects a planetoid dubbed "The Outsider" heading for the pseudo-utopian community on Earth. Against Benson's advice the Army sends its spacecraft to knock it out but they're destroyed by a fleet of spinning flying saucers who emerge from inside the planet with jagged laser beams a-blazing. The fools! Benson then discovers the planetoid locked into an ever-decreasing orbit around the Earth, suggesting a super-computer from a dying alien civilization inside the planet; his missionary zeal for pure knowledge leads him to offer himself in the ultimate act of sacrifice, descending deep into the bowels of the runaway planet.And they really do look like bowels - glowing red and filled with plastic tubing, a triumph of low-budget ingenuity from the Godfather of Spaghetti sci-fi thanks to his resourcefulness as a special effects wizard, working miracles out of a few toilet rolls and a vacuum hose. Amidst the relentlessly talky script and the pointless romantic interludes, there's a strange, almost quasi-revolutionary thread against the military industrial complex, but that's the crazy Italians for you. So, from the man who would one day direct Cannibal Apocalypse comes an early one in the insanely huge Antonio Margheriti catalog: the 1961 Battle Of The Worlds.

Claude Rains stars as Prof. Benson, a cynical mathematical genius/recluse who must save the world from implacable aliens. The movie has an interesting premise - a planetoid enters into orbit around the Earth causing widespread upheavals of Nature, and turns out to be a sort of alien Noah's Ark - but is marred by a tiny budget, hambone acting (except for Rains), oafish direction, and really crummy effects even for 1961. This may not have been Rains' last film, but he certainly deserved better. Having said all that, for some odd reason this one remains a favorite. Guess there's no accounting for taste. Seriously though, there are worse. MUCH worse.