After the local children see strange lights in the sky, things start going wrong at a secret rocket-base that is about to launch an orbiting H-bomb. The core premise, on which I won't elaborate to avoid spoilers, had been done before in better films and, despite being helmed by Jack Arnold and filmed by Ernest Laszlo, as an entry into the 'creepy kids canon, 'The Space Children' is underwhelming. The child actors are OK but much of their dialogue seems 'scripty' and false, and unlike classics such as 'The Village of the Damned' (1960), the kids are not presented as menacing or unworldly so, while their presence seems to be necessary for the plot to unwind, they're not particularly interesting. The various parents are somewhat more nuanced (and less perfect) than usual, and Russell Johnson (Gilligan's professorial co-castaway) gets to play an obnoxious, child-beating drunk. The special effects are rudimentary and the budget was inadequate to do justice to the story (the global scope of the plot's backstory is briefly touched on in a couple of lines towards the end but the film needed needed a better, more expansive ending). Primarily of interest as one of a number of 50's sci-fi films that centered on the hopes for, and fears of, weaponising outer-space.
Review of The Space Children
