During an electrical storm in the middle of the night, young David Maclean witnesses the landing of a flying saucer just outside his backyard... As the saucer lands, it burrows it's way underground... His father is a scientist working on a secret project and knows his son is not prone to bouts of fantasy, so he goes out to investigate and we see him fall into a sandpit... When he does not return David's mother calls the police who go to the pit and themselves fall in... When the father finally does return he isn't quite the nice guy that he was earlier, he has a mean streak in him and he slaps David for being too inquisitive about the open wound on the back of his neck... Soon the policemen return, and they too have undergone some kind of change and it seems that there is some unspoken hanky panky between David's father and the cops... David's father later takes his wife to the pit so that her mind can also be taken over by the Aliens...

David then goes to the police station to report the incident but notices that the Police Chief has the same wound that his father has on the back of his neck... The Police Chief orders David locked up until his father can be notified and goes in search of him... The desk cop calls in lovely Dr. Pat Blake to talk to the boy... She discovers that david is a friend of local astronomer Dr. Stuart Kelston who verifies David's sanity... She then takes the boy up to the observatory where Dr. Kelson tells of his theory that Mars is inhabited by super intelligent beings that have built an army of synthetic humans as slaves... I'd say they should lock up Dr. Kelson except that his theory turns out to be right... He further explains that the Martians have come to Earth because Earthlings are planning to go there... Dr. Kelson shows David a big rocketship through the telescope and tells him that this is the secret project that his father works on... They then train the big telescope on the sandpit and see an army General get sucked underground...

Dr. Kelson then phones Col. Fielding who mobilizes the Army which gives us a chance to see some stock footage of tanks being loaded on a train... The Army then surrounds the sandpit and starts blasting away only to find that the Aliens have changed locations... In the meantime David and Dr. Blake are sucked into the pit and captured by the Martians who start preparing Dr. Blake for the mind control operation... Soon the Aliens are again located and the Army breaks into their lair to discover giant mutant slaves and the head Martian with no arms or legs in a fishbowl... The Army plants time bombs around the ship but David and Dr. Blake are trapped with a few Army guys... David finds one of the Alien's disintergrator tubes and blasts a way out for them to escape... The Martian ship takes off and explodes in the air...

This is one of the best sci-fi flicks of the 1950's... There's not too much violence and some of the camera angles are terrific... My favorite is the view from the back of the desk in the police station as you watch little David come tearing into the police station... The cop is sitting about six feet above the floor making visitors have to look way up to talk to the authority figure... If you haven't seen this movie, you're missing a good one... It was remade in 1986 but it's a stinker...