Skunkyrate Gripping story with well-crafted characters

Grimossfer Clever and entertaining enough to recommend even to members of the 1%

Married Baby Just intense enough to provide a much-needed diversion, just lightweight enough to make you forget about it soon after it’s over. It’s not exactly “good,” per se, but it does what it sets out to do in terms of putting us on edge, which makes it … successful?

Lela The tone of this movie is interesting -- the stakes are both dramatic and high, but it's balanced with a lot of fun, tongue and cheek dialogue.

classicsoncall This happens to be one of those pictures where the good and the bad reviews both sound about the same, and everyone winds up considering it a blast. You can put me in the same category, who wouldn't have a good time picking this thing apart for it's cheesy monster, cheesy model toy tanks and airplanes, and cheesy actors playing it straight and wondering how they'll make it through the whole thing.Even so, I've come up with a couple of observations that might be worth mentioning. Anyone else notice how the original male astronauts of spaceship AAB-Gamma were introduced by their last names - Captain Sano, medical doctor Shioda and signal officer Miyamoto? But then, the space biologist on the mission was introduced as Lisa! I'm not into the whole feminism thing but that was a pretty significant slight to an important member of the team. Speaking of which, I couldn't help thinking while watching Peggy Neal in the role, that she could have been a stand-in for Angie Dickinson in a bigger budget flick.The other thing I noticed was that business of the 'guilala' spore burning through the table and floor and eventually into the earth before wrecking the space station, while the science folks were partying it up at Dr. Berman's (Franz Gruber). I hate to think this is where the writers for the 'Aliens' franchise got the idea for their monster, but it makes you wonder.But when it comes to the monster itself, oh baby!, stand by for what's probably the goofiest looking Godzilla knock-off in the annals of Japanese monster movies. Every time it set down it's rubbery feet on an unsuspecting mechanical victim, I had to laugh - there was no way to control their floppy motion. The bonus had to be those fiery spitball blasts at the attacking war planes, unless of course, one considers the monster ability to absorb itself into a red ball of energy and float around from city to city on it's path of destruction.Well, with embarrassingly hokey special effects and laughably ridiculous science, this has to be one of the all time, campy sci-fi greats, even if I'd never heard of it before catching it on Turner Classics the other day. You know, as I sit here and think about it now, the scientists involved here never did get around to discovering the mystery of the UFO that popped up every now and then. Not that I would have expected them to, when they couldn't even come up with a decent title to describe the 'X' from outer space.

gavin6942 The spaceship AAB-Gamma is dispatched from FAFC headquarters in Japan to make a landing on the planet Mars and investigate reports of UFOs in the area. As they near the red planet, they encounter a mysterious UFO that coats the ship's hull with unusual spores. Taking one of the specimens back to earth, it soon develops and grows into a giant chicken-lizard-alien monster that tramples Japan.This is a great looking film. Japan is not really known for its good science fiction. We far more recall the cheesy suits for Godzilla, Gamera and the other big monsters. There is some of that here, but overall the quality seems much higher... so how does this film get forgotten? That space scene is excellent, and it is top of the line, easily on par or better with anything the American were shooting at the time.

henri sauvage In letterbox, in a near-pristine print, in the original Japanese (with subtitles) I have to say this is a much better film than the one most of us saw on TV, back in the day.For one thing, the line "Monsters have rights, too!" is never uttered. even in translation. (Although -- now that I think of it -- some people might prefer the dubbed version precisely because of its goofiness.) Of course, that's just the dialog, and even the most handsome presentation of this film can't obscure its marvelously wacky weirdness. The miniatures and effects are kind of a mixed bag. The space-related sets and models are actually fairly well executed, but the monster effects are often sub-Toho, sometimes hilariously so, like when an absurdly out-of-scale F-101 Starfighter crashes into the X and just sort of hangs there for a few seconds. I think that's more from a lack of experience with kaiju flicks on the part of the studio and its technicians than penny-pinching. In the Criterion edition, at least, it's obvious that Shochiku put a not inconsiderable amount of money into this production.Silly as it undeniably is, there are in fact some very creative moments in this movie, such as when the monster absorbs too much energy from a nuclear reactor and turns into a gigantic, red-hot sphere which bounces around Tokyo, wreaking fiery havoc until it plunges into a lake.When you look at the competition, stuff like "Gappa: The Triphibian Monster" and "Yongary", in its very odd and quite unique way this is clearly one of the most entertaining of the Toho-wannabe giant monster films of the 60s.

stevenfallonnyc In the 70's, as a kid when looking through the new TV Guide for the week's monster movies, the only thing as good as finding a Godzilla film or two was finding the Godzilla wanna-bes, like the undeniable classic "The X From Outer Space.""X" is probably the personification of "cheesy Japanese monster flick." This monster is silly-looking, the FX are horrid, the music is terrible, and the film is a total blast. The "X" attacking planes and destroying buildings is just good and bad enough to make everyone happy.The reason this film is a blast is because it has a lot of charm and heart. Those are a few of the ingredients that certain giant monster films made back then lack, and that's why they are unwatchable and truly bad, while films like "X From Outer Space" are bad but have enough of those things to make it fun. When a film lacks those things and is clueless, you get dreck like "Queen Kong" and "A.P.E."There's nothing wrong with "The X From Outer Space" if you are simply into watching fun giant monster films with actors in suits (no computer crap) stomping on miniature buildings and swatting airplanes on wires out of the sky.