Earth Vs. The Flying Saucers: 1956 The title says it all. Many saucers have earned a good living in Hollywood, but none have so thoroughly trashed the U.S.A., nor looked so good in the attempt as the ones starring in this further Harryhausen masterpiece. Martian war machines do not qualify as saucers.
Carol Hanley (Joan Taylor) is now Mrs. Dr. Russell Marvin (Hugh Marlowe), and the newlyweds are retuning to their top secret jobs at the rocket testsite, Operation Skyhook. En route, Marvin is recording his latest progress report.
A saucer buzzes their car, and they are unsure about reporting the sighting. Arriving at Skyhook, Marvin proceeds to launch his satellite. Carol's father, General Hanley, (Morris Ankrum!) drives up too late to prevent the liftoff.
Over dinner, Hanley tells his new in-law that Skyhook's ten previous launches crashed for reasons unknown. Marvin confides their encounter, and suspects his "birds" were brought down by alien forces. Number twelve is ready to fly when saucers land and crash the party.
	Stiff humanoid figures walk out into a blazing anti-aircraft battery and first blood is drawn. The elbowless aliens fire deadly rays from ball shaped hands. They disintegrate the men, jump back in their ship, and waste Operation Skyhook.
Gen. Hanley is captured, the installation is levelled, and the only survivors are Russ and Carol. They were trapped in the underground control bunker. The batteries in their tape deck run low, and Russ now hears the alien message.
	When they buzzed his car, they were trying to tell Russ that they planned to pop in for a chat at Skyhook, and he was supposed to figure this out from the noise that the saucer made. No one believes Russ when he plays the tape for Pentagon brass.
Russ breaks house arrest to meet with the aliens. Carol and other pursuers board a saucer with him, and they learn (from the voice of Paul Frees) that the aliens are "survivors of a disintegrated solar system" seeking a new home.
They order Russ to arrange a meeting in Washington with all world leaders. He claims no one will believe him, so the aliens blast a naval vessel and tell Russ to report the exact longitude and latitude of the sinking to prove himself.
The next scene jumps to Russ, Carol, and the officer assigned to watch them, (Donald Curtis, scientist from It Came From Beneath the Sea) trying to convince Pentagon guys they are not lying or crazy. The coordinates of the doomed ship confirm their sanity.
Russ gets the O.K. to develop a sonic ray gun, which proves inadequate until a variation of it is used to interrupt the magnetic fields that power the saucers. Just as the prototype is finished, they learn that the aliens are onto the plan.
	Driving away as a saucer arrives to stop the project, they see several invaders exit their ship to search the building. Russ tests the new gun on the waiting saucer, causing it to wobble and gyrate. It takes off, leaving one crew member behind.
The saucer starts blasting away, destroying the prototype and starting a forest fire. They dump General Hanley's body. Harryhausen even provided the the fire's flickering shadows on the saucer's whirling underside. Excellent.
	Russ and company hide in a drain pipe, and escape to build a fleet of trucks that carry the sonic guns. They also deliver the empty shell of the stranded invader, who disappeared after being brought down by a couple of slugs from a carbine.
	The gun trucks show up nearly too late, as the aliens reveal their abject hatred of national monuments. One has not seen Washington D.C. until taking the tour a la Harryhausen. Russ and Carol lead the little convoy into the thick of it.
As the invaders blast the city, the sonic guns begin to "knock them down like clay pidgeons." The saucers go down fighting, with an unfortunate tendency to smash public buildings. Finally, the aliens decide they are outmatched.
	The still numerous remains of the saucer fleet pull away from the earth, defeated. The U.S of A. drove them off, no problem. Cold War tensions were soothed in the public mind by a tale of scary invaders getting kicked off the earth, American style.
	Later, Russ and Carol snuggle at the beach. "Will they come back again?" she asks. "Not on such a nice day." Russ didn't want to tell her his technological breakthrough could only provide the most temporary advantage over the invaders.

Still, the audience did see the shot of the fleet pulling away from the Earth. Maybe the interstellar travellers were just scared of us, and easily intimidated. Either way, producer Charles H. Schneer really got his money's worth out of Harryhausen. The film has a special effect every other minute. These were almost entirely Harryhausen's lone, handcrafted creations from storyboards he whipped up after reading an early script. Schneer knew he could pull off his ambitious project because of his previous work with Harryhausen on 1955's It Came From Beneath the Sea. With the sucess of the effects as a given, Schneer's team needed only find actors, locations, sound effects, etc. Operation Skyhook was actually the Hermosa Sewage Plant in Los Angeles. The weird sound of the whirling saucers was based on an augmentation of the muck going through its pipes. It should also be noted that one scene of saucer attack uses stock footage an airshow collision, which technically qualifies this flick as the #1 snuff film of 50's sci-fi. Executive producer Sam Katzman and director Fred F. Sears were also responsible for: The Giant Claw(1957).

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