Rymd Invasion i Lappland

USA / Sweden • 1959 • 72m •

• Directed by: Virgil W. Vogel. • Starring: Barbara Wilson, Sten Gester, Robert Burton, Bengt Blomgren, Åke Grönberg, Gösta Prüzelius, John Carradine, Brita Borg, Doreen Denning, Ittla Frodi, Fred Hoffman, Allan Johansson, George Mitchell. • Music by: Harry Arnold, Allan Johansson.

After a herd of reindeer are mysteriously found dead following a meteor crash in a remote part of Sweden, soldiers and a geologist are called out to investigate. Just as they discover that the meteor is actually a spaceship, a hideous monster destroys their plane and kills the soldier guarding it. As the geologist (along with his figure skater girlfriend) are trying to ski to safety, the monster attacks again and kidnaps the helpless woman. What is this creature, and can it be stopped?

Review:

Image from: Rymd Invasion i Lappland (1959)

Although this movie received lukewarm reviews (when it was reviewed at all) by the London critics, I liked it. I still do, even though I now have sufficient clues to realize that a good proportion of the film was actually played by doubles. The heroine has no less than three: a girl to perform her figure skating routines, another to do all her skiing, and another to partly show off her figure in a chaste shower sequence. The hero has only a skiing stand-in to upstage his footage-'but the amount of skiing material in this movie is actually quite considerable. With the addition of a song or two, plus the usual pseudo-scientific back-chat, this doesn't leave much time for the monster, an impressively cumbersome, furry giant who manages to shuffle through the snow leaving sharply delineated footprints. In true King Kong style, the heroine has plenty of screams up her sleeve, before the monster is finally pursued and disposed of in an ending rather reminiscent of Frankenstein.

Nonetheless, the snowy, ice-bound Swedish locations lend the movie more than routine interest and it must be admitted that directoreditor Vogel puts this hokum across with considerable competence, cleverly using both low and high angles to re-enforce the supposed height of the killer creature, and smoothly cutting between 2nd and main unit sequences to generate a fair degree of excitement.

Stan Gester played the hero with a great deal of charm. He made over twenty movies (mostly in Sweden) from 1944 through 1962, but this seems to be his only starring role.

Review by JohnHowardReid from the Internet Movie Database.

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