10 great sci-fi B-movies

American science fiction cinema took decades to wriggle free of the pulp magazine/comic book aspects typified by the Flash Gordon serials of the 1930s, only to give up and go back (with a bigger budget) in Star Wars (1977). Because SF films require expensive special effects and SF literature involves challenging ideas, A-picture science fiction was historically a rare strain – carried by Metropolis (1927), Things to Come (1936), 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and Blade Runner (1982): philosophical spectacles, steeped in awe and anxiety.

On the lower half of those bills – or put out in double (or triple) features, mainstays of low-prestige distribution via drive-in, grindhouse, cassette rental or streaming – are science fiction B-pictures. Cheaper, faster, often scurrilous, impatient with messages (or prone to overdo the editorial), these films are easy to ridicule for dramatic or technical imperfections (and scientific illiteracy – as often found in A-picture sci-fi as in the land of the Bs). Indeed, some Bs are as prized for their failings as admired for their modest achievements.

If you can’t afford a trip to space, have the alien visit economy class – by teleportation or plastic plate UFO. If the city-stamping Godzilla is beyond the budget, go with smaller fuzzy-felt mutants or even invisible monsters. The B jungle is populated by lumbering robots, alien sexual predators, time travellers cutting a swathe through the present day and old-school monsters (vampires) repurposed for the atomic age.

There’s plenty of awe and anxiety here too, but also fun and ingenuity.

Director: David MacDonald

“You plot stars millions of miles apart in the heavens, but you can’t even read a map of Scotland.”

Set almost entirely inside a dingy Scots pub invaded by a leather-caped-and-cowled dominatrix from another world and a robot that looks like a 1950s fridge on stubby legs, this is the greatest British B. Nyah (Patricia Laffan), weary of the exhausted males of Mars, comes to Earth in search of virile Scotsmen to repopulate her home planet. 

A chatty comedy of interplanetary courtship has a certain nightmarish edge as the pettish, frustrated Devil Girl curls her lip and deploys her fearsome clunkbot to abduct sperm donors. The Monthly Film Bulletin observed: “Settings, dialogue, characterisation and special effects are of a low order, but even their modest unreality has its charm. There is really no fault in this film that one would like to see eliminated. Everything, in its way, is quite perfect.”

Director: Roger Corman

“I invited you to this planet and you made it a charnel house!”

A Venusian who resembles a giant rubber turnip with teeth hides in a cave, plotting conquest. A misguided scientist (Lee Van Cleef) believes it might benefit mankind, but his gutsy wife (Beverly Garland) knows a monster when she sees one. One of the first SF movies to include knowingly camp elements, It Conquered the World still has eerie, even shocking moments. Screenwriters Charles Griffith and Lou Rusoff notably kill off the wrong characters – hero Peter Graves’s wife welcomes him home in 1950s sitcom fashion, then tosses a mind-controlling bat at him and is shot dead. 

Producer-director Roger Corman, who studied engineering, reasoned the inhabitant of a high-gravity planet would be squat and powerful. When Garland gave the Paul Blaisdell-created creature a solid kick on the set, Corman was convinced that in all future films he would make the monster taller than the leading lady.

Director: Roger Corman

“So you have wounded me and I must grow a new claw? Well and good, but will you grow new lives when I have taken them from you?”

Many 1950s monsters are side-effects of nuclear weapons tests, including the giant ants of Them! (1954) and the radioactive kaiju Godzilla. Weirdest of these spawns of the atom are the enlarged crustaceans of this Roger Corman picture – giant crabs with a telepathic ability to absorb the consciousness of the human beings they eat. 

Like so many B creatures, the crab monsters are awkward, unwieldy special effects which look particularly silly in stills but are far better presented – and seldom-seen – in the actual films. An expedition to an island affected by fallout from the Bikini Atoll test is picked off by the monsters just as the island itself crumbles into the sea. In eerie moments, the crabs speak with the voices of the dead.

Director: Roger Corman

“If I don’t receive blood within four chronoctons of time I shall have no continuing need for emotion.”

‘Mr Johnson’ (Paul Birch) passes for human, concealing his death-gazing white eyeballs under dark glasses. Hailing from the doomed planet Davanna, the high-tech vampire abducts victims to test human blood for its efficacy in curing the plague ravishing his homeworld. To carry out his mission, he recruits a human nurse (Beverly Garland, as intrepid as in It Conquered the World) who begins to suspect that her boss is… not of this Earth! 

Here, producer-director Roger Corman cannily goes for small-scale. In dire straits, Davanna is mounting a low-budget invasion of Earth, though it does run to an umbrella-bat creature that squishes heads and a matter transmitter in the basement. In an ending which proved influential, Johnson is defeated… but another anonymous man with dark glasses arrives to take his place.

Director: Nathan Juran

“She’ll tear up the whole town until she finds Harry.”

“Yeah, then she’ll tear up Harry.”

The A feature The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957) inspired the cheapo B The Amazing Colossal Man (1957), which in turn prompted this delirious mix of noir melodrama and shoddy spectacle. A neurotic millionaire (Allison Hayes) is being tormented by her worthless husband (William Hudson), who is running around with one of the great floozies of 50s cinema, rock’n’roll vamp Yvette Vickers. An alien giant from a ‘satellite’ (in 1958, thanks to Sputnik, flying saucers were temporarily out of fashion) uses her famous diamond necklace to power his spaceship and gifts/curses her with gigantism in return. 

Statuesque Hayes lives up to the iconic poster image when she bursts out of her house for a last-reel rampage. Even if the effects aren’t up to par, the final image of the electrocuted giantess clutching her doll-sized cheating husband is pulp perfection.

Director: John Krish

“Even if I had known what I know now, could I – or anyone – have held back the terror?”

John Krish’s claustrophobic, domestic take on the Quatermass brand of boffin-vs-alien SF drama envisions a battle of the sexes in which all men are stuffy, practical, short-sighted and terrified, while all women are unknowable, magical and purposeful. Dr Mark Davidson (John Neville), working on a hush-hush space project, is pestered by suave, sweetie-proffering security man Major Newell (Patrick Newell) because a background check by the scientist’s new wife Julie (Gabriella Licudi) suggests no such person exists. 

It’s plain that Julie is a shapeshifting spy, but the freshest angle is that this unearthly stranger does a poor job of impersonating a human – she calmly picks up a hot Le Creuzet without oven gloves, but her acid tears burn tracks in her cheeks – and is racked with unhappiness at the isolation she feels on this planet and in her marriage.

Director: Denis Sanders

“They’ll love the very life out of your body! Ordinary housewives turn into ravishing creatures!”

For a literal bee picture, this has a remarkable pedigree – directed by two-time Oscar winner Denis Sanders from a script by novelist/future director Nicholas Meyer. Mostly middle-aged men in a California town dominated by a government scientific research institute have fatal sexual encounters with women who are genetically transformed into human queen bees (“coming and going at the same time”). Rugged investigator Neil Agar (William Smith) uncovers the bizarre, incomprehensible mad science experiment behind the crisis. 

This is mostly notable for funny lines, wry performances, odd plot turns and stretches of surreal strangeness, as if Russ Meyer and Michael Crichton had collaborated on a high-tech thriller. Macho Smith strikes sparks with buttoned-down genius Julie Zorn (Victoria Vetri) while the astonishing Anitra Ford, as Dr Susan Harris, covers her black marble eyes with huge dark glasses and ensnares hapless males in a deadly mating dance.

Director: Sutton Roley

“They Were Chosen To Live. But They Were Destined To Die!”

Ten confused worthy citizens chosen by computer are hustled into an elevator and sent down to a deep-level survival bunker where military custodian Richard Jaeckel says they are among the few selected to recreate civilisation after nuclear war. While the fractious group try to process that bombshell – most problems are caused by millionaire CEO Raymond Couzins (Jackie Cooper), who becomes a drunken rapist whiner and tries to buy his way out of the hole – another pressing issue arises. The striplit high-tech complex is invaded by thirsty cave-dwelling vampire bats. 

After gruesome casualties, psychologist Peter Macomber (Bradford Dillman) admits that this is a behavioural experiment – but the killer bats are a random factor. A mix of disaster movie soap opera and animal attack horror, this compulsively tawdry quickie is imaginatively directed by Sutton Roley, who stresses distorted camera angles and sweaty, angsty performances.

Director: Norman J. Warren

“You know, there’s something about these crystals that we just haven’t discovered yet.”

In the wake of Alien (1979) – a B script given an A production – lookalike bug-eyed sex monsters proliferated. Norman J. Warren’s economical Inseminoid (also released as Horror Planet) is Alien-style sci-fi made by people who hadn’t yet seen Alien. Set in an outer-space mining complex represented by Chislehurst Caves, this feels like a Doctor Who serial with extra gore – it’s one of the few all-British films to be tagged a ‘video nasty’. 

Sandy (Judy Geeson), inseminated by a bug-eyed monster, suffers extreme mood swings during her sped-up pregnancy… and gleefully murders her teammates. The film supposes nailguns and chainsaws are essential kit for a space expedition and builds suspense by having the camera rush through rock tunnels. Geeson gives it her all, prefiguring Isabelle Adjani in Possession (1981), screaming loud enough to be heard in the vacuum of space.

Director: Charles Band

“Dry hair is for squids.”

The consciousness of cop Jack Deth (Tim Thomerson) is sent back from 2247 to possess his 1985 ancestor Phil Dethton (also Thomerson) to thwart a time-travelling cult leader who is murdering the forefathers of his enemies, wiping descendants from the timeline. Producer-director Charles Band is among the most prolific names in the low-budget B-picture and direct-to-video arena. Scripted by Danny Bilson and Paul De Meo, Trancers is one of the liveliest, wittiest, cleverest cheapies ever made. 

Hard-boiled Thomerson is outstanding as the gruff future cop, partnered in the 20th century by young Helen Hunt, who spends much of the film dressed as an elf after her mall Santa boss has turned into a feral zombie (it’s a Christmas movie!). It’s full of smart comic book/SF ideas: the sunken city of Lost Angeles, the tough cop inhabiting the body of a 10-year-old girl, the ‘long second’ time-stretching watch.

Plan 9 from Outer Space is out on BFI Blu-ray from 19 October. Attack of the Crab Monsters screens at BFI Southbank as part our season Movie Maverick: 100 Years of Roger Corman this autumn.