Teenagers from Outer Space (1959)

(On Cable TV, May 2021) It’s almost mandatory to make fun of Teenagers from Outer Space. After all, laughter is a response to trauma, and this is a truly wretched film from a technical point of view: bad special effects, worse actors, nonsensical screenplay and shoddy production values are only some of the highlights of this attempt to create an alien-invasion film out of a woefully inadequate budget and jack-of-all-trade involvement of multi-multi-multi-hyphenate filmmaker Tom Graeff. And the result is rather endearing in its ineptness — there’s something about how over-the-top clumsy the film is that’s almost disarming. Many others agree—the film was a featured viewing for MST3K, and its passage in the public domain led it to be propagated everywhere—including within the Destroy all Humans videogame, where it was appropriately displayed as a drive-in movie. It may not be a glorious legacy, but it is a legacy — what other 1959 film produced for a five-figure budget do you remember as of 2021?