Honorable mention: — This Island Earth
— Gog
— Gattaca
The rural Virginia community in which I lived from 1961-1963 had but one TV station, and that station played an after-school movie. I think it used the "Dialing for Dollars" format.
They would show one movie per week, and would repeat it every day.
When Gog was shown, I watched it every day. I was really absorbed by it. Of course, I was only seven or eight years old.
It contained all kinds of scientific and technical subjects I was interested in, all tied together in a very weak plot.
Radar, remote control, atomic energy, spaceflight, centrifuges, death-rays, robotics.
The LASER had not been invented when Gog was made, so that magical acronym never appears in the movie, even though deadly heat rays zap objects and persons in several scenes.
In the end, the bad guys turn out to be the Communists, who had taken control of a secret government lab from a satellite in Earth orbit. An F-86 is dispatched to blow the satellite out of the sky, which is taken care of very quickly once the square-jawed scientist investigator is dispatched from Washington to look into what's wrong at the lab.
The lab in question was - I strongly believe - modeled after the Santa Susanna Field Station in the mountains east of Simi Valley, CA, which really was a secret lab back in 1954, when Gog was made.
Near SSFI (on the same mountain, I believe) is the Spahn Ranch, at which numerous Westerns and cowboy-themed TV shows were shot. It (the Spahn Ranch) is also where Charles Manson kept his "family."
***When Gog was shown, I watched it every day.***
I saw the previews (trailer) back in 1954 or 55. Never got to see the movie.
Once it came on TV and I got to see the first few minutes where a man is frozen and his body shattered. Then I had to leave to go to work.
Still haven't seen it.
Want to see this. I saw the previews in 1954 and remember the man with crutches fighting off Lon Chaney.
There are lots of films I remember from the early 1960s on TV that I can't remember the names.
In one, a scientist develops a sludge in a cave that devours everything and every one. The only thing that will kill it is air. When they break the window separating them from the sludge they find it now has an immunity to air.
There are a number of things about Gog that are both ahead of its time and humorous (though I’m sure they didn’t mean it that way). Perhaps the best is at the end, when the Lab Director talks down to the US Secretary of Defense like he was a 10 year old kid.
I actually own a copy on DVD. You can find a lot of those obscure, old movies at a site called “Monsters in Motion”.
http://www.monstersinmotion.com/
Also, while I’m thinking about it, “The Man with the X-Ray Eyes” was good too.