Killers From Space

W. Lee Wilder's Killers From Space was a common title on public domain video but never made the jump to laserdisc. Now Alpha Video has put it out on DVD in a surprisingly good quality edition, mastered from a print that is one of the better that this reviewer has seen in recent years. The 1954 movie, directed by the little-known older brother of Billy Wilder and starring Peter Graves (who had been in Billy Wilder's Stalag 17 soon before), passed out of copyright in 1982, and has had few legitimate showings in the years since -- RKO originally distributed it, but the film has since passed through the hands of Paramount Pictures. This disc is taken from a 16mm print that suffers from some scratches but is otherwise intact. The image has been mastered with a lot of care, and the sound is clean and has been set at a healthy volume, which is a surprise. The movie opens automatically to a simple menu with the "play" button in the default position. The handful of chapters are sufficient to delineate the action of the 71-minute feature, which really only has about five major scene changes.