This Island Earth

One of the most celebrated of all 1950s sci-fi films, featuring a memorably bug-eyed and brain-bulging mutant.

A scientist receives a strange consignment of electrical components and discovers he’s been chosen for a special research project, which turns out to the front for an alien scheme. Soon enough he’s caught up in an intergalactic war between the Metalunans and Zagons.

Despite its merciless lampooning by the Mystery Science Theatre 3000 TV series, This Island Earth is widely regarded as one of the strongest films from Hollywood sci-fi boom of the 1950s, featuring special effects that stand up reasonably well even today and one of the most recognisable alien monsters in all cinema, the brain-bulging, pincer-clawed Zagon mutant.