Good movie, but best of all time? Hardly . . .

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

There are moments in this movie where the great movie it could've been peek out... They're fleeting, here, but they're worth savoring, and they happen often enough to make it worth your while.

One of the worst ways to make a cult movie is to set out to make a cult movie.

This educational short – intended as a propaganda piece, solemnly narrated by Jack Webb (a familiar face of the era) and personally overseen by movie mogul Jack L. Warner – feels very much like an episode of "The Twilight Zone". As in INVASION USA (1952), on whose DVD it's included, the politics are hard to take nowadays – though the fantasy, albeit moralistic, framework of the narrative (wherein a passive working-class American wakes up one morning to find his hometown overrun by the Communists) makes it at least palatable in an IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE (1946) sort of way. On the other hand, being compact and on a much smaller scale than the earlier feature-film, it's easier to suspend belief in its case. By the way, George Waggner (billed "waGGner", for whatever reason) is best-known for his stint directing such classic Universal chillers as THE WOLF MAN (1941).

Of course the film was 1950s era propaganda (actually made in the early 60s) but that doesn't mean it was a gross exaggeration of what life in a Communist America would be like.Do you guys really think living in Russia was fun for the Russians? Do you think events depicted in the film didn't happen there? In any case, the film is important for historical purposes as much as anything else. Watch for a young Robert Conrad in the factory scene.This film is available as a "special feature" of the DVD release of "Invasion U.S.A." (1952) and there is a listing of 100 "cold war" era titles of a similar genre.

A previous reviewer said that this movie had a good point because Communism was (and remains) a real threat. FOR CRYIN' OUT LOUD MISTER, WHICH ERA ARE YOU LIVING IN? I should identify that I don't doubt that the USSR had missiles pointed at us, but we also had missiles pointed at them. As for spies, all countries spy on each other.The point is that anyone who takes this movie seriously must have his/her brain warped. "The Commies Are Coming, the Commies Are Coming" is unintentionally one of the most laughable movies ever. It portrays a wholesome American small town getting taken over by the Soviet Union, and one man gets accused of "deviationism" and subsequently gets executed. If nothing else, this movie could be used to show what the McCarthyites did to the Rosenbergs.As for host Jack Webb, aside from having this to his credit, he also had "Dragnet" - which apparently was nothing more than pro-police propaganda. So that's that: Jack Webb was a loser.

Jack Webb takes an average white American male, husband and father of two, into a vision of what America might be like under Soviet control.Heavy-handed and one-sided, this propaganda one-reeler has Jack Webb's thumbprints all over it. Rumored to have been bankrolled by a US Government agency (you pick one), this film runs almost like a right-wing answer to "The Twilight Zone", as if to confront TV pioneer Rod Serling's liberal-left musings.It may have shocked people in it's day, and will probably enthuse those who still look for Commies under the bed, but now, it's a camp classic, reminding us of how paranoid we were (and, by the way, how paranoid the Soviets were about the USA!).