It's an amazing and heartbreaking story.

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

There are moments that feel comical, some horrific, and some downright inspiring but the tonal shifts hardly matter as the end results come to a film that's perfect for this time.

It's a movie as timely as it is provocative and amazingly, for much of its running time, it is weirdly funny.

The man who made this film, Phil Tucker, was one of the worst film directors in history. He was responsible for such travesties as "Dance Hall Racket" and "Robot Monster"--the latter of which was among the films in Harry Medved's book "The Fifty Worst Movies of All Time". Incompetence, bad acting and crappy budgets--all hallmarks of this film legend. So, when I saw that "The Cape Canaveral Monsters" was also made by Tucker, I had to watch it, as I occasionally like a terrible movie. After all, with over 12000 reviews to my credit, I need a few truly horrible films now and again after watching artsy, foreign or silent films. Unfortunately, while "The Cape Canaveral Monsters" is very bad, it never comes close to being as bad as "Robot Monster".The film is supposedly set around Cape Canaveral, Florida. But, being a Floridian, I was amazed to see LOTS of very, very high hills with caves and not a trace of a palm tree or alligator. Frankly, if there WERE caves around Canaveral, they'd be filled up with water, as the land is swampy and very wet. The location was about as un-Canaveral like as you can get--short of filming it in Alaska! The plot involves two bad actors who have stolen human bodies killed in a car accident. Following their assumption of the bodies as their own, the pair destroy rocket test after rocket test, as their planet does not want the humans venturing into space. They also want to collect a few human specimens to take back to their home planet. Two young folks who work for a professor in charge of the rocket program stumble upon these two undead aliens. Can they stop them or is the Earth royally screwed? The story idea is pretty typical of the genre--and isn't that different from Ed Wood's "Plan 9 From Outer Space". And, like "Plan 9", the film has a lot of bad acting, crappy props and the like. Bad movie buffs will love watching the Professor deliver his lines as if he's suffering from a traumatic brain injury. They will also love the one-armed guy who clearly has his arm tucked inside his jumpsuit! But the overall level of badness isn't uniform. The male lead isn't a terrible actor and the editing and direction occasionally don't look horrible. Not exactly glowing endorsements, I know, but things that make the film less attractive to those who seek out the very worst! Bad but not quite bad enough is how I see this one.

Aliens plan to invade.But Cap Canaveral may detect the invasion before the aliens are ready. So it is time for a preemptive strike.The aliens spot a couple of likely bodies on the beach. Creating an auto accident so they can pilfer the left over bodies the aliens are now in position to foil our Cape Canaveral space project.Will the aliens be detected and harassed by snotty students armed with a transistor radio?Or will they frees dry a couple of human specimens.Let this story be a warning to all who past their curfew plan to make out in a convertible on the beach.The aliens look really hokey. With fake scars and missing limbs.One fun thing is to look at all the old technology and cars.

This is a lesser-known effort than the same director's notoriously awful ROBOT MONSTER (1953) but it actually proves somewhat better, if still in no way a good film. It may well be the first zombie picture to receive a sci-fi slant (thus predating George A. Romero's regrettably landmark NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD by 8 years!}), but the monsters' use here is really no different than the various 'alien takeover' ploys we had seen and would continue to see until that particular fad burnt itself out! What is different is that the zombies were rendered so in a car crash, so that the victims are all scarred, bloody and literally torn to pieces (one of them keeps losing an arm throughout)!; their real form, then, is nothing more than a glowing speck which enters the human body through the brain.The titular site, of course, is the U.S. rocket-launching base and the aliens are here to sabotage their every effort to breach outer space...which they do by shooting an unwieldy bazooka straight at the shuttle (at one point, the man does it while one-armed and hits the bull's-eye regardless – so much for his partner's whining that he should restore his other limb, of course by finding another human donor)! By the way, one of the film's main founts of amusement is the aliens' evident contempt for one another! – incidentally, they occasionally report to their intergalactic superior, who appears on their monitor in the form of a floating pancake!! At the base, we have the usual motley crew of military brass, rookie scientists and the obligatory German expert, who comes with a geeky-but-cute niece who throws the Doc into a fit by flirting with the young man on his time! The two lovers have to cut loose in order to enjoy some quality time together, meeting with another couple to have themselves a picnic-by-moonlight; however, the hero is too immersed in his work not to notice the static on his pal's radio, which means that a transmitter is being illegally operated in the vicinity (and which, he reasons, may have something to do with the rockets going haywire)! While he and his girl go snooping around, the other two are abducted by the aliens to their cave hide-out and placed half-dangling into what appears to be a sink while the girl is undressed to then be wrapped in a plastic sheet (in preparation for her being transmitted into space), while the boy's body makes for a plastic surgeon's dream as the bruised-up alien pilfers whatever takes his fancy from him – assuming that, if he looks good, he should be less conspicuous when roaming outside! Hero and heroine are soon in the aliens' clutches themselves, but he manages to escape simply by passing his watch in front of the controls: I have to wonder, at this stage, what would have happened had the leading man not been Physics-savvy! He lands in the home of a hillbilly (who appears before long toting a gun in his pyjamas) and calls the authorities – again, since he is who he is, we do not get the usual wasting-of-time with the hero attempting to make the cops believe his story! Even so, the pace of the 68-minute film is rather slow, being even stopped dead in its tracks at the climax so as to allow most of the cast (including the eminent scientist, who is actually present in some group-shots but not others!) – captured by the aliens by means of a paralyzing gun! – to methodically work out, via mathematical equations, what would cause an explosion from the materials at their disposal inside the cave! Again, the film is nothing to write home about and yet it does contrive a circular twist ending which was totally unexpected and downright cynical for such a low-brow offering! For the record, this viewing came by way of an old and quite hazy TV transmission that is continually interrupted for ad-breaks (though these were somewhat haphazardly eliminated afterwards).

The alien invaders using the recent dead is a whole sub-genre of films from Plan Nine From Outer Space to Invisible Invaders and this film filmmakers looking to save a buck by not having to come up with a monster suit. Sadly almost every film from genre are really bad. Sure some of them are fun bad, but they are still bad.Such is the case with Cape Canaveral Monsters. This little mistake has floating balls of light taking over the bodies of a recently deceased couple in order to sabotage the US space program.(and we thought the commies were bad)Dumb it is, fun its not.This is one to avoid-a warning I send out even to bad film lovers-this is just the wrong sort of bad.