While making its decent to land at an airport in Tangiers a private plane loses power and crashes. On board were Professor Landersen and his son Robert (Michel Lemoine). All aboard were reported as dead. The body of Robert Landersen was missing.
Soon after that, other crashes and failures are being reported around the world. Pictures from some of the crashes show the same man in the vicinity just prior to each incident. This is unusual since some of the incidents happened around the same time but in different areas of the world. In addition, the man people report seeing looks like Robert Landersen. Authorities begin to believe that the disasters are of an extraterrestrial nature. In other words, aliens are responsible. A worldwide search is initiated to try to track down the alien.
In Italy, one of the aliens is approached by a beautiful artist, Audrey Bradbury (Jany Clair), who draws his portrait. The alien, now calling himself Bronco (Michel Lemoine), finds out that Audrey knows Marina Ferri (Maria Pia Luzi) the fiancé of Professor Giorgio Borri (Jacopo Tecchi). Borri has invented a gas that can paralyze and entire city for days. Bronco is after the formula. Audrey is fascinated by Bronco and takes him to a party where he meets Marina. Government agents find out that Bronco is in Italy and that he has been seen with Audrey. They begin tailing him. Bronco hypnotizes Marina and has her take him to see Borri.
Eventually the authorities learn that Bronco is a cyborg alien. He also has some internal power that makes him radioactive. He can kill with the touch of his hand. In addition, there are more aliens running around and all of them look like Robert Landersen. The task now is to try to find the source of the cyborgs power and find a way to combat it before they take over the world.
“Planets Against Us” AKA “Planets Around Us” AKA "I Pianeti Contro Noi" AKA “Le monstre aux yeux verts" or “The Monster with Green Eyes” was released in 1962 and was directed by Romano Ferrara. It is an Italian science fiction film. There is a French dubbed version of the movie that was then dubbed into English except for a couple areas that apparently didn’t really have any relevance to the plot of the film.
The film is very cold war-ish, especially the ending where the fourth wall is broken, and an actor points a finger at the audience as a warning of what could come if we don’t get our act together. The beginning and ending of the movie were interesting but I found the middle of it to be rather sluggish and unimpressive. They tried to show that the alien ends up falling in love with Marina, but it was done clumsily. Towards the end there is a scene where the cyborg takes off his outer human looking shell and you see just a bit of his inner metal skeleton. It’s stop-motion and the special effects are primitive, but it does have a Terminator-esque look to it. There are also some pretty cool disintegration scenes, but they are few in number. The alien spaceship is a toy, and it looks like it.
The cyborg, Bronco, is played by Michel Lemoine. I found him to be a strange choice as the cyborg. Not the robot part, he is extremely creepy and stilted so that fits. What I had a problem with is that all the women found him attractive and mysterious. Both Audrey and Marina found him unfathomable and magnetic. Meeting him didn’t work out too well for either one of them.