"Whoever he is and wherever he came from, he came prepared..."

Just when you thought you'd seen every Brit film about strange temperature meddling aliens and the sweaty antics of the stiff-upper-lipped types within their range of influence, along comes another one. What was it with filmmakers in the 1960s and their desperation to get everyone as moist and wheezy as possible?

Like an episode of Doctor Who (this one was even written by Who scribe Robert Holmes), something crashes in the woods, setting a few twigs on fire and making a nearby radar operator drop his novelisation of "The G-String Murders" (complete with large photograph of breasts on the front cover). "That's a bit odd..." he underacts. "Much too small for a plane..."

Meanwhile, a couple (young woman in furs, too-old man) are busy mowing down a pedestrian in their car, with a typically stiff-upper-lipped lack of reaction. Little do they know they are being watched by strange figures in the woods...

At a nearby hospital, our hunky doctor, played by Edward Judd (from the very similar Island Of Terror) is busy turning away a tramp who reckons he's been made blind by "lights in the sky", and, as the car crash victim is brought in, a couple of rubber-suited young women are honing in on the place too.

Finally, our Doctor hero realises that the crash victim isn't human - he's got a plate in his head and dodgy blood. "Whoever he is and wherever he came from, he came prepared..." he explains. Prepared for everything except cars, obviously. Soon he's woken up, and after touching someone (and therefore learning English, obviously) he starts babbling on about coming from a planet called Lystria. The two women in rubber are escaped prisoners who went on the lam after his ship broke down.

Meanwhile the army is investigating a crater nearby, and the local bobby mentions that a "foreign-looking bloke" has just been brought into the hospital. For some reason, a forcefield has been layed around the hospital, causing the tempreature to rise and all the nurses to change out of their nylon slips (I kid you not).

Just when you're losing the will to live yourself (none of this has been particularly exciting), the hospital boss decides to jump in his car and leave, only to spectacularly crash into the invisible barrier created by the forcefield, his body shooting through the windscreen and burning up. In such a pedestrian movie, a simple little thing like this comes as quite a shock.

Realising that the alien bloke seems to fear women, the feisty lady doctor carries on the interrogation and soon finds out that it's him who's the prisoner, and the women are his guards. As the male doctor makes his way under the forcefield through the sewer to recover the male alien's power pack (and gets ridiculouly dirty in the process) the alien women home in on their escapee, and the entire film ends very quickly indeed in a storm of stock footage, one character deadpanning: "Now we've got them killing each other... just like us..."

Invasion does actually play against the stereotypes of the time, with Chinese nurses and feisty lady doctors - but then it blows it big style by making the plot turn on the rather offensive idea that "all Chinese people look the same". But at the end of the day, it's as dull as its washed-out monochrome film stock. Yawn. The best thing you can say about it is that it's short, but it still outstays its welcome.