“A woman! This is preposterous! This is highly skilled work!”

Science experiments in a nearby laboratory are ruining the regulars’ telly viewing in the local pub (given the amount of smoking going on, I’d be more worried about the perils of lung cancer than the not-very-veiled threats about nuclear power which precede this scene).

Our passionate scientist is Dr Laird (Alec Mango, yes really), whose experiments with magnetism have already cost him one assistant. The good news? “Brass hat” Brigadier Cartwright (Wyndham Goldie) has come up from London to tell him they’ve found him a new one.

The bad news?

“A woman! This is preposterous! This is highly skilled work!”

However, once in place Michele (Gabi Andre) is more than capable (certainly more capable than her predecessor and his “touching the wrong lever” shenanigans), winning over Ladd’s assistant Gil (Forrest “the American Sid James” Tucker) with her vagina-defying scientific knowledge and variable French accent.

Clearly thinking they might as well send a woman because they’re about to pull funding on Laird’s experiments anyway, the brass hats have a sudden about turn when it becomes apparent that he might have discovered a way to alter the molecular structure of enemy aeroplanes.

What they aren’t yet aware of is that he’s also attracted the attention of people living on other planets. A UFO is seen falling to earth, and the newspapers waste no time speculating that the world is being invaded by “people from Planet X”.

Got your 1950s “ism” bingo card ready? We’re moving from sexism to racism in one bound as a young girl from the village meets up with a stranger, tells him he looks “foreign” because of his whiskers, and suggest he won’t be able to find anywhere to stay because “people are quite narrowminded around here”. Of course, we know it’s okay – he’s not a foreigner, he’s an alien! Every time he appears on-screen he’s accompanied by wobbly “he’s an alien” music (such a give-away).

Meanwhile, for some reason local tramps are turning nasty and the woods are full of enormous insects and other creepy-crawlies. Things start happening really quickly (it’s almost as if someone somewhere ran out of money), with people making decisions that aren’t based on anything they could possibly know, and getting worried about other people without any visible grounds to do so.

The alien stranger – who has been christened “Mr Smith”, now helps a suspiciously small “army” to despatch the creepy crawlies, but not before they’ve eaten the face off at least one unfortunate. Michele manages to get herself trapped in a giant spider’s web and fought over by the web’s owner and an up-for-it cockroach.

With all this nonsense going on, and the finger pointed at Laird and his experiments, the scientist does a sudden 180 and becomes the bad guy, shooting the government official (and looking remarkably pleased with himself for doing so) before Smith (“the legendary character from outer space”) steps in and sorts everything out.

Ah, but is it any good?

Of course it isn’t! It’s a film featuring poorly-realised giant insects menacing people via back-projection techniques, it’s utter crap. Entertaining crap, obvs, but it does lack a certain level of internal logic which would have improved it no end, as would a satisfying conclusion that went beyond “and then a UFO came down and blew everything up”.