Before there was E.T. and David Bowie there was the Man from Planet X, parked in his spaceship like a hippie in the woods on the foggy moors of a Scottish isle, his big-eyed gaze enthralling earthlings to his bidding. The Man from Planet X has all the pleasures of fifties sci-fi-the old professor and his comely daughter, the free science lessons, the embedded profundities (“If only I were not so helpless before the voiceless threat of the unknown!”), the attraction and repulsion of the alien, into which we can read a thesis or two. Ulmer, the exile, knew well the plight of the interloper from a dying planet. But the rarer pleasures of this story are in the telling; like Detour, it is a brilliant exercise in economy of means, atmospherics whose effect borders on the avant-garde. Here, in the fog (on sets reputedly left over from 1948's Joan of Arc), German Expressionism meets minimalism. How little it takes to draw us in completely!