It’s not terrible, but great genre director Jack Arnold was losing some of his science-fiction steam at this point—or he merely struggles with a low budget as UFO films drifted out of fashion at the studios. The pulp snap of Arnold’s best work slows and stumbles here and he leans heavily on an alien special effect in which the creature looks like a glowing pile of potatoes au gratin. The best moments offer some offbeat “creepy kid” imagery in this story of a visitor from outer space who takes over the minds of the young children of US Defense Department workers. They all live at a government-provided beach community where the kids play in the sand and receive telepathic messages from extra-terrestials while the wives fret and the husbands put the finishing touches on a new satellite-based H-bomb system. Yep, it’s another one of those movies in which aliens work to stop Earth from going too far with The Bomb, except THIS alien is more sneaky than Michael Rennie. It’s a clever idea (busy television writer Bernard C. Schoenfeld scripted from a story by Tom Filer) even as the execution kinda limps its way home. See all of Jack Arnold’s earlier 1950s films first.