The robot invasion consisted of one robot.

The eerily deserted street scenes were filmed at dawn before traffic started. The city feels abandoned not because it was cleared, but because it was still asleep.

TARGET EARTH (1954) is one of the great accidental achievements of 1950s science fiction - a truly unsettling movie that keeps promising a robot army and can only deliver a single metallic thug wandering around a vacant Los Angeles pretending to be Chicago.

The robot was Steve Calvert, a stuntman who spent much of his career inside ape suits for low-budget jungle pictures and who brought the same patient, lumbering physicality to his mechanical menace here.

The film keeps gesturing toward the larger invasion - characters talk about it, news reports reference it, officials gravely discuss it - and then the camera cuts back to the one robot they had, doing its best.

It was Herman Cohen's debut as a producer. Cohen would go on to become one of the true showmen of American B-movie horror - I Was a Teenage Werewolf, Horrors of the Black Museum, a career built on delivering exactly what the poster promised by any means necessary.

Target Earth represents his first lesson in that particular art: take what you cannot afford to show, and make the audience's imagination do the work instead.