Borden and his guide Brenegan come staggering out of the dense jungle into a slightly less dense area of the jungle.  They are showing up 15 days late and without the porters slaves and supplies they were supposed to bring.  Borden blames Brenegan for their associates slaves abandoning them.  He was “vicious, inhuman toward them.”  Like some kind of partner-master.

They walk a little more, calling out for the group they were supposed to meet.  They quickly arrive at a cabin which just baffles me.  If it was this close by, why didn’t they just rendezvous here?  The cabin is stocked with food, so Borden says they will stay the night.  On the table, they notice a large titular cocoon.

They hear a scream and run outside.  Their last porter has found the bodies of his co-workers fellow slaves.  Borden says, “Some giant leach of an animal drained them of every drop of blood.”  They hear noise in the brush and Brenegan raises his weapon.  A woman staggers out and babbles incoherently about “hundreds of them” before fainting.  Borden carries her back to the cabin.

While Borden tends to Susan, who I think is his daughter or niece, Brenegan reads from the notes of the late Dr. Blankford:

August 3 . . .  The creature died this night.  Conclusion: it could not have been of earthly origin.  By some miracle, the meteorite brought it here.  A sample of life from beyond our universe in the form of a monstrous, invisible insect.”

Borden grabs the notebook and reads of Blankford’s discovery of a giant cocoon.  An invisible creature the size of a large dog crawled out of it.  Blankford and his assistant caught the creature and covered it with plaster to create a visible statue of it.  Borden continues reading:

July 23 . . . the plaster model is finished.  It is the most dreadful insect I have ever seen.  Note to self, order another case of model glue.

I hope it was worth the wait since the journal entry dates suggest the plaster took 11 months to dry.

July 28 . . . I discovered what the creature feeds on.  Its exclusive nutriment is . . . human blood!”

Exclusive?  No wonder it was so pissed off.  It must have gotten pretty hungry back on its homeworld with no humans.  They look around and find the plaster model Blankford made.  It is indeed hideous, a modern art masterpiece.  Susan wakes up groggily saying, “Run away, hide!  There are hundreds of them!”

When she is fully awake, she tells of the attack of the invisible creatures.  She says, “Mr. Bordon, please don’t leave me.” ^[1]  Brenegan gets the idea that the insects could be inside the cabin already and grabs his gun.  That night they are awakened by scratching noises and one of the beasts really does make it into the cabin.

The invisible critter attacks Brenegan, and Borden inexplicably saves the maniacal paranoid whiner.  He is able to pry the insect off and tie it up.  We see the “empty” coil of ropes moving about as it struggles.  Then Susan is attacked; wait, no, she just fainted.

That night, Brenegan finally gets full cabin fever.  He takes down the boxes stacked in front of the door and makes a run for it.  In seconds he is screaming off-screen as the insects attack him.  His death was not for nothing though.  First, it raises the caliber of the acting about 50%.  Second, he knocked over a box of insecticide canisters and that seems to have killed the insect they captured.  Hmmmmm, insecticide is fatal to insects — who knew?

Borden and Susan load up with canisters of the bug spray and make their escape.  They make it safely to the river.  Back at the cabin, we see hints that one of the insects has gotten into the cabin.  It goes to the statute of its fallen comrade and pulls it over with a black string visible even in this lousy transfer.

This episode is frustrating in its perfect illustration of the limitations of the time.  It was created by the team of Don Medford and Frank De Fellita, who have been responsible for the best episodes of the series.  It has all the elements for a classic episode, but is frequently undermined by technology.

As always, the transfer is just awful.  But it is just a kinescope of the original live broadcast.  Whaddya gonna do?  Have ya seen that Apollo 11 film lately?  The best argument against a moon-landing hoax is that hoaxsters would have had better footage.

Some of the acting is just over-the-top hammy.  I’m sure in 1953 that actors had figured out they didn’t still have to play to the last row of a live audience, or wildly over-emote like they did before talkies.  However, I think this genre still brought these traits out in them.  Borden was OK, but Susan was a little hysterical.  Brenegan was just a maniacal, cackling wild man.

The music was fine.  There were even bits that are pretty close to music in some classic movies.  There is a bit from The Shining ^[2] and a sequence that sounds a lot like the shark attack theme from Jaws.

In looking for that Jaws clip, I realized that the episode needs no excuses.  For what they had to work with in technology and budget, they did a fine job.  The set-up and key plot-points could have provided Halloween-level suspense — maybe in 1953, it did.  Zooming through undistracted by note-taking, I was struck by the interesting camera-work . . . the zooms in on Brenegan’s eyes (or the insect’s eyes), the focus on Susan as the men fought the insect, the effect of the tied-up invisible insect, the overwrought music (used effectively for a change).  If you have the imagination to look past the superficial problems, and appreciate what they were going for in 1953, this is another winner for Medford and De Felitta.  Relative winner.

Other Stuff:

• ^[1] But I thought they were related.  When the two men were searching for their companions, he called out, “Bordon!”  But his name is Bordon, so I assumed the other person was his brother (as his father would have been far too old for such shenanigans; the 20 year old dame I mean, not the safari).  Pffft, I have no idea who these people are.
• ^[2] Bartok, I see from You Tube comments.
• Nancy Coleman (Susan) previously acted in Dangerously They Live (1941), The Gay Sisters (1942), and Her Sister’s Secret (1946) which are the last three clips I watched on Pornhub.