Phantom from Space is not the worst film ever made, but it's an amazingly dull one -- and one thing that a science fiction movie should never be, even when it's bad, is dull. The whole genre is built on an innate sense of wonder, and there isn't at least a glimmer of that, then something is seriously wrong. The thing is, Phantom could have been an enjoyable little flick -- never great, mind you, but possibly good and certainly the kind of silly fluff that you look forward to seeing on an impossibly rainy Saturday afternoon. The idea of an invisible alien who is wreaking havoc and causing death has a lot of possibilities, but none of them are exploited either by director W. Lee Wilder or his screenwriters. Aside from the absence of joy and life, Phantom suffers from its meager budget. The special effects are almost non-existent, and thus rather than see so much of what transpires, we are told about it -- adding to the dullness. The characters are dull, the dialogue is dull, the direction is dull, the actors are dull -- I think you can probably see a pattern here. Phantom ends up being a film that's really only for sci-fi completists.