Alien Trespass will attract nostalgists who can’t catch enough creaking sci-fi aliens on television. Younger viewers who do not care about yesterday will probably take a pass, even if it is the first theatrical feature from R.W. Goodwin, director/co-producer of The X-Files.

The Steven Fisher screenplay, from a story by himself and co-producer James Swift, mirrors their and Goodwin’s childhood and adult love affair with such double-feature matinee standards of fifty years ago, fueled by early TV programs, now-quaint innocent national conceptions of space probes and radioactivity, and Cold War fears of invasion. This anxious atmosphere is introduced in b&w “News for November 21, 1957,” which concludes with a Hollywood studio feud that shelved, theoretically destroyed, all prints of “Alien Trespass . . . Our Feature Presentation.”

Filmmakers are not alone in their enthusiasms here. For example, in 2001 Larry Blamire directed, produced and starred in The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra, “not a spoof of B-movies -- it is a B-movie” rediscovered after half a century by a fan. Not “a spoof or a parody or a cheap imitation,” the current film is an “homage . . . maintaining the style and spirit of the movies.”

It consciously envelops a wider spectrum of classics and not-so-classics, to openly displaying two movie posters in a boy’s room and ingeniously working in the slightly anachronistic “Steven” McQueen The Blob as movie-within-a-movie reflecting “real” on-screen events. Unlike Lost Skeleton, this one has no evildoers: sheriff Vernon Watson (Robert Patrick) is a relatively harmless chaser of the female “classy chassis”; said to be intelligent, man-sucking extraterrestrial the Ghota is doing no more than obeying instinct, as distinct from its The Day the Earth Stood Still name-progenitor Gort, a robot obedient to Michael Rennie’s Klaatu Christ-figure with the same spacesuit tailor.

Unlike such obnoxious stuff as Mars Attacks!, gentle humor here is respectful of the genre that, after all, produced a share of genuine scares in its pre-FX heyday. There is one gem of a pun on Marshall Wyatt Earp, but the rest is simply fond re-creation of funny outdated acting and story styles. An It Came from Outer Space Perseids meteor shower over small Mojave, California -- actual filming was in British Columbia -- is admired by townsfolk, some of whom are drawn out to the Butte, or are already there necking, by a meteorite shock that marks the crash landing of a perfect flying saucer.

The era-styled four-tentacled Ghota (Jovan Nenadic) had sabotaged the ship carrying him, is prone to sporadic invisibility, escapes to feed on human essentials, leaving only man’s liquid component as sticky sludge, and, if not recaptured, will reproduce and wipe out our species. The pilot and only other occupant, Urt, assumes the appearance of astronomer-teacher Ted Lewis (Eric McCormack), who had driven out to investigate after anniversary love-making with lusty wife Lana (Jody Thompson).

Unused to soft-boiled eggs, spoons, and the film’s caressed 1950s automobiles, disguised Urt’s kind, emotion-challenged human is comically lost on planet Earth but dogged in pursuit. Not all that effective, the hungry Ghota nevertheless manages to ingest a half-dozen or more locals, by which time temporary police chief Dawson (Dan Lauria), three town teens, and others are believers in on the hunt.

SPOILER ALERT

Like Lana a bit more open in sexual hints than period-memory recalls, Sam’s Lucky’s diner waitress Tammy (Jenni Baird) is also drawn in, when she makes an advance, in the guise of an offer of a lift, to Urt’s clueless Lewis. Patricia Neal to Urt/Klaatu, she dreams of art-gallery romance in Sausalito and accidentally discovers vacuum-cleaner usefulness with table salt, the monster’s kryptonite. Fallen for Urt-as-Lewis, she sort of saves him and unselfishly voices humanity’s awe at the beauty of the unknown universe.

Empty re-dos like The War of the Worlds remind us that the majority of originals are better left alone. Closer to the spirit and the cinema technology to which it pays homage, Alien Trespass is neither soulless nor bad. Yet it does not improve on the sources that inspire it, so why not watch them in the first place, instead?

(Released by Roadside Attractions and rated "PG" for sci-fi action and brief historical smoking.)