So I guess we have to add a third choice for the end of the world: a Bang, a Whimper… and now a Scream.
Low-budget science fiction didn’t proliferate in Great Britain the way it did here in America, where everybody with access to a movie camera was trying to pump out the next monster movie hit. Some of the less ambitious English films tried to localize the terror in a single setting, more or less, and the setting of choice for pictures like Devil Girl from Mars, Immediate Disaster (Stranger from Venus) and The Strange World of Planet X (Cosmic Monsters) was the rural pub, or inn, where a little group of locals could sit about and discuss which one of them might be an invader from outer space. The movies are so claustrophobic, they sometimes resemble TV plays.
That brings us to this movie, which isn’t a cheapie yet appears made for next to nothing. The dandy title The Earth Dies Screaming isn’t attached to much of a movie, which is a disappointment for director Terence Fisher, normally a stylist who could find a way to enliven all but the most desperate projects. He seems to have found his match in Jack Parsons’ and Robert Lippert’s weak production, which has perhaps the most thoughtless screenplay in British science fiction of the ’60s. No, I take that back, as I’ve squirmed through The Terrornauts on a big screen.
A mass invasion of Earth is underway. American Jeff Nolan (Willard Parker) makes his way to a hamlet littered with dead bodies and decides to hole up with a few accidental survivors. Then the killer robots arrive. They slay with only the touch of their gloved hands. And not long thereafter, the corpses rise, blank-eyed, to serve the invaders as well. It’s something of a sticky wicket for the locals, while Jeff the Yank tends to think in immediate practicalities.
Don’t get worked up waiting for flying saucers, pitched battles or cities in flames, because most of the screaming in The Earth Dies Screaming takes place off screen. Although corpses litter the streets the kill tally is low. The most promising moment occurs when we suddenly notice that a pair of corpses we’d seen in a crumpled automobile have somehow disappeared. There’s no faulting the actors, who perform with reasonable competence. But very little happens in the screenplay by Henry Cross (Harry Spaulding of The Day Mars Invaded Earth). The characters meet, talk over their concerns and explain how they’ve survived. There’s the young couple that seems confused, and the older local (Thorley Walters), an eccentric who means well but preps for disaster by hitting the bottle. And then there’s the obnoxious elitist (Dennis Price) who has already decided that an unattached female (Virginia Field) will become his personal property. That’s about the only internal conflict going in a screenplay that has people mostly standing around talking. The crisis of the young wife having a baby in the middle of the killer robot threat is curiously subdued, almost a non-issue.
We know we’re in trouble when the killer alien robots arrive. They are no more than actors in pleated silver suits, wearing plastic heads repurposed from space helmets from an earlier movie. Old Republic robots were more interesting; these look like a cross between The Man from Planet X and men in hazmat suits. An eerie sound effect and Elisabeth Lutyens’ effective music score add a little menace but the cast never seems as disturbed as it should. The Earth is dying screaming out there, and they still make small talk.
Still, the predicament of a few people trapped as killer robots roam the streets has worked before and will work again, and this turnip of a space invasion movie has its fans if only for nostalgia’s sake. The persistent positive image that sticks in my mind is the sight of a newly resurrected corpse with a fresh set of blank eyeballs, preceding a pair of killer robots through a door. That was a favorite in the old Famous Monsters magazine. I couldn’t, and still can’t picture myself wearing those special eye coverings.
Various reviewers talk about the great Terence Fisher’s supposed lack of interest in this particular project. I have a feeling that Hammer wasn’t the most generous company to work for, what with Mr. Fisher having to do these cheaper down-market films in the first place. The fact is that only a couple of filmmakers of his generation were still working by 1964, as the Brit New Wave had swept them away in favor of new blood. Fisher’s name was on some of his country’s most profitable film exports for several years — Hammer received honors from the crown — but he wasn’t able to step up to bigger productions. I have to conclude that those involved with The Earth Dies Screaming saw it as a paying job, not a chance to shine.
Lippert’s English movies, some of them produced with Jack Parsons, don’t add up to much. Their most effective show The Curse of the Fly takes an undeveloped franchise one step forward and two steps back, despite an ingenious basic story idea. Their Spaceflight IC-1 is a blatant rip-off of a worthy Czech science fiction picture. There’s not a lot of achievement in their work. The truth about The Earth Dies Screaming is that it delivers few genre thrills. The great title is the movie.
