This 5th [Imprint] collection is in truth a varied Sci-fi sampler, with one bona fide classic, an ultra-cheap Sam Katzman item, a marvelous Camp hoot, a worthwhile idea turned into a terrible mess, and yet another weird expression of gonzo 50’s politics. In other words, fans of filmed Sci-fi will find these remastered oddities irresistible: Devil Girl from Mars, This Island Earth, The Gamma People, The Night The World Exploded and The 27th Day. Plus a bonus feature.

Tales of Adventure Collection 5
Blu-ray
Devil Girl from Mars, This Island Earth, The Gamma People,
The Night The World Exploded, The 27th Day
[Imprint]
1954-1957 / Color + B&W / 1:85 & 1:78 widescreen, 1:37 Academy / 6 hours 28 min. / Street Date November 28, 2024
Starring: Hazel Court, Patricia Laffan, Adrienne Corri; Jeff Morrow, Faith Domergue, Rex Reason; Paul Douglas, Eva Bartok, Leslie Phillips; Kathryn Grant, William Leslie; Gene Barry, Valerie French, George Voskovic, Arnold Moss.
Produced by: The Danzigers; William Alland; John Gossage; Sam Katzman; Helen Ainsworth
Directed by David MacDonald; Joseph Newman; John Gilling; Fred F. Sears; William Asher

The [Imprint] people can be counted on for unusual film collections, often with Blu-ray debuts of unusual titles. This branded-line entry takes the company to their 400th numbered release with an odd grouping of Science Fiction movies, four of which are debuting in Region A. One familiar classic is grouped with four from the lower end of Sci-fi esoterica: a head-scratchingly dumb disaster thriller, a politically warped alien invasion parable, a goofy English invasion tale that’s become a Camp classic oddity, and an unfortunate failure that tries to mix cerebral Sci-fi, political comment and light comedy. All have their fans, and the remasters are mostly flawless.

[Imprint’s] Tales of Adventure Collection 5 is given a quality presentation: four keep cases inside a sturdy top-opening box. We cover its titles in chronological order.

Devil Girl from Mars
1954 / B&W / 1:66 widescreen 1:37 Academy / 77 min.
Starring: Hugh McDermott, Hazel Court, Peter Reynolds, Adrienne Corri, Joseph Tomelty, John Laurie, Sophie Stewart, Anthony Richmond, James Edmond, Stewart Hibberd, Patricia Laffan.
Cinematography: Jack Cox
Art Director: Norman Arnold
Costume Design: Ronald Cobb
Film Editors: Brough Taylor, Peter Taylor
Composer: Edwin Astley
Screenplay by James Eastwood from a play by Eastwood and John C. Mather
Produced by Edward J. Danziger, Harry Lee Danziger
Directed by David MacDonald

Some viewers will decide that Devil Girl from Mars is only good for a laugh, but it’s a hell of a curiosity and very entertaining, as in ‘never a dull moment.’ There’s certainly no other movie anything like it, Science fiction or otherwise.

England did its postwar bit for Sci-fi filmmaking despite the frequent lack of production resources. Hammer’s early  Spaceways was underwhelming, and other UK attempts to copy Hollywood could be dire, as seen in  Stranger from Venus and  Fire Maidens of Outer Space. Just the same, good films were made ( Counterblast,  Seven Days to Noon) as well as top titles like Nigel Kneale’s  Quatermass pictures.

Devil Girl from Mars has the feel of a naive stage play, performed utterly seriously. Stock characters fuss and worry at a visit by a gleaming flying saucer. The female Martian invader is played with a haughty disdain by Patricia Laffan, an accomplished actress who still impresses as Peter Ustinov’s murderous wife in MGM’s big-budget Bible epic  Quo Vadis. Laffan’s ‘dominatrix from space’ was rediscovered in the 1980s as a genuine Camp spectacle. Seen in its new video remaster, Devil Girl from Mars is now revealed to be handsomely filmed and carefully directed. Is it slyly aware of its own awkwardness?  Is its unintentional comedy really unintentional?

A cozy Scottish inn harbors a cross section of types: fashion model Ellen Prestwick (horror favorite Hazel Court), reporter Michael Carter (Hugh McDermott), a scientist (Joseph Tomelty) and the barmaid Doris (Adrienne Corri), who is hiding her boyfriend, an escaped criminal (Peter Reynolds). The innkeepers (Sophie Stewart and John Laurie) tend to their precocious grandson Tommy (Anthony Richmond). There arrives a spinning, glowing alien craft carrying the statuesque warrior Nyah (Patricia Laffan). Dressed in a leather miniskirt, she delivers imperious pronouncements about ‘puny earthlings’ while ogling a cowering Hazel Court.

Nyah throws an impenetrable force field around the inn, cuts off communication and power, and prattles on about the superior weaponry of her invasion force, which includes her killer robot ‘Chani.’   Various escapades include attempts to resist Nyah’s sinister mind control, and the taking of young Tommy as a hostage. There’s also an interplanetary love triangle: Ellen falls for Michael, but Nyah decides that the hunky reporter should accompany her back to her male-depleted home planet.

Devil Girl from Mars is a surprisingly polished production. The camerawork is fine and the visual effects of the flying saucer and various rays are very good. The film’s designs don’t quite match up. The hilariously non-threatening robot Chani looks like a steam cabinet decorated with some flashing safety lights, and Nyah’s partly-spinning flying saucer resembles cast-off car parts given a shiny paint job. But the statuesque, leather-clad Nyah is the center of attention — she could be an S&M pin-up for the Looney Tunes’ Marvin the Martian. Strutting around in boots, cape and skullcap, Nyah seems less like a Martian than a visitor from a sex club twenty years in the future. There’s nothing like her until The Rocky Horror Show’s  Dr. Frank-N-Furter — yet Patricia Laffan plays the part in 100% serious mode.

Can a feminist argument be made for this pot-boiler?  Confronted by the threatening female from space, the men tend to be ineffectual and weak, and the women more independent and devious. Nyah talks like a perfidious Queen from some sword ‘n’ sandal epic. Her sisters back on Mars won a war against males, so it’s no wonder she’s ordering up an attractive Earthman, ‘to go.’

If anybody played this material for a joke, Devil Girl would likely be unwatchable. Instead, good actors perform the claustrophobic dinner-theater conflicts without irony. The tidy conclusion wraps things up pretty much how we thought they would. The attractive leads become an item and the less glamorous second couple finds tragedy, but we expected that. These actors attend the spirit of the play as if it were high drama.

Devil Girl from Mars is one of the more entertaining features in the set, although some viewers will be disoriented by its theatricality — such conventional types reacting to outrageous events in conventionally predictable ways. It really is a ‘what were they thinking?’ movie.

More discussion of the transfer quality can be read at the end of the review.

We are unable compare the excellent encoding for Devil Girl with the UK disc released just over a year ago by Cult Classics. [Imprint] appears to carry over that disc’s extras by Kim Newman and Barry Forshaw, and adds analysis by two more Australian critics. Phillipa Berry offers a second commentary, while Jon Towlson contributes an interesting video discussion of independent filmmaking in England. He explains how the ‘quota quickies’ lasted only a few years, but left behind a particular low-budget tradition. We learn that the producers the Danziger brothers were Americans. They made a couple of movies with Edgar G. Ulmer before relocating to London.

This Island Earth
1955 / Color / 1:85 widescreen (+ a bonus full-frame flat encoding) / 87 min.
Starring: Jeff Morrow, Faith Domergue, Rex Reason, Lance Fuller, Russell Johnson, Douglas Spencer, Robert Nichols.
Cinematography: Clifford Stine
Film Editor: Virgil Vogel
Special Effects: David S. Horsley, Clifford Stine, Cleo E. Baker
Original Music: Henry Mancini, Hans J. Salter, Herman Stein
Written by Franklin Coen, Edward G. O’Callaghan from a story by Raymond F. Jones
Produced by William Alland
Directed by Joseph Newman

The one acknowledged classic in the Adventure 5 Collection is This Island Earth, producer William Alland’s most ambitious Sci-fi feature of the 1950s and the first interstellar thriller in color. It’s a favorite, even though its script and direction aren’t as good as Universal’s movies directed by Jack Arnold. It and MGM’s  Forbidden Planet were rare big-budget studio Sci-fi pictures, as the genre was being overrun by much smaller films that earned just as much at the box office … like some of the others in this set.

CineSavant gave This Island Earth a full review six years ago, for a special edition Blu-ray release  reviewed here.

[Imprint] gives Universal’s classic a breezy, enthusiastic commentary by Heath Holland plus Trailers from Hell’s trailer commentary with Joe Dante. Also present is a separate full-length 1:37 flat feature encoding, a special treat for that segment of Sci-fi fandom that wants to see their favorites as they once saw them on old flat TVs.

The Gamma People
1956 / Paul Douglas / 1:78 widescreen / 79 min.
Starring: Paul Douglas, Eva Bartok, Leslie Phillips, Walter Rilla, Philip Leaver, Martin Miller, Michael Caridia, Pauline Drewett, Hedda Lochner, Jocelyn Lane, Olaf Pooley, Rosalie Crutchley, Leonard Sachs, Paul Hardtmuth, Cyril Chamberlain, St. John Stuart.
Cinematography: Ted Moore
Visual Effects: Tom Howard
Art Director: John Box assistant John Box
Costume Design: Olga Lehman
Film Editor: Jack Slade supervising editor Alan Obiston
Composer: George Melachrino
Screenplay by John Gossage, John Gilling based on a story by Louis Pollock or based on a story by Robert Aldrich (???)
Executive producers Irving Allen, Albert R. Broccoli
Produced by John Gossage
Directed by John Gilling

The Gamma People is the problem feature of the set, a thriller that begins as an interesting Sci-fi concept. But the good ideas are hobbled by a screenplay and direction that can’t decide if it’s a frightening thriller or a light comedy.

The film’s opening plays like a weak spoof of mid-European political intrigue. En route to a music festival, reporters Mike and Howard (Paul Douglas & Leslie Phillips) are literally side-tracked onto a railway spur that takes them into the tiny country of Gudavia, an Iron Curtain backwater that has sealed its borders to the outside world. The reporters are arrested as spies by clownish Gudavian police, and then soon liberated by the region’s mysterious Dr. Boronski (Walter Rilla) — who Howard recognizes as a missing UK scientist, under a different name.  Like a modern Dr. Moreau, Boronski aims to accelerate human evolution to create a superior race, and he’s been conducting highly disturbing experiments on children. His Gamma Ray projector has made young Hedda into a brilliant pianist, and young Hugo into an intellectual genius. But Hugo is also a scheming little jerk with totalitarian notions. Worse, Boronski’s many failures have become goonish morons, who wander around the Gudavian village and threaten the outside visitors.

Helping Mike and Howard in trying to save young Hedda is Boronski’s beautiful assistant Paula (Eva Bartok). The weak comedy banter eventually gives way to a Frankensteinian finish, with Boronski attempting to fry the intruders with his death ray. Help comes from an unexpected direction.

John Gilling can’t make this mish-mosh of unappetizing ideas come together; he tries to compensate by staging many scenes against handsome Austrian scenery. The Gudavian locale feels like an operetta, with the traditional costumes and quaint-but-strange locals. The police-state authorities seem foolish, while the sinister social/mind control ideas make us think of the equally confused  Scream and Scream Again made 13 years later.

The imported star Paul Douglas reverts to light comedy mode, as in his interesting Alexander Mackendrick movie  The Maggie, but there’s nothing in the story that’s remotely funny. Neither is the mad doctor’s Gamma apparatus particularly impressive, leaving the most arresting image to be the oversized mask that Hugo makes for the local carnival. A cross between a ghoul and an Easter Island statue, the mask apparently represents Dr. Boronski’s Utopian future human. Boronski’s notion of ‘creating a new race’ suggests a Dr. Moreau-like sick intention to mate Hedda with Hugo … that is, once he solves his ‘twenty morons for every genius’ problem.

The little groups of Gamma imbeciles sometimes do Boronski’s dirty work, like throwing a troublemaker from a cliff. They remind us a bit of  George Romero zombies, and are likewise incompatible with Douglas and Phillips’ attempts to inject light humor into the proceedings. The Gamma People has some ambitious ideas yet is almost completely unsatisfying, a non-starter. Few of its particulars stick in the mind for more than a few minutes.

For blame, we look to executive producers Albert R. Broccoli and Irving Allen, who stumbled through the 1950s making one lumpy overcooked genre effort after another. 1955’s  The Cockleshell Heroes is the worst ‘How I Won The War’ film we’ve seen, while the frustratingly misconceived  Fire Down Below wastes the efforts of a terrific cast (and contains several elements of Broccoli’s 007 breakthrough  Dr. No).

The Gamma People’s origin is confused as well. Alain Silver and James Ursini documented that producer-director Robert Aldrich claimed to have come up with the original story. Could it have been something he proposed to Columbia’s Harry Cohn?  The movie ended up produced in England with extensive location shooting in Imst, Austria. Director John Gilling was building a reputation as a creative director, and the film’s credits feature respected talents Ted Moore, John Box and Syd Cain — all of whom indicated high hopes for a picture of merit.

One would like to learn more about The Gamma People but no commentary or interview is attached. The movie never generated much discussion. Although not completely suppressed, like Columbia’s interesting version of Orwell’s 1984 from the same year, it wasn’t shown frequently on television.

[Imprint] instead tacks on a bonus Sci-fi feature, an old Standard-Def TV transfer of producer Alex Gordon’s 1962  The Underwater City with William Lundigan and Julie Adams. Many of its underwater scenes were filmed ‘dry for wet’ on sound stages. The movie is most noted for having been released theatrically in Black & White, even though Gordon filmed it in color. Many viewers got a big surprise when color prints showed up on TV around 1969.

The Night The World Exploded
1957 / B&W / 1:78 widescreen / 64 min.
Starring: Kathryn Grant, William Leslie, Tristram Coffin, Raymond Greenleaf, Charles Evans, Frank J. Scannell, Otto Waldis, John Zaremba; Gerald Mohr & Fred F. Sears (narrators).
Cinematography: Benjamin H. Kline
Art Director: Paul Palmentola
Film Editor: Paul Borofsky
Music director: Ross DiMaggio
Written by Jack Natteford, Luci Ward
Produced by Sam Katzman
Directed by Fred F. Sears

Ah, Sam Katzman … Columbia’s producer of low-end program filler didn’t earn much respect … the studio thought so little of his pictures, they played them without Columbia torch lady logos.

The wholly insubstantial The Night The World Exploded is nearly the worst of Sam Katzman’s Sci-fi offerings, the kind that Fred F. Sears would turn out in just a handful of days. Is it a Disaster Thriller or just a disaster?  It became the bottom half of a double bill with the equally idiotic but far more entertaining Katzman loser  The Giant Claw. Stock footage accounts for more of the running time than usual, although it’s quite creatively arranged. These Katzman films commit editorial incest: we see a familiar shot of buildings burning and think, ‘Hey, didn’t Ray Harryhausen animate a flying saucer over that scene?’

A tale of massive world destruction is told on a laughably tiny scale. Earthquake scientist William Leslie says his new technology predicts a devastating earthquake, but the governor won’t evacuate the public. When he’s proved right and a city is destroyed, Leslie gets the go-ahead to do studies on suspect places where the earth has ’tilted’ (important scientific term), presumably from pressure below. With the help of his cute assistant Kathryn Grant, Leslie climbs to the bottom of Carlsbad Caverns, a not-bad cave set. There he discovers a dangerous rock that kills a nice-guy Park Ranger (sniff). It’s none other than ‘Element 112,’ which when allowed to dry out (?) expands violently, causing all those nasty quakes.

The movie is barely an hour long … but it must spend 4 minutes in the cave set fretting over Ms. Grant. She clings for dear life to a ladder because she’s afraid to climb down. Did Katzman try to get her an Oscar nomination?

A number of years ago, a notable discussion thread at the  Classic Horror Film Board gave researcher Tom Weaver a soapbox to compare Katzman’s 20¢ movie to Universal’s $5.98 Sci-fi effort  The Monolith Monsters. Both movies postulate a crazy mystery mineral (one of them is from outer space) that grows exponentially depending on whether it is wet or dry, or salty, or whatever. Both kill unsuspecting nice folk until a bold ‘science guy’ talks somebody into blowing up a million-watt dam (or just does it himself). The question was, did one of these movies copy the other?  If so, why?

There’s really no contest between the pictures: the Universal movie has good suspense, impressive special effects and a to-die-for Lola Albright. Sam Katzman’s ‘big scene’ is a pitiful demonstration of Element 112’s explosive fury. To make his point, William Leslie takes some generals way out to the desert, just to blow up a cheap globe hanging from a tree.  ↑  The scene is even more lame than the rubber balloon that demonstrates octopus propulsion in Katzman’s earlier  It Came from Beneath the Sea.

The Night the World Exploded doesn’t give us a lot to think about. Would its two young actors consider it a good assignment simply because they get starring roles?  It’s not a very good actor’s showcase. Viewers would instead remember the film’s most unintentionally funny scene. The staging belongs in a Carol Burnett spoof. Somebody phones in the news that a giant volcano is erupting in his Nevada town … and we see it raining fire and smoke point blank through the guy’s window … one of those Sam Katzman rear-projection windows with no glass.

Our eagle eyes also caught a really cheap re-use of a set: Leslie’s lab and a large meeting room are the same space hastily redressed. We can’t miss it because the scenes are filmed identically, with an identical double door on the left. In the second scene, we see patches of darker wall and holes in the plaster where the lab equipment stood just before. Was every interior in this epic filmed on the same tiny sound stage?

This feature and The 27th Day share a disc and a keep case, and come with no extras.

The 27th Day
1957 / B&W / 1:78 widescreen / 75 min.
Starring: Gene Barry, Valerie French, George Voskovic, Arnold Moss, Stefan Schnabel, Ralph Clanton, Friedrich von Ledebur, Paul Birch, Azemat Janti, Paul Frees, Grandon Rhodes, Emil Sitka, Philip Van Zandt, Mel Welles.
Cinematography: Henry Freulich
Art Director: Ross Bellah
Film Editor: Jerome Thoms
Original Music: Mischa Bakaleinikoff
Screenplay by John Mantley John Mantley
Executive Producer Lewis J. Rachmil
Produced by Helen Ainsworth
Directed by William Asher

A last gasp for Hollywood’s anti-Red filmaking of the 1950s is this allegorical Sci-fi based on a novel that still has its fans. It follows but cannot top the impact of the 1952 jaw-dropper  Red Planet Mars, which advocates the U.S.A. becoming a Christian Theocracy. In The 27th Day the emphasis is on expunging the Soviet Union. Author John Mantley adapted his own original novel for the screen.

A cultured alien (excellent character actor Arnold Moss) collects five earthlings for an interplanetary joy ride, provided by stock footage of  Harryhausen flying saucers: American reporter Jonathan Clark (Gene Barry), Englishwoman Eve Wingate (Valerie French), German scientist Klaus Bechner (George Voskovec), Soviet soldier Ivan Godofsky (Azemat Janti) and Chinese peasant Su Tan (Marie Tsien). The alien comes from a dying planet that wants to relocate to Earth. Morally prohibited from taking life, he nevertheless gives the earthlings capsules capable of depopulating the planet, so that we can conveniently eliminate ourselves. Returned to their countries, the five possessors of the death capsules proceed in different ways. Soldier Godofsky hides his from his superiors. Su Tan commits suicide, making her capsules usesless. Eve throws her capsules into the sea and rushes to America to find Jonathan. The alien has put a deadline of 27 days on the project — if humanity hasn’t been wiped out by that time, the aliens will deem humanity worthy of survival and leave us be, thus assuring their own extinction.

The 27th Day’s level of production betters the average Sam Katzman opus, starting with the higher-caliber cast. We become acquainted with the technical aspects of the alien death pills, as the script goes absolutely haywire in its assessment of a moral way to use them. The Russkies try and fail to weaponize their capsules against America; after an hour of pacifist hopes and fears, the U.S. scientists’ solution is to jerry-rig another set to ‘wipe out every enemy of peace and freedom.’ What begins as an intriguing fable ends up serving a crock of ideological madness — a sneaky trick eliminates all Communists. World saved, ain’t it grand?  We then make an immigration deal with the devious aliens that started the trouble.

Did the producers call in actors that owed Columbia a film or two?  Gene Barry and Valerie French are quite good, with Arnold Moss and Friedrich von Ledebur standouts in the large cast. Future Beach Party director William Asher steers the show away from a ‘Fred F. Sears’ look, but it’s possible that he had twice the shooting days to work with.

Fifteen years ago we got all up and bothered by the moral hypocrisy of this show. That much longer  full review is here.

As stated above, this feature and The Night the World Exploded share a disc and a keep case, and come with no extras. I’ve read critiques of films like Red Planet Mars and The 27th Day, but disc extras seem to shy away from shows that might be controversial on the political divide.

[Imprint]’s Blu-ray set Tales of Adventure Collection 5 is given their reliably sturdy packaging. The main attraction for completist fans is simply that these shows are now available in HD quality.

All of the transfers are good; Sony almost always delivers prime quality transfers from their library. The Night the World Exploded and The 27th Day are immaculate, but The Gamma People, while otherwise sharp and good-looking, has a dusting of negative dirt here and there.

This Island Earth comes from Universal. Its transfer looks similar to an earlier domestic Blu-ray, with the colors a little less distinct and the picture a little lighter overall. Devil Girl from Mars is a truly handsome StudioCanal transfer, rich and flawless in every respect.

The standard-def ‘bonus encoding’ of 1962’s The Underwater City is clearly an old transfer, flat and ugly. Yet the movie looks to be a little more intelligent than Francis D. Lyon’s awful  Destination Inner Space.

Even when Sony has a theatrical 1:85 available for widescreen titles, [Imprint] will choose a 1:78 and fully fill the widescreen TV frame. Compositions indicate that Devil Girl from Mars was likely meant to frame off at 1:66, but the flat full-frame transfer we’re given was probably all that StudioCanal offered.

Tales of Adventure Collection 5
Blu-ray rates:
Movies: Devil: Camp Fun; Island: Classic vibes; Gamma: Odd train wreck; Exploded: weak cheapie; 27th Day: ‘morally objectionable for all.’
Video: Devil: Excellent; Island: Very Good; Gamma: Good; Exploded & 27th Day: Excellent.
Sound: All Very Good or Excellent
Supplements:
Devil Girl:
Commentary by Phillipa Berry
Commentary by Kim Newman + Barry Forshaw
Visual essay Invasion from Outer Space by Jon Towlson
Video lecture by Kim Newman
This Island Earth:
Commentary by Heath Holland
Trailers from Hell trailer commentary by Joe Dante
Trailer
Alternate 1:37 flat encoding of entire feature
The Gamma People:
Trailer
Bonus feature in Standard Definition The Underwater City (1962)
The Night the Sky Exploded & The 27th Day:
None.
Deaf and Hearing-impaired Friendly? YES; Subtitles: English (feature only)
Packaging: Four Blu-ray in Keep cases in hard card box
Reviewed: May 25, 2025
(7330sci)

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