The Earth Dies Screaming

I watched this movie late on cable and enjoyed every minute. It had all the ingredients of a classic B Movie. Aliens,Zombies,Quaint english village,Survivors of an environmental disaster,Hapless females,and dodgy acting. You have to love the old B Movies to really enjoy this film.

The lurid title is misleading, since a sleepy little village simply gets sleepier in this quickie retread of 'Village of the Damned' and 'The Day of the Triffids' which strikingly anticipates 'The Night of the Living Dead' with added robots.

Like Romero's later classic a small group of people take cover in a quiet rural area (here played by the village of Shere in Surrey) which provides an incongruously picturesque backdrop to an infestation of zombies; and like the later film is cleanly shot in black & white and with an atmospher scored by the celebrated composer Elizabeth Lutyens.

The first few minutes of "The Earth Dies Screaming" are very promising. There is an eerie silence showing how most of humanity has been wiped out, right at the beginning. (It also helps that the movie was shot in black and white - I find apocalypse movies that have been shot in black and white more effective than those shot in color.) As the characters are introduced, they are promised to be a colorful bunch.

But after this promising beginning, the movie starts to fall apart. We never learn why the invaders attacked Earth, nor do we learn much about them. In fact, the robots are treated very casually at times by the characters! In fact, the movie feels too casual elsewhere; although this is a '60s movie, it feels more like one of those innocent '50s sci-fi movies; there is a dated feel to this movie. The ending feels unfinished; since the movie runs only about an hour, surely they could have come up with a more concrete ending had they extended things.

It's not a TERRIBLE movie, but it's disappointing - you'll see the wasted potential.

This is a great movie. I stumbled upon it in my quest to see all of the "1950's SciFi" movies. I was also drawn to it since the great Terence Fisher directed it.

The plot about a group of people trying to come to terms with an alien invasion has been done before and done since however for what ever reason this film just plays out fantastically well.

Certainly its no better or worse than many other films in the genre, but during the 60 odd minutes that it unspools it holds with rapt attention, something that many other supposedly better films fail to do.

I know that once seen it may fall from memory but while it may not remain foremost in your brain it will forever spring up when you see the title with a "Hey that was a really good film".

If you can see it, preferably late at night with all of the lights off.

A warm-up by director Fisher for his "Island of Terror"(66) and "Night of the Big Heat"(67), this is a template for alien invasion pictures: there's a small group of survivors (in rural England) and marauding invaders, here in the form of slow-moving robots. Since the invaders never do move beyond a slow walk, they never seem to pose a serious threat unless you happen to run right up to them (which one of the characters does indeed do). Then they zap you with a touch of their cold hand and you eventually turn into a controlled zombie. It sounds a bit silly, but the film manages to convey an eeriness to the whole setting. Maybe because it's in black & white, it also reminded me a bit of "Night of the Living Dead"(68). The sense of isolation and the threat are very similar.

What sets this above other sci-fi films of the fifties & sixties is the lack of clunky, melodramatic dialog. The intent by the filmmakers and actors is that this is really happening. The survivors are an average group of citizens, caught in a traumatic situation. None of them are prepared or trained for something like this. There's always that one troublemaker in the group, of course, brandishing a revolver and behaving like an ass. But the story needs that extra tension to make it more interesting. It's low budget, but they didn't really need a lot of money to show empty streets or just several bodies littering the landscape. This one, though, really begs to be remade with a decent budget, as a full throttle invasion story. A similar Americanized version was the earlier "Target Earth"(1954).