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.

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).

Damn, you simply have got to love these glorious paranoiac Sci-Fi/horror productions of the 60's. Not only because they have the most appealing sounding titles in cinema, but also because they don't ever waste a single moment of playtime and come straight to the confronting point. "The Earth Dies Screaming" opens with a frightening series of disastrous accidents, like a train crash, multiple car crashes, a plane crash and ordinary people dropping dead in the streets. I know we have seen this before in other movies (like "Day of the Triffids" or "Village of the Damned"), but it remains thrilling to observe. Hundreds, thousands, millions of casualties and not a single word of dialog has even been spoken yet! I realize it's an often abused expression but … they really don't make movies like these anymore nowadays! On with the story, a small group of survivors painfully come to realize alien robots targeted the entire earth's population for extermination, and nearly succeeded as well. The menace of prowling aliens is constant and needless to say the stressful situation also causes conflicts and hatred between the few remaining survivors. The concept loses quite a bit of its fantastic impact once the enemy has been identified and declared invincible, but the escalating interactions between the protagonists sustain the tension more than enough to keep you close to the screen. The always-reliable director Terence Fisher adds even more flair to an already astonishing film and never once loses his grip on the subject matter. "The Earth Dies Screaming" isn't the most startling Sci-Fi slash Horror highlight of that period, but it's undoubtedly a masterful achievement and one of the films that helped to define a cinematic era.

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.

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.