Raiders of the Lost Aliens: Maureen O’Sullivan in Stranded

Now Playing: Stranded (1987)

Pros: A low-budget sci-fi thriller that masterfully builds suspense, respects its audience and features solid performances
Cons: Fans of CGI and big budget effects won’t find much to like

Thanks to everyone who has participated in the ‘Favorite Stars in B Movies’ blogathon! This post on Maureen O’Sullivan is my contribution to the effort. If you haven’t already, please explore all the other marvellous posts on famous film stars and their B movie appearances: Day 1 | Day 2 | Day 3

I have reminisced many times here at Films From Beyond about my Monster Kid days, before the internet era and streaming, before VCRs and time shifting, and even before the advent of basic cable.

Yep, it was just me and the family’s black and white console TV with the rabbit ears antenna that brought in 3 clear channels and maybe another fuzzy one on a good day. But, as an eager young member of the Monster Kid Club, that was good enough. At the height of those salad days, growing up in a small university town in the midwest, I was in TV reissue/syndication heaven.

On Friday nights I had my ‘50s sci-fi movies (broadcast from the big city station 30 miles to the south), and on Saturday nights I eagerly watched the classic monsters (broadcast from the university station in my hometown). While weekend nights generally belonged to the monsters, there were plenty of opportunities to catch family friendlier, but still watchable, action-adventure movies on a number of TV movie matinees (not to mention the local downtown theater).

The Tarzan movies starring former Olympic swimmer Johnny Weissmuller were among the more memorable offerings on those lazy weekend afternoons. Sure, Tarzan was no Frankenstein, Dracula or Wolf Man, but there were enough thrills and chills in those movies to get my 10 year old heart beating just a little faster. (There were even monsters here and there, like the time Boy was trapped in a giant spider’s web in Tarzan’s Desert Mystery).

Speaking of hearts beating a little faster, beautiful Maureen O’Sullivan as Jane Parker joined Weissmuller for a decade-long run in six of the MGM Tarzan films, starting with Tarzan the Ape Man in 1932 and ending with Tarzan’s New York Adventure (1942). The skimpy outfits she wore in those films revealed as much skin as ‘30s audiences were ever likely to see (or for that matter, naive ‘60s TV viewers during the height of Tarzan’s syndicated popularity). O’Sullivan undoubtedly was the first movie crush for thousands (if not a whole generation) of fans (and yes, I was a member of that legion).

In an interview with film historian Tom Weaver, O’Sullivan had a good laugh over the fan mail she received as a result of the Tarzan costumes:

"[Weaver:] In the earliest Tarzan movies, your wardrobe was very skimpy. Did that make you self-conscious at all?
[O'Sullivan:] I didn’t think it was so skimpy. What was it now, I’ve forgotten… the outfit torn up the side? No, I thought it was appropriate for where I was. It wouldn’t have been appropriate to wear at Buckingham Palace, or to church or something [laughs], but it was appropriate for what I was doing. So no, it didn’t worry me at all -- until I started getting mail about it. And I thought, 'Well, people are crazy. They have to write about something.' If they didn’t write about that, then they wrote about how they liked me -- it was one thing or the other. I did get a lot of mail on my costume and I thought, 'Do people really have nothing to do except write to strangers?' [Laughs]" [Tom Weaver, I Was a Monster Movie Maker, McFarland, 2010, p. 185]

Fortunately, the talented Miss O’Sullivan got roles that required more than just baring her legs and keeping Tarzan out of trouble. Even as her mailbox was filling up with fan letters appreciative of her jungle wardrobe, she was donning elaborate period costumes in such prestige films as The Barretts of Wimpole Street (1934), David Copperfield (1935) and Anna Karenina (1935).

After the last Tarzan film in 1942, O’Sullivan took a break from acting to devote time to her husband, writer/director John Farrow, and her growing family (ultimately having seven children, six of whom -- including Mia Farrow -- went on to work in movies and TV).

Upon returning to acting in 1948, O’Sullivan made a splash in a starring role opposite Ray Milland in the film noir classic The Big Clock. Several undistinguished B movies later, O'Sullivan settled into guest shots on TV shows and theater appearances until she played an alcoholic show business mother to her real life daughter Mia Farrow in Woody Allen’s Hannah and Her Sisters (1986).

While Hannah and Her Sisters and the obscure, low-budget sci-fi drama Stranded (released a year later) might seem to be worlds or even universes apart, they both share the theme of families weathering adversity.

In Stranded, O’Sullivan’s movie family is a small one. She plays Grace Clark, an elderly but scrappily independent woman living with her granddaughter Deirdre (Ione Skye) in a farmhouse on the edge of town (later on we learn that Deirdre’s parents were killed in a car crash).

On a dark and stormy night, what seems at first like a lightning hit that takes out the power instead turns out to be a weird energy beam that has delivered something very strange to the Clark house. Deirdre and Grace, who are upstairs, notice a weird blue light shining from the parlor on the ground floor. Grace bravely grabs a shotgun to confront the intruders, but when it becomes apparent these are no garden variety burglars, Grace and Deirdre hide in a bedroom.

Alien travel advisory: In the U.S. there are more guns than people, so exercise caution!

A tense situation turns tragic when Deirdre’s would-be boyfriend Jerry (Kevin Haley) and his dad Vernon choose exactly the wrong time to stop by the Clark house on their way home from a fishing trip. When no one responds to his calls from the darkened house, Jerry gets worried and grabs a gun from the glove compartment.

Instead of finding Deirdre and Grace, Jerry and Vernon are startled by a tall humanoid figure with long white hair standing in the parlor, a glowing blue crystal hovering in front of her. A weird gnome-like humanoid suddenly jumps up and hisses, and before you can say “guns and surprise alien visits don’t mix,” a panicked Jerry shoots the tall figure. In turn, another figure at the top of the stairs blasts Jerry with some sort of energy beam, sending him flying out the front door. Vernon, grief-stricken and vowing revenge, drags his son’s body back to the truck and hightails it out of there.

The only thing Deirdre and Grace have to fear is fear itself.

When things get quiet, Deirdre and Grace tiptoe down the stairs, lamp and shotgun in hand. The creature that blasted Jerry suddenly intercepts them in the hallway, grabbing Grace’s shotgun and then herding them into the front parlor.

The sight that greets them is surreal: The gnome creature and two other slender, pale humanoids with high foreheads and long, flowing hair are huddled around their stricken companion who is lying on the floor. They look like they could be a family -- one of the uninjured aliens is a young, almost androgynous-looking male, and the other is older, with a stiff, regal bearing. Grace whispers, “They almost look like angels!”, to which Deirdre responds “I don’t think so…” The film’s credits list them simply as Prince (the young alien; played by Brendon Hughes), Sir (Dennis Vero) and Queen (the gunshot victim played by Florence Schauffler).

Surprise alien visits and guns don't mix.

There’s alien-looking, and then there’s alien-looking. In the latter category is the short, squat gnome with a huge creased dome of a head and long whiskers growing out of the bottom of his chin-less face (played to great effect by Michael Balzary, aka Flea of Red Hot Chili Peppers fame). The creature seems more like a humanoid pet to the aliens, and just wants to please. After the initial shock, Grace takes to the adorably homely creature, dubbing him “Jester.”

But most alarming is the creature that seems to be the alien family’s bodyguard. Despite having female curves, Warrior (Spice Williams-Crosby) is malevolent-looking, dressed in a form-fitting suit (or is it her skin?) and is mostly faceless with the exception of two large, glowing eyes (not to mention the deadly energy-beam weapon she wears on one arm).

This is not something you want to see in your house at night.

Meanwhile, the aliens and the Clarks are attending to the mortally wounded Queen. Grace deescalates the tense situation, exhibiting clear concern for the alien she calls “dear lady,” saying they need to get her to a hospital (Deirdre patiently explains to her grandmother that “they can’t go to a hospital.”) The Queen passes a brightly glowing blue crystal to Prince before expiring (Sir doesn’t seem to be in the line of succession -- you have to wonder if he’s the Prince Andrew of this royal alien court).

And before you can say “gee, that’s a surprisingly quick response time for a rural area,” multiple Sheriff’s squad cars are pulling up to the house. Even before the sheriff himself (Joe Morton) has had a chance to arrive, Vernon, with nothing but bloody revenge on his mind, goads one of the deputies to seize the day, with predictable results -- the deputy is zapped to death by Warrior, who is only defending her group.

When Sheriff McMahon finally arrives, he realizes he has inherited a cluster-you-know-what, with a dead deputy on the grounds, Deirdre and Grace bewilderingly shouting from the house that they’re not in danger, and deputies who are either too spooked to think straight or are ready to charge the house like brain-dead Rambos.

As if that situation wasn’t bad enough for a newly installed African American sheriff, a caravan of Vernon’s redneck buddies arrive just itching to blast them some aliens to kingdom come. The coup-de-grace is the sudden appearance of a solitary federal agent, Helen Anderson (Susan Barnes), complete in trenchcoat, warning McMahon that if he doesn’t quickly get control of things a military “clean-up” team will do the work for him. It just isn’t his day.

Guns and angry mobs really don't mix.

The best thing about Stranded is that the people behind it realized they didn’t have the budget to make something even remotely resembling Star Wars, so they settled for good writing, believable characters and solid performances. Not only that, but they decided to respect the intelligence of their audience.

For something so low-budget and small scale (just a single location), the film manages to pack a lot of suspense and unease (as well as pathos) into the proceedings. Much is left to the imagination. The visitors don’t arrive in a conventional spaceship, but rather some sort of transporter beam/wormhole that is never explained (and doesn’t need to be).

The aliens don’t speak English, nor is there a convenient Star Trek-style autotranslator. They are mute through most of the film (the implication being that they communicate telepathically), so the actors portraying them have to rely on facial expressions and gestures. Most expressive of all is Jester, the aliens’ “pet,” who wears his simple emotions on his sleeve, so to speak. The “angelic” aliens are a mix of the uncanny (human-looking, yet somehow not), a royal-like reserve, and gentleness.

The visitors’ backstory is communicated first to Deirdre through a series of telepathic images (aided by the blue crystal manipulated by the Prince). The rapid-fire succession of other-worldly images tells a tale of the aliens’ imprisonment, and a daring escape and pursuit by mysterious captors who aren’t shown in their entirety -- just their repulsive, reptilian legs. The sequence is simple and imaginative without requiring expensive effects or indulging in extraneous exposition.

Who needs Star Wars-style holograms when you can just beam what you want straight into somebody's mind?

Somehow, in a cosmic stroke of luck, the escapees managed to beam themselves to just about the only farmhouse in rural America where intruders -- especially such weird-looking ones -- wouldn’t be shot on sight. With their own history of tragedy and loss, Deirdre and Grace aren’t about to greet visitors, especially “angels,” with shotgun blasts.

As a result of their forbearance, Deirdre is given a telepathic glimpse of worlds no human has ever seen before -- not to mention forming a proto-romantic attachment to the angelically handsome Prince -- and Grace forms her own special bond with the alien goofball Jester. But with rival alien assassins on their trail and uncomprehending police with guns encircling the house, the peace won’t last long.

It's the Clarks and their alien visitors against the world (and part of the universe).

Joe Morton as Sheriff McMahon is in a position where, as the new sheriff in town (and an African American one at that), he is made to feel somewhat like an alien intruder in a rural area where racism is still rampant. In his confrontation with the would-be lynch mob, Vernon keeps calling the sheriff “boy,” but McMahon maintains his cool, and his deputies back him up, forcing the mob to back down.

In another example of coolness under pressure, McMahon enters the house to size up the situation and possibly negotiate what looks like a hostage situation. With Deirdre’s encouragement, the aliens give him the same telepathic briefing through the crystal. Outside the house, federal agent Barnes, who has some sort of hidden agenda of her own, suggests to the chief deputy that the aliens are using mind control on the sheriff, and that he needs to be prepared to take charge. With friends like these…

Interestingly, just a few years before, Joe Morton played the title role in the cult hit The Brother from Another Planet (1987), in which he was the alien being pursued by extraterrestrial bounty hunters.

Joe Morton has a moment of sci-fi-induced deja-vu.

Stranded was only the second movie role for UK-born Ione Skye (daughter of ‘60s pop-rock singer Donovan), who debuted in the gut-wrenching River’s Edge (1986). Although she is still working, the height of Skye’s career came with her appearance in one of the great coming-of-age comedies, Say Anything (1989), opposite John Cusack.

On the career flip side, Stranded was the second to last feature film Maureen O’Sullivan made (not counting three TV movies and a series guest shot). With the Grace Clark role O’Sullivan proved she hadn’t lost any of her acting chops, as she seemed to effortlessly combine a bit of steely resolve, a bit of elderly naivete, and a lot of empathy. Perhaps her best scene in Stranded is at the end credits, which are superimposed over footage of a local TV reporter interviewing Grace and Deirdre about their amazing alien encounter. O’Sullivan is completely natural and even a little impish in answering the reporter’s questions. It’s a delightful scene.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the other, behind-the-scenes talents that contributed to this stand-out (but highly neglected) sci-fi drama. Jeffrey Jur’s cinematography is exceptional, making expert use of light and shadow, and avoiding the overly dark, muddled night photography characteristic of other low-budget films. Subtly, the early scenes with the aliens -- when it’s not clear if they're dangerous or not -- are tinged with red, and then gradually, as they gain the trust of Deirdre and Grace, calming blues take over.

The alien design and make-up (credited to Vera Yurtchuk and Brian Wade) is simple yet effective. The Prince and his family seem to be inspired by the Nordic aliens of UFO lore. Warrior looks to be wearing a modified wetsuit, but the large eyes that dominate an otherwise featureless face make her very intimidating. Much less intimidating is Jester, who looks like he could be a cousin to the Ferengi, who were introduced in Star Trek: The Next Generation around the same time.

Separated at birth? Top row: Nordic aliens and the Prince. Bottom: a Ferengi and Jester

According to IMDb, director Fleming B. Fuller only directed two other feature films and one TV movie. Stranded is a solid sci-fi thriller that masterfully ratchets up the suspense, stimulates the imagination, and delivers some very good, affecting performances. I don’t know Fuller’s story, but it seems a shame he didn’t do more.

Where to find it: A soft-looking, but still watchable stream can be found here.

A Trip Down Monster Kid Memory Lane with Roger Corman

The great Roger Corman, master of the quick and cheap exploitation picture, producer and distributor of hundreds of films, and mentor to a whole generation of influential filmmakers and actors, passed away on May 9th of this year at the age of 98.

Roger Corman on the set of The Trip (1967; Wikimedia Commons)

Rather than duplicate a career summary that you can get in a thousand different places on the web, I thought I’d honor Roger by reminiscing about his influence on this particular Monster Kid growing up in the midwest in the ‘60s and ‘70s.

I’ve told this story before, so bear with me if it feels like a case of deja vu all over again. Living in central Iowa in the mid-‘60s was Monster Kid Heaven. On Friday nights, one of the Des Moines TV stations ran sci-fi movies, introducing me to such thrilling delights as The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, Earth vs. the Flying Saucers and the like (there were also duds like Teenage Monster or Giant from the Unknown, but being a resilient kid, I took the bad with good and was grateful that my ever-suffering parents allowed me to stay up to watch this stuff at all).

Then on Saturday nights, my local station presented Gravesend Manor, which was hosted by the wacky ensemble cast of Malcolm, the butler of the manor, his vampire buddy the Duke, cigar-chomping Esmeralda, and Claude, the mute, put-upon assistant. Gravesend Manor was the icing on the weekend monster cake, showing selections from the Shock Theater package featuring the classic Universal monsters, with a few non-horror mysteries and thrillers thrown in (it was always a letdown when the familiar monsters failed to make an appearance, but on the up-side, anticipation would then build for the next week).

To say the least, the one-two, Friday-Saturday punch of sci-fi thrills and Universal monster chills made a deep mark on my very impressionable mind. After all, here I am, decades upon decades later, and I’m still revisiting these films and posting about them.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but Roger Corman (and to give credit where it’s due, frequent writing collaborator Charles B. Griffith) had crept into my young head and were occupying it every bit as much as my beloved Universal monsters. I’d be lying to say I was impressed with every Corman film that showed up on Friday nights. I wouldn’t become familiar with the term “production values” until much later, but I knew cheap when I saw it.

These weren’t what you'd call polished pictures, but they still made an impression. For instance, the giant mutated crabs of Attack of the Crab Monsters (1957), with their lidded googly eyes and frowny faces, look like live-action cartoons. But there’s something very un-cartoony about the premise of giant irradiated crabs not only consuming human beings, but absorbing their consciousness and using that ability to lure more unsuspecting human prey into their maws (or whatever it is crabs eat with).

Okay, so giant crabs throwing their voices like ventriloquists, imitating the people they just ate for lunch is ridiculous on its face, but also creepy as hell. And then there’s the other doom facing the scientists -- the island they’re stranded on is quickly breaking up and falling into the sea. Even though the idea is wacky in the extreme, it still somehow resonated.

“The Most Terrifying Horror Ever Loosed on a Shuddering Earth!”

“A horror film has got to have something in every single scene, so the audience never has a chance to sit back for more than a moment. These films are constructed very carefully -- you do have to give people a few moments to relax and then come back into it. My main goal in Crab Monsters was to integrate tension into each scene, leading to the horror conclusion.” -- Roger Corman, The Movie World of Roger Corman (edited by J. Philip di Franco, Chelsea House, 1979)

Speaking of approaching Doom, it was Roger Corman who introduced 10-year-old me to the Apocalyptic variety via Last Woman on Earth (1960), an ultra-cheap fantasy-melodrama featuring a fatal love triangle between end-of-the-world survivors Betsy Jones-Moreland, Antony Carbone and future Oscar-winning screenwriter Robert Towne (who, in addition to writing, took acting gigs while he was still getting his feet wet in Hollywood).

I know, I know -- what in the world was a 10 year old boy doing watching something like that? Well, it was on one of those precious late-night creature shows, and in the olden days before video on demand, you took what they gave you and liked it.

“Liked” is maybe too strong a word in the case of Last Woman. Compared to all-out nuclear war resulting in a decimated earth filled with irradiated mutants, Last Woman’s apocalypse is almost gentle -- the trio had been scuba diving in Puerto Rico when a mysterious event depleted all the oxygen in the atmosphere just long enough to kill off everyone not breathing through some sort of gear. The film is a mostly slow-moving affair, with the survivors wandering around, bickering among themselves until the inevitable climactic blow-up.

This was a guaranteed snoozer for a prepubescent Monster Kid, with one exception. As the trio is walking through the streets of San Juan wondering what the hell happened, they encounter the body of a little girl lying like a large rag doll on the sidewalk. Needless to say, this got my attention, since one of the great unwritten rules of film violence is that adults are fair game, but kids and dogs are not. Disturbing as it was (especially as I wasn’t much older than the girl), this scene made the film Memorable, and automatically exempted it from the mental Dud pile.

“On an island of tropical splendor, these three must make their own world, their own new code of morals...”

A definite Dud (at least at the time) was the other film Corman made while shooting down in Puerto Rico, Creature from the Haunted Sea (1961). (Roger wanted the most bang for his buck when he invested in location shooting, so he was always looking to get an additional movie out of the deal.)

Featuring the same acting trio as Last Woman, Corman’s Creature is a comedy-horror mash-up about an American gangster who agrees to transport the deposed officials of a Caribbean banana republic to a safe harbor, but secretly plans to relieve them of their lives and treasure while blaming everything on a made-up sea monster.

Some of the comedy bits are cringey even for a 10-year-old, and the monster is comically cheap-looking, literally made from random household items. But screenwriter Charles Griffith’s premise is clever and adult for a cheap drive-in flick, and there are some wry comic moments to reward those who can look past its faults (see my full review here).

“It’s alright, be calm everybody, the boat’s insured!”

Much more in line with my Monster Kid sensibilities was Day the World Ended (1955), which was set in a more traditional apocalyptic post-nuclear war landscape, featuring a band of quarreling survivors threatened by a single (and singular) irradiated mutant (others are hinted at, but the budget apparently could only bear the cost of one monster suit).

Marty the Mutant, as the creature would come to be affectionately dubbed, was the creation of Paul Blaisdell, an independent effects artist who was highly ingenious and economical, and the go-to guy for several of Corman’s 50’s creatures. (Paul also saved costs by wearing the suit himself.)

Marty is positively demonic-looking, with pointed bat-like ears, horns growing out of his head, and three eyes (you scoff, but are you absolutely sure radiation from a nuclear war wouldn’t produce a Marty or two?). Marty’s evil looks are interesting enough, but he’s also somewhat sympathetic, with a psychic connection to one of the normie survivors that puts him a grade above the typical ‘50s B monster.

“The Screen’s New High in Naked, Screaming Terror!”

But the ultimate Corman-Blaisdell creature collaboration was Beulah, the squat, fierce-looking Venusian vegetable monster from It Conquered the World (1956). Beulah didn't quite achieve the lofty goal of the title mainly because, for budgetary reasons, she tried the conquering thing all by herself.

Although she may not look it to the untrained eye, Beulah was the Corman-Blaisdell team’s highest-concept creature. Corman and Blaisdell reasoned that in such an alien environment as Venus’, vegetables rather than animals might have reached the highest stage of sentient being. That alone wasn’t groundbreaking, given that the humanoid alien in The Thing from Another World (1951) was supposed to be an ambulatory vegetable.

Blaisdell took it a step farther with the idea that any kind of humanoid would be crushed by Venus’ atmospheric pressure (not to mention melted by the heat, but we digress), so natural selection would favor some other form of body type. And so, the squat, conical would-be conqueror Beulah was born. Once again, Blaisdell wore the suit himself (which was more like a small parade float with moveable arms than a suit).

Like many such other slow-moving menaces, would-be victims had to almost throw themselves at the creature, but there’s no denying that Beulah is unique in the annals of B sci-fi. (For more on Beulah, click here.)

“The Most Terrifying Monster the Mind of Man Can Conceive!”

“The first day we were shooting [It Conquered the World], I took the creature out. Beverly Garland, the leading lady, went over and looked at the creature. Standing over it, she said, ‘So you’ve come to conquer the world, eh? Take that!' and she kicked it.” -- The Movie World of Roger Corman

(I love that these creatures have nicknames.While they don’t represent the height of creature effects even for the time, they are wackily idiosyncratic with their exaggerated, frowning monster faces, and a refreshing change from all the giant insects and various other enlarged monsters that proliferated during the decade.)

This post wouldn’t be complete without addressing one other solitary invader from the ‘50s Corman archive. A year after Beulah failed to conquer the world, Corman had another alien set up shop in Southern California. Although he was Not of This Earth, Paul Johnson (Paul Birch) could definitely pass for human by covering up his cloudy, all-white eyes with dark glasses. Lacking a creature like Beulah, Not of This Earth (1957) had to compensate with some other-worldly ideas.

Johnson, looking like the original Man in Black, is an alien from the planet Davana who has come to Earth in search of uncontaminated blood (it seems his people have been sickened with blood disease as the result of a nuclear war.) To aid in his mission, Johnson has a matter transporter and holographic communicator installed in a closet (!) of his comfortable ranch-style home.

Posing as a man with a mysterious blood disease, Johnson enlists the unwitting aid of a doctor and nurse (Beverly Garland) to receive regular blood transfusions. The stakes couldn’t be higher: if the transfusions work, Johnson’s home planet will invade and subjugate the earth for access to healthy human blood. If they don’t, the earth will be destroyed.

I confess I was not too impressed with the movie the first go-round. It was slow moving and talky, and the alien menace, despite the disturbing eyes, was just a doughy middle-aged man in black (Johnny Cash he was not). However, a couple of scenes kept me from falling asleep.

In the first, Johnson is perturbed by a vacuum cleaner salesman who shows up on his doorstep (played by Corman mainstay Dick Miller). Sensing an opportunity, the alien invites the man down to the cellar for a demonstration of the product. Blathering away as he tries to make a sale, Miller’s character belatedly senses something’s not right, takes a look at Johnson’s featureless eyes, does a double-take, then looks forlornly at the camera for a brief moment before being dispatched by the space vampire.

This was my introduction to breaking the fourth wall, and it's a perfect example of the black humor that peppered Corman’s films and made even pre-pubescent Monster Kids like me sit up and take notice.

“Look buddy, let me have five minutes of your time in your own cellar, and I’ll prove to you that this little baby can do what no other vacuum cleaner in the world can do!”

Another sit-up-and-take-notice moment comes later when Johnson has been exposed as an alien invader. Deciding that he’s done with the doctor, the alien dispatches a flying, umbrella-like creature that wraps itself around the victim’s head and, well, maybe it’s best not to use your imagination.

The creature is a creepy forerunner of Alien’s infamous face-hugger. While this and the Dick Miller bit weren’t quite enough to redeem the film for me that first time, subsequent viewings revealed a wryly subtle take on mid-century American paranoia and strange agents hiding in plain sight in sunny Suburbia.

Whether the film hooked viewers the first time, or, as in my case, required repeat viewing to appreciate, it certainly has had an outsized impact for an early Corman exploitation flick, having been remade twice (most famously in 1988 with Traci Lords in the Beverly Garland role).

The ultimate Roger Corman cheapie that rewards repeat viewings is of course The Little Shop of Horrors (1960), which, appropriately enough, also enjoys the biggest cult reputation of all -- much of it due to its resurrection via a Broadway musical and a big budget remake.

This tale of a nerdy flower shop employee and his co-dependent relationship with a man-eating plant was made in a couple of days on a next-to-nothing budget. Full of ad-libbed dialog and seemingly ad-libbed sight gags, Little Shop is perhaps one of the unlikelier cult hits in cinematic history. Somehow, scenes that by themselves might seem sophomoric or forced -- like a duel to the death with dentist’s tools -- come together in a surreal package that has something for everyone (well, almost everyone).

It’s as if the super-accelerated production got the casts’ adrenaline going and brought out everyone’s best. There are physical bits and sight gags for Stooges fans and puns and malapropisms for the more verbally oriented (enough that it takes several viewings to fully take it all in). It’s hard not to like something about it.

Still, Little Shop was an unlikely attraction for a Monster Kid weaned on the more dignified Universal Monsters, but I was thrilled whenever it played on one of my creature features.

“Where a talking, man-eating plant gives Homicide something to think about!”

“If Bucket [A Bucket of Blood, 1960] and Little Shop, two of the cheapest films I ever directed myself, look like they were made on a bet, they pretty much were. In the middle of 1959, when AIP wanted me to make a horror film but had only $50,000 available I felt it was time to take a risk, do something fairly outrageous. I shot Bucket on only a few sets in five days. When the film worked well, I did Little Shop in two days on a leftover set just to beat my speed record.” -- Roger Corman (with Jim Jerome), How I Made a Hundred Movies in Hollywood and Never Lost a Dime, Da Capo Press, 1998, p. 62

Roger Corman inevitably graduated to bigger and better things, starting with the elegant Poe films he made with Vincent Price for American International Pictures. The man never stopped working, producing hundreds of films over the decades -- and as if that wasn’t enough, he somehow found time to do cameo appearances in some of his former mentees’ pictures.

But none of those achievements will ever fully eclipse the wonderfully quirky cheapies from the early years.They weren’t great films, but they invariably turned a profit, and Corman gained the kind of experience and smarts that money (especially bloated Hollywood budgets) can’t buy. But best of all, he created indelible memories for a whole generation of monster-loving kids.

Popeye the Spaceman: Killers from Space

Now Playing: Killers from Space (1954)

Pros: Features a mildly intriguing Cold War spy plot with an overlay of alien invaders
Cons: The film is talky and slow-paced; the alien make-up is laughable; the rear-projected monsters are about as frightening as a visit to your local zoo’s reptile house

Last year I participated in the annual “So Bad It’s Good” blogathon hosted by Rebecca at Taking Up Room. Back then, I wrote about a bizarre alien who takes over the mind and body of a nuclear scientist in order to gain access to America's nuclear secrets and rule the world (The Brain from Planet Arous).

For this year’s So Bad It’s Good fest, I decided on a film about bizarre aliens who take over the mind of a scientist in order to gain access to nuclear secrets and rule the world. (I know what you’re thinking, but stick with me -- it’s only superficially similar to last year’s baddie. And by the way, if you like what you see here, you’ll love all the write-ups of delightfully bad films that Rebecca has collected at her site.)

In the early part of the 1950s, the newly developed H-bomb -- orders of magnitude more powerful than the bombs that leveled Hiroshima and Nagasaki -- hovered like a colossal mushroom-shaped angel of death over the collective imaginations of Americans. Fears of world-ending nuclear war precipitated communist witch hunts, backyard bomb shelters and duck-and-cover drills in schools.

B movie makers, never ones to let a good scare go unexploited, reworked the fears into assorted alien invasions, radioactive monsters and even the occasional apocalyptic wasteland. Wisely, most declined to feature or even refer to Russians in their films, as that was getting a little too close to worrying news headlines to be good, escapist entertainment. So alien invaders and irradiated monsters were pressed into service as stand-ins for the pesky Reds.

As an early Cold War artifact, Killers from Space is as paranoid and wacky as they come, featuring an American nuclear scientist kidnapped by Russians, er, aliens, and hypnotized into helping them with their nefarious plans. And for bad movie aficionados, it includes ludicrous-looking space invaders and more pseudo-scientific gobbledygook than you can shake a slide rule at.

Killers from Space, meet the killers from Earth with their awesome H-bombs!

The film opens with lots of stock footage of an above-ground nuclear test being conducted in the Nevada desert. Dr. Doug Martin (Peter Graves) is flying second seat in a jet circling the blast, taking measurements. Martin and the pilot spot a strange bright light flashing on the ground near the test site, and as they change course to investigate, the pilot shouts that he’s lost control of the plane, which heads straight toward the ground.

Rescuers find the mangled body of the pilot at the crash site, but there’s not even a tiny piece of Dr. Martin to be found. Later in the day, Martin, shaken and disoriented, stumbles up to the main gate of the nuclear test base, seemingly none the worse for wear with the exception of neat surgical incisions on his chest.

Martin’s colleagues and his wife Ellen (Barbara Bestar) are relieved that he’s alive, yet incredulous that he could have survived such a horrendous crash. The chief scientist and base doctor order Martin to take time off to recover, but being a patriotic cold warrior, Martin chomps at the bit to get back to work.

A grizzled FBI agent (Briggs, played by Steve Pendleton) is called in to investigate, and at one point he speculates that the man claiming to be Martin is an imposter (cue the dramatic music). No one else wants to believe the worst, but as a precaution Martin’s superiors put him on indefinite leave.

At home, Martin is having nightmares and seeing weird, disembodied floating eyeballs. But Martin is a driven man (by his sense of duty, or something else?), and the mandatory downtime will not stand. He sneaks onto the base after hours and helps himself to a file of top secret test data.

The suspicious FBI agent tails Martin and catches him trying to hide the files under a rock near where his plane crashed. Martin escapes, but crashes his car after huge floating eyeballs seem to fly into his windshield.

Public service announcement: When driving, always keep your eyes on the road.

Back at the base hospital, the commander authorizes the doctor to administer sodium amytal to the delirious scientist, who keeps insisting “They’ll kill everyone! We’ve got to stop them!”.

Your eyelids are getting heavy, you are feeling sleepy. You will not remember any of the mild spoilers revealed in this next section…

Martin recovers his post-crash memories with the aid of the truth serum, and in an extended flashback sequence, relates his crazy story.

The sequence starts off promisingly enough with Martin waking up on a table, a trio of weird pop-eyed aliens clustered around him with strange instruments in their hands. (UFO enthusiasts will instantly recognize the classic abductee tale of being taken aboard a spaceship for examination and/or esoteric surgical procedures. In this case, the aliens have restarted Martin’s heart after recovering his body from the crash.)

The earth scientist finds himself in a dimly-lit cavern with all sorts of scientific paraphernalia strewn about. The silent alien minions take Martin to their head honcho (John Frederick), who introduces himself as a fellow scientist from another planet.

Unfortunately, instead of an action-packed follow-up to the mystery of Martin’s disappearance from the crash site, we’re treated to a seemingly endless tour of the aliens’ underground lair and the backstory of how they came to be on our planet (imagine a super-villain bragging to the captured hero about his evil plans for 20 minutes straight).

The Killers from Space taught the grey aliens everything they know about surgery on humans.

It seems the aliens are an advance guard from a dying planet tasked with paving the way for a takeover of the earth (hmmm, where have we heard that before?). In a head-scratchingly convoluted plot, they’ve tunneled underneath the nuclear test site to siphon off energy from the blasts, which they are using to create giant mutations of the local fauna (desert lizards, scorpions and spiders, oh my!). When it comes time for the invasion, they intend to unleash the creatures on earth’s population (?!).

But for some obscure reason, they need more data on the strength of the nuclear blasts to complete their fiendish plans, so they kidnap Martin for the purpose of hypnotizing him into stealing files from the base (okaaay…).

Considering the circumstances, Martin, at least at the beginning, is strangely composed, following the alien leader around and asking questions like he was on a VIP behind-the-scenes tour of Disneyland. But curiosity has its limits, and before the alien can talk his ear off, he makes a run for it.

Martin’s escape attempt consists of yet another overly long sequence of the panicked man running from one cavern to another, encountering rear-projected “giant” creatures who thrash around and gnash their mandibles, but seem strangely uninterested in attacking the puny human. They don’t appear to be very good candidates for devouring humanity and laying waste to the earth.

Martin stares down a rear-projected lizard in the Bronson caverns.

Back at the hospital where Martin has come out of the drug-induced trance, his wife and colleagues are stupefied by the incredible story. The base doctor tells the commander that anything said under the influence of the sodium amytal has to be the truth, but he seems doubtful. It looks like Martin will have to go it alone to thwart the aliens’ plans.

You’ve got to admire the ambition and cockeyed optimism of filmmakers who try to launch epic cinematic alien invasions on a shoestring budget. In the era before sci-fi became big business and CGI made ambitious effects more feasible and spectacular, intrepid producers with big ideas and not so much cash had to content themselves with making liberal use of stock footage (checkmark for Killers), economical make-up and costumes (check; more on that later), in-camera effects (check) and nearby locations like Los Angeles’ Bronson Caves that were cheap and convenient but still added an element of the exotic (check).

In addition, the philosophy behind Killers from Space seems to be that if you can’t wow ‘em with big budget effects, distract ‘em with a lot of pseudo-scientific jargon. The questionable science and non-sequiturs come fast and furious during Martin’s flashback scenes.

It’s hard not to crack a smile when the alien scientist brags to Martin about how the invasion fleet is “magnetically propelled along the electron bridge,” or how “to date, we have accumulated several billion electron volts as a result of your atomic explosions.”

During the show and tell the alien makes extensive use of a viewscreen that no doubt looked futuristic to ‘50s audiences used to bulky console TV sets. He shows Martin brief shots of flying saucer models zipping along the “electron bridge,” a fuzzy image of his dying home planet hanging out in space, and for the coup-de-grace, footage of a futuristic city from the home world. The model work is decent for the time, but Killer’s producers didn’t spring for it (and probably couldn’t have afforded it) -- the footage is borrowed from an earlier sci-fi film, Flight to Mars (1951). [IMDb trivia]

"I don't know Doc, I can't make out that last line in the eye chart at all!"

In a way it’s all very meta: we’re watching the characters on a screen, who in turn are watching a screen. The video tour of outer space wonders goes on and on smack dab in the middle of the movie. I’m tempted to think the people behind Killers were onto something: That in our advanced technological society, “reality” is not what we experience and feel directly, but what we see on screens. Or maybe the producers just needed to show their stock footage in a way that looked “spacey” and futuristic, but didn’t cost much. I guess we’ll never know.

Speaking of the deleterious effects of too much screen time, Killers from Space’s biggest claim to fame is the aliens’ ridiculous-looking bulging eyes (not to mention the thick, bushy eyebrows, which give the effect of two caterpillars crawling on a plate of sunny side-up eggs). The head alien tells Martin that their eyes are the result of centuries of adapting to growing darkness as their sun dimmed. But ‘50s moms knew the real score -- if you watch too much TV (or fancy tele-screens), you’ll end up looking like that. (Alternatively, my mom warned that I’d become permanently cross-eyed from sitting too close to the TV.)

The eyes look as if a harried effects person cut ping pong balls in half and painted pupils on them. According to Killers’ make-up man Harry Thomas, budget-conscious producer-director W. Lee Wilder wanted to do exactly that, but Harry had a slightly better, but still economical, idea:

“I made the eyes out of plastic and colored them, gave them a light film for the sclera and put a hole in the middle so the actor could see. Again, it was a hurry-up thing -- what I wanted to do was punch the plastic eyes through cotton or lens paper, then seal all that to the face so it would look like they came out of the eye sockets themselves. They wouldn’t give me that time, nor time to shade the sides of the eyes to give it some dimension and feeling.
  The main alien -- did you notice those eyes move? What I did was put another pair of eyes over the first pair and pull them back and forth with strings. That was my own idea; I just couldn’t see the picture without animation. I wanted to see those eyes move, and when it worked, that made my heart feel real good because then the audience believed it.” [from Tom Weaver, Interviews with B Science Fiction and Horror Movie Makers: Writers, Producers, Directors, Moguls and Makeup, McFarland, 1988, p. 359]

The aliens saved a bundle by waiting for the Presidents Day sale to buy their 4K viewscreens.

The main man behind Killers from Space, producer-director W. Lee “Willie” Wilder, was the older brother of Hollywood legend Billy Wilder, who wrote and directed many all-time classics, including Double Indemnity, Sunset Boulevard and Some Like It Hot. Prior to catching the movie-making bug, W. Lee manufactured women’s purses in New York.

He moved to Los Angeles in 1945 and started his own film company, producing The Great Flammarion (with Erich von Stroheim) in 1945 and directing his first feature, The Glass Alibi the next year.

After spending a couple of years making musical shorts, Wilder decided to cash in on the sci-fi craze. In the early ‘50s, Wilder started the Planet Filmways company, producing and directing a string of low-budget sci-fi movies in collaboration with his son Myles, who co-wrote the screenplays (Myles would later go on to write for such TV comedy hits as Get Smart and The Dukes of Hazzard). 

In addition to Killers from Space, the team was responsible for Phantom from Space (1953), about a lone invisible alien invader (tailor-made for a paltry budget), and The Snow Creature (1954), featuring a Yeti captured in the Himalayas and transported to Los Angeles where it escapes to wreak havoc.

But Wilder’s goofiest contribution to ‘50s sci-fi debuted in 1957. The Man Without a Body tells the tale of a wealthy businessman with a terminal brain tumor who comes up with a lunatic plan to preserve his legacy: He steals the preserved head of Nostradamus and enlists the aid of a mad scientist to replace his brain with the prophet’s, which is somehow supposed to take on the businessman’s memories and personality. (Unfortunately, the film manages to be talky and slow-moving in spite of its cracked premise.)

"If you want to get a head in this business, you need to set aside your ethics!"

Peter Graves is of course best known for his role as Jim Phelps, head of TV’s Mission: Impossible team from 1967 - 1973. Graves and his brother James Arness (Marshall Matt Dillon of Gunsmoke) had a number of sci-fi gigs before securing their signature roles: after his encounter with the pop-eyed aliens, Graves fought a Venusian vegetable monster in Roger Corman’s It Conquered the World (1956) and battled giant grasshoppers in Beginning of the End (1957); Arness was the Thing from Another World (1951) and went up against giant mutated ants in Them! (1954).

So, when all is said and done, is Killers from Space so bad it’s good (or at least worth a look as a vintage curiosity)? My favorite go-to expert on ‘50s sci-fi, Bill Warren, thought that at least one aspect was interesting even if the execution was lacking:

“The idea of a man being forced against his knowledge to spy for aliens intent on conquering the Earth is moderately intriguing, and could have made a better film than Killers from Space. But lack of imagination and a low budget doom it. The reliance on back-projected insects and animals as the aliens’ major weapons of conquest is cheap and foolish, especially as the monsters don’t do anything except sit there and look put upon.” [Warren, Keep Watching the Skies! Vol. I, McFarland, 1982, p. 178]

As hare-brained and plodding as it is, Killers from Space still stands as a somewhat intriguing artifact of its time, a low-budget Cold War fever dream.

After defeating the Killers from Space, the crew at the military base
got back to work preparing for nuclear Armageddon.

Where to find it: Streaming | DVD

That '70s Sci-fi TV Movie, Part One: The Love War

Now Playing: The Love War (TV movie, 1970)

Pros: The two leads give it their all despite a weak script and cut-rate production values
Cons: Like I said, weak script and cut-rate production values

Back in November of last year, Barry at Cinematic Catharsis accepted a challenge from a fellow blogger to write about his five favorite movies from 1978. At the end of that post, he issued new challenges to several bloggers, including yours truly. Picking up the baton, I decided to go with my top five underrated/overlooked ‘70s sci-fi TV movies.

At first I intended to just devote a single post to the five, but of course, being congenitally verbose (and a little masochistic), I found myself regurgitating paragraphs and paragraphs on the first movie, so I decided to turn the single post into a five-part series. I’ll pass on the challenge to a new set of bloggers in part five, but until then, on with the show!

This Aaron Spelling-produced TV movie is as bare bones as they come, even for an era known for its low-budget TV productions. Lloyd Bridges plays an alien operative from the planet Argon who has traveled to earth along with two colleagues to fight a team from a rival planet for control of the planet. All the aliens have assumed human appearances and identities, and we eventually learn that the contest is strictly regulated by an interplanetary “War Arbitration Control” board - each side gets three representatives, and the team with the last man/alien standing wins. However, as we also soon learn, that doesn’t preclude one side or the other from cheating.

The movie starts out with Bridges tracking down a rival alien at the Los Angeles train station. For the mission, he’s outfitted with an energy gun that looks like a wand candle lighter, a communicator that is nothing more than a translucent plastic stick, a tracking device that looks like a small pill box with red and white flashing lights, and weird wrap around glasses that he uses to see his rivals in their real form (shades of They Live!) Again, it doesn’t get any more basic than that, and probably cost Spelling all of $20 to outfit the whole cast.

The clerk at Sunglass Hut assured Kyle that this was the latest style.

The biggest effect is quickly trotted out. Bridges somehow manages to blast the enemy operative without attracting any attention, and then attaches a small detonator to the body, which within seconds causes it to glow green, then disintegrate in a ball of orange fire.

But that’s only the preliminaries. For some obscure reason, the final battle is to take place in a small California town south of Fresno (!). Bridges must get there pronto, but has missed the only train of the day, so he takes the bus… (Okay, he travels light years to fight in a battle for the earth, and he has to take the bus to get to his appointment? Really?) Enter Angie Dickinson/Sandy, who provides the love interest in The Love War. She hops on the bus enroute to Fresno, plops down in the seat next to Bridges, and (apologies in advance) chats him up like a call girl at an aluminum siding salesmen's convention.

Not used to interacting with earth women, Bridges (who introduces himself as Kyle) is very awkward at first, but then quickly warms up to the beautiful woman who has such an avid interest in him. Subsequent developments require an entire suspension bridge of disbelief on the part of the viewer.

Bridges allows Sandy to follow him to an old hotel at his destination, where he sedates her and reveals his true form and mission as she struggles to stay awake. Apparently the stakes are ultra-high: If the Argons win, they will invite humanity to join their interplanetary federation; if the other side wins, they will eliminate human beings and take over the planet. Enamored with Sandy to the point of imbecility, Bridges takes her with him to the final battle over the objections of his Argon teammate (Daniel J. Travanti of Hill Street Blues fame).

.

Kyle takes a break with Sandy before trying to save humanity from complete annihilation.

The Love War goes into action movie mode with shoot-outs, car chases and even a Wild West-style showdown in a ghost town. Along the way, Sandy remains an enigma -- will she be a help or hindrance in the battle for the earth? (Also, if Kyle somehow wins, will he be called to account for being a love-struck idiot who needlessly endangered the supremely important mission?)

The best thing going for The Love War is that Bridges and Dickinson keep absolutely straight faces throughout, even as they’re throwing off lines like “I haven’t felt this way in 150 years” or “I’ve never felt so alive -- kiss me Kyle!”

I remember as a teenager being intrigued with The Love War when it first aired, and somehow the “magician’s act” of the bodies disappearing in a puff of flame and smoke made a particular impression on me. (And yes, I was old enough to be impressed by Angie as well!) I also recall thinking the idea of pitting small teams of soldiers against each other to decide the fate of a planet, versus fighting a war that would get a lot of people killed was a cool one (especially living at the height of the Vietnam war).

Seeing it 50+ years later, it’s hard not to smirk at the hackneyed premise (even for its time; see below), the bare bones production, the clunky dialog, the logic lapses, and the indifferently staged action scenes. Still, there’s something endearing about these old TV movies that, due to limited budgets, had to be more about ideas and characters than effects, even if they ultimately fell flat.

The final showdown at the Not-OK Corral.

Lloyd Bridges would go on to appear in a number of notable sci-fi, fantasy and suspense TV movies during the decade, including The Deadly Dream (1971), Haunts of the Very Rich (1972), and The Force of Evil (1977), among others. Angie Dickinson appeared in The Resurrection of Zachary Wheeler (1971), the short-lived supernatural anthology series Circle of Fear (1972), and the Dan Curtis TV movie/pilot The Norliss Tapes (1972), before reaching the zenith of her fame as the star of Police Woman (1974-78).

Where to find it: An okay streaming copy can be found here.

A short, select list of ‘60s & ‘70s sci-fi TV dealing with hand-picked combatants squaring off in battles to the death:

The Outer Limits, “Fun and Games” (1964). For amusement purposes, an all-powerful alien pits two earth people against two creatures from another galaxy in a deathmatch to determine whose planet will be destroyed and whose will be saved.

A deadly boomerang is part of the fun and games in this Outer Limits episode.

Star Trek, “Arena” (1967). The advanced space civilization the Metrons intercede in a clash between the Enterprise and a Gorn ship, dispatching the two captains to a deserted planet to settle their differences in hand-to-claw combat.

Kirk and the Gorn captain rehearse for Dancing with the Stars.

The Challenge (TV movie, 1970). To avoid an all-out war over a crashed nuclear-powered satellite, the U.S. and an unnamed Asian country send one commando each to a deserted Pacific island to battle it out to the death. Directed by George McCowan (credited as “Alan Smithee”) who also directed The Love War.

Astonishing Alien Robot Invasions, Part Three: Devil Girl from Mars

Now Playing: Devil Girl from Mars (1954)

Pros: Briskly paced; cool spaceship design; the Devil Girl appeals to the adolescent in all of us
Cons: The scary robot is underutilized; tries to cram too many subplots into its short runtime

Astonishingly, my first two Astonishing Alien Robot Invasion posts have proved to be pretty popular, leading the way in page views in the last year or so (see them here and here). I referenced the Devil Girl and her faithful robot sidekick in both parts of the series, so it’s time for the Martian duo to get their own post.

Admittedly, “invasion” is somewhat an exaggeration in describing the Devil Girl’s mission. Kidnapping is more accurate, but then, what is kidnapping if not an invasion of someone’s personal space, security and bodily integrity?

Also, there’s just the one robot in this one, and not an army (or even a platoon) hunting down humans and doing nasty things to them. And unlike the first two films in the series, where the robots’ masters are never seen, this robot’s mistress, the Devil Girl, is front and center, strutting around in a tight-fitting black leather outfit and boots that look like they were salvaged from… well, I think you know what I’m talking about.

But enough about differences -- the Devil Girl’s metallic sidekick qualifies as an alien robot invader, and that’s that.

For a low budget B in which all the action takes place in one location -- an inn in a remote corner of the Scottish Highlands -- Devil Girl packs a lot of characters, back stories, scientific jargon, love affairs and assorted high drama into its short 77 minute run-time.

Okay, pay attention, because there will be a quiz later. Within the opening 20 minutes or so, all sorts of characters and plot lines converge on the quaint Scottish inn:

• Convicted wife-murderer Robert “It was an accident” Justin, aka Albert Simpson (Peter Reynolds), has escaped from custody and sought shelter at the inn, where his girlfriend/mistress Doris (Adrienne Cori) works. Doris introduces him to everyone as a hiker.
• Prof. Hennessey, an astrophysicist (Joseph Tomelty), and news reporter Michael Carter (Hugh McDermott) have been driving around the countryside investigating reports of a meteor (which will soon be revealed as something else entirely). They get lost, and end up seeking shelter at the inn.
• A glamorous London fashion model, Ellen Preswick (Hazel Court) is already at the inn, trying to find peace and solitude after a break-up with her boyfriend.
• As if that weren’t enough, innkeepers Mr. and Mrs. Jamieson (John Laurie and Sophie Stewart) also have their young nephew Tommy (Anthony Richmond) staying with them. It doesn’t help that Mr. Jamieson likes to take a nip from his own bar inventory whenever he can.

The Devil Girl isn't sure if she's walked onto the set of a sci-fi movie or a soap opera.

Whew! This all sets the stage for the Devil Girl’s spectacular entrance (spectacular for a ‘50s B movie at any rate). Michael, the newspaper reporter, recognizes Albert as the escaped convict, and just as he’s about to expose him, a sudden bright light and thunderous noise overhead distracts everyone.

A spaceship lands outside the inn in a tumult of retro-rocket fire, smoke and wailing mechanical noise. In typical fashion, the professor confesses that he’s baffled by the thing, preferring to believe that it’s some sort of experimental plane or guided missile rather than a spaceship from another planet. But the phone is dead and the car won’t start, so it starts to dawn on the assembled guests that conventional explanations won’t do.

Cue the Devil Girl (Patricia Laffan), who emerges from the spacecraft looking absolutely fabulous in a black headpiece and matching cape. She slowly saunters down the gangplank like a supermodel on a fashion show runway.

After dispatching the poor, crippled handyman with a disintegrator ray, she makes her grand entrance at the inn. As the professor and Michael look on slack-jawed, the imperious visitor introduces herself as Nyah, a Martian. She had been headed for London, but had miscalculated and lost a piece of her ship after encountering a thicker than expected atmosphere. (?!)

Nyah matter-of-factly explains that females became the rulers of Mars after a devastating war of the sexes, but that since then males have been declining and the birth rate has plummeted. Her mission is to collect red-blooded earth males to take back to Mars to rejuvenate the population.

In spite of the miscalculations that landed her in the middle of nowhere, Nyah has quite an array of super-scientific technology and powers at her disposal, including the aforementioned disintegrator ray-gun, telepathic mind control, force fields, and a lumbering, 10-foot-tall robot that can shoot a disintegrator beam out of its see-through, dome-like head.

In a lengthy sequence Nyah has her robot companion disintegrate a tree, a truck and a tool shed in order to intimidate the locals (shades of Klaatu and Gort from a few years earlier, except that those aliens only used their power after being attacked).

The Devil Girl and her robot use the Scottish Highlands for target practice.

Supremely confident in her superiority, Nyah is not content to sit quietly, sip coffee and thumb through a magazine while waiting for her ship to be repaired. She keeps barging into that most sacred of British inner sanctums, the tavern at the inn, hurling insults at the “puny” and “demented” humans (see my post on The Earth Dies Screaming for more on the local pub as a safe refuge in UK sci-fi and horror films). 

But she oversteps when she kidnaps sweet, innocent Tommy, threatening to take him back to Mars, and at that point the humans are ready to stop cowering and fight back. She also miscalculates when she takes the professor on a tour of her ship to further brag about the might and power of Mars. She’s especially proud of the ship’s “perpetual motion” power source. The old scientist, whom Nyah had earlier called “a very poor specimen,” makes a mental note of this possible Achilles heel. Every scrap of information is vital if the “puny” humans are to have a chance at stopping the invasion and preventing earth’s virile males from being abducted to Mars.

Just like The Brain from Planet Arous that I wrote about recently, the Devil Girl is straight out of the cheesier sci-fi pulp magazines of the ‘30s and ‘40s, wherein female characters tended to be either potential victims of bug-eyed monsters or evil alien queens intent on subjugating earthmen.

Devil Girl’s producers didn’t have the budget to do a full-fledged space opera, so they did the next best thing, bringing the most interesting elements -- the female alien, the scary robot and a pretty cool spaceship -- down to earth to play out the melodrama on a single set.

The set is pretty lively, what with the escaped convict hiding out at the inn, the handyman being vaporized, the professor spluttering and trying to deny the evidence of his own eyes, the reporter desperately trying to contact his paper about the story of the century, and the Devil Girl strutting around trying to impress the rubes with her superpowers. There’s even a budding romance between Michael and Ellen the fashion model.

Have you heard this one? A Martian, a fashion model and newspaper reporter walk into a bar...

But there’s only so much a one-set sci-fi wonder can do before a certain amount of viewer fatigue sets in. If you were a drinker and tipped your glass every time the Devil Girl made a dramatic entrance, stared contemptuously at the puny humans, insulted one of them or bragged about her awesome powers, you’d be hard-pressed by the end to get up off the couch. [Editor’s note: Films From Beyond does not endorse drinking games. Always watch B sci-fi movies safely and responsibly.]

On the other hand, Nyah’s metallic sidekick, Chani the robot, gets short shrift. Chani is clunky and slow and looks more like a walking meat freezer than the product of an advanced civilization, but at least he can fire those neat disintegrator rays out of his head.

He’s trotted out about midway for his shock and awe demonstration, then makes only one more brief appearance toward the end when he helps his mistress thwart a desperate plan by Michael to take control of the ship. The music swells when Chani makes his appearances, but unfortunately he’s not as scary or intimidating as his slimmer, trimmer cousin Gort.

Perhaps Devil Girl’s greatest contribution to '50s sci-fi coolness is the spaceship that makes its noisy landing next to the inn. It has a very distinctive look, combining classic UFO elements like a spinning band suggesting anti-gravity propulsion, with more conventional rocketship attributes like airfoil stabilizers and retro-rockets for landing. The special effects team headed by Jack Whitehead supplemented the model with matte paintings to convey the enormous size of the ship. It’s very well done.

"It's okay, we've got TSA precheck."

Devil Girl has a “so bad it’s good” cult reputation, mainly due to Nyah’s outfit and Patricia Laffan’s sneering performance. While it’s seedy around the edges and betrays its low budget at every turn, there’s so much going on, and so many different characters emoting their hearts out, that it flies along at brisk pace and has a surprising amount of energy for an ostensibly talky, set-bound film.

Where to find it: Streaming | DVD  

Astonishing Fact

While the 1950s are not generally considered a high-water mark for strong and independent women in popular culture, the decade’s sci-fi movies teemed with female-ruled worlds and matriarchies. In contrast to the Devil Girl, who travels from Mars in search of male breeding stock (aren’t men supposed to be from Mars?), the other films depicted earth astronauts traveling to other planets and encountering female-dominated societies.

In Abbott and Costello Go to Mars (1953), the boys set out for the Red Planet, detour to New Orleans, then finally end up on Venus, where they discover that men have been banished by the beautiful female inhabitants.

Both Cat-Women of the Moon (1953) and its re-make, Missile to the Moon (1958) feature cunning, aggressive female lunarites (lunarians?) living in caves beneath the surface and trying to avoid giant man-(and woman-)eating spiders.

In Fire Maidens of Outer Space (1956), astronauts travel to the 13th moon of Jupiter, only to discover a tribe of nubile females and one old man, remnants of the lost civilization of Atlantis that had migrated to outer space.

Finally, in Queen of Outer Space (1958), yet another space expedition lands on Venus, where the astronauts are captured by a society of women who had earlier overthrown the Venusian men in a civil war.

Earth women also did their share of space exploration. For more details, see my post on "Women Astronauts of ‘50s Sci-fi."

Astonishing Quote

“When we were making the film, even though it featured well-known stars and theatre people, we thought, ‘What are we doing? It will never see the light of day.’ It was truly ahead of its time. Even though it seemed preposterous to us that it would be a big hit, that genre had not yet become popular, so we had done something groundbreaking and revolutionary. I laugh when I think about it, but I still get fan mail, and I’m even told Steven Spielberg got some ideas from it. Nearly fifty years later, I wonder if women in leather still rule Mars.” - Hazel Court [In Hazel Court, Horror Queen: An Autobiography, Tomahawk Press, 2008, p. 76]

During some downtime, Hazel and Hugh discuss whether or not to fire their agents.