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.

Roger Corman's Price-less Poe Picture

Now Playing: The Premature Burial (1962)

Pros: As usual for a Corman Poe adaptation, the cinematography and production design make for a sumptuous and expensive-looking B-movie.
Cons: Adds a lot of padding to a simple story, resulting in slow pacing and dull stretches; the reveal at the climax is predictable and disappointing.

The idea of being mistaken for dead and buried alive seems so antiquated to us advanced lifeforms living in the 21st century. Medical science has progressed way beyond the hoary old cliches of checking for a pulse and holding a mirror up to the nose to detect a faint breath. We can diagnose brain death now, and all those crude methods for determining death were long ago buried by history and science.

Or so we thought. I don’t want to scare you, but for all our vaunted technology and expertise, misdiagnosed death is still a thing. In 2014, there was a case of a 78 year old hospice patient who was declared dead, only to wake up the next day in a body bag in the morgue. The same year, a woman who was declared brain dead at a New York hospital revived just as she was being prepared for organ harvesting.

Fortunately, such cases of Lazarus Syndrome are rare -- only 38 cases have been reported since the syndrome was first described in the medical literature in 1982. [Honor Whiteman, “The Lazarus Syndrome: When the ‘Dead’ Come Back to Life,” MedicalNewsToday.com, May 2017]

But that’s cold comfort for anyone who has been unlucky enough to be prematurely given up for dead. The same Medical News Today article describes the hair-raising experience of a UK woman with “locked-in syndrome,” a form of catalepsy wherein

“...a patient is aware of their surroundings, but they experience complete paralysis of voluntary muscles, with the exception of muscles that control eye movement.

In 2014, The Daily Mail reported on 39-year-old British woman Kate Allatt, who had locked-in syndrome. Unaware of her condition, doctors declared her brain dead. Medics, family, and friends stood by her bedside and discussed whether or not to switch off her life support. Allatt heard everything, but she was unable to tell them that she was fully conscious.

‘Locked-in syndrome is like being buried alive,” said Allatt. “You can think, you can feel, you can hear, but you can communicate absolutely nothing.’” [Ibid.]

With knowledge of such uncomfortably recent documented cases, the protagonist’s obsession in The Premature Burial becomes more relatable and less dated.

Ray Milland plays a wealthy middle-aged bachelor, Guy Carrell, who lives with his sister Kate (Heather Angel) in a gloomy mansion located in the fog-shrouded countryside somewhere in England. Guy’s mood is as gloomy as his surroundings, as he has recently witnessed the disinterring of a body for medical research purposes. To his horror, he saw that bloody scratches on the inside of the coffin and a look of abject terror frozen on the corpse's face indicated the poor man had been buried alive.

This poor fellow is the star of Premature Burial's pre-titles sequence.

This sends him into a deep depression. When Guy’s beautiful fiancee Emily (Hazel Court) shows up uninvited at the mansion, he tries to send her away, telling her that due to a family curse, they can never be married. It seems that his father was subject to cataleptic episodes, and when Guy was 13, the man slipped into a trance, was declared dead of a heart attack, and was promptly interred in the family vault below the mansion.

That night, Guy heard his father’s cries dimly echoing from the vault, but he couldn’t get anyone to believe him. Guy is morbidly afraid that catalepsy runs in the family, and that at any moment he will have an episode and share his father’s terrible fate. Sister Kate sternly dismisses the notion that their father was buried alive, and Emily is able to convince Guy that he will fare much better with her by his side.

They are soon married, with many well-wishers in attendance, including Emily’s father, Dr. Gideon Gault (Alan Napier) and family friend Miles Archer (Richard Ney). The happy mood is quickly dispelled, however, when the new bride, prompted by the guests, sits down to the piano to play. She picks an old folk tune, Molly Malone, which coincidentally, one of the gravediggers was whistling when they dug up the man who had been buried alive.

Guy and Emily relax by taking a walk in a fog-shrouded cemetery. Uh-huh.

This sets Guy off into another bout of paranoia, and instead of going to Italy on a honeymoon, he uses his time and resources to construct a mausoleum with more fail-safe ways for a misdiagnosed “dead” man to free himself than you can shake a gravedigger’s shovel at.

Emily, chafing at being holed up in the gloomy house with her obsessed husband, teams up with Miles to convince Guy to tear down the mausoleum and free himself of his gnawing fear. But when they try to seal the deal by opening up Guy’s father’s crypt to prove he wasn’t interred alive, it backfires spectacularly, and Guy’s worst nightmare comes true.

All the elements of Roger Corman’s justifiably admired Poe adaptations are present in The Premature Burial (except for one -- Vincent Price -- which we’ll get to in a moment). The lush cinematography was by Floyd Crosby, who had lensed The Pit and the Pendulum the year before and would carry on with The Raven, Tales of Terror, and The Haunted Palace in the next couple of years.

Art director/production designer Daniel Haller was a genius at making Corman’s Poe pictures, budgeted in the mid $100,000s, look like a million bucks (or two).

Two very talented writers contributed the screenplay. In addition to Premature Burial, Charles Beaumont penned The Haunted Palace and The Masque of the Red Death for Corman, as well as some of The Twilight Zone’s most beloved episodes for Rod Serling, before his untimely death in 1967. Ray Russell was also a celebrated master of horror, whose credits include the source novel and screenplay for William Castle’s Mr. Sardonicus, and X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes (a Corman cheapie that has gained an authentic and loyal cult following over the years, and features one of Ray Milland’s best performances).

In spite of all the talent behind it, The Premature Burial suffers from a lack of energy and suspense compared to Corman’s other Poe adaptations. The problem stems partly from the need to pad the main elements from the original short story -- a horrible discovery in a reopened crypt and the building of a “fail-safe” tomb to avoid a similar fate -- with filler to bring it up to feature length.

Raiders of the Lost Tomb, aka Guy and friends and family.

The film passes on too many spine-chilling opportunities. Guy relates a story about hearing his supposedly dead father crying out from the vault, but we don’t hear it directly (unlike Corman’s first Poe film House of Usher, where the audience, along with Roderick, hears his sister scratching and screeching in her tomb). The intermittent use of the Molly Malone tune that sends Guy into paranoid fits doesn’t quite cut it.

Premature Burial uses up most of its energy in a scene where Guy, manic with anxiety, shows off his new mausoleum to Emily and Miles. They stand there gaping as he demonstrates a trick coffin that opens from the inside, a belltower that can be rung by the “dead” man after he’s woken up, an escape hatch on the roof and rope ladder for access, and if all else fails, dynamite to blast the tomb open. And if that fails, there's poison on hand for the ultimate exit. It’s all so elaborate, it would make Wiley Coyote's head spin.

This is quickly followed by an hallucinogenic nightmare sequence in which Guy is trapped in the mausoleum -- seemingly years after he’s been placed there -- and every fail-safe contraption fails spectacularly. That really reminded me of poor Wiley.

Guy's mausoleum is the work of the finest designers on the planet:
Wiley Coyote and Rube Goldberg.

From there, the film grinds down to an ending that, for all its morbid imagery, lacks any real suspense, and features a “twist” that you can see coming for miles.

It’s tempting to conclude that much of the film’s problems lie with the absence of Vincent Price in the title role. Ray Milland was a talented, award-winning actor, and he would prove just how much he could do with a B horror role with his inspired performance in The Man with the X-Ray Eyes. But Price was born to star in Corman’s Poe pictures, and his absence is a letdown. On the other hand, I suspect Vincent would only have made a nominal improvement. The script spends too much time with various characters trying to talk Guy down from his morbid delusions (not to mention the time spent showing off the mausoleum contraptions), and not enough on the horrors that have driven the man to near-insanity in the first place.

Corman wanted to make The Premature Burial with Vincent Price and without the involvement of American International Pictures, but again, like a Roadrunner cartoon, his best laid plans went astray. As Corman biographer Beverly Gray recounts:

[The Premature Burial] was a direct result of the Corman brothers’ [Roger and Gene’s] business relationship with Pathé American. Pathé’s owner, William Zeckendorf, had originally agreed to distribute The Intruder [Roger Corman’s social message movie about racial tensions in the Deep South] in exchange for Roger’s promise to shoot a Poe adaptation for his company. When [AIP head] Sam Arkoff got wind of the arrangement, which threatened the AIP monopoly on the highly lucrative Poe films, he warned that AIP would retaliate by withdrawing its business from Pathé’s respected film laboratory. Zeckendorf capitulated, and Corman was surprised to see Nicholson and Arkoff show up on the set of The Premature Burial, cheerfully informing him that he was once again working for them.” [Beverly Gray, Roger Corman: An Unauthorized Biography of the Godfather of Indie Filmmaking, Renaissance Books, 2000, p. 76]

To add insult to injury, when Corman started the project with Pathé’s backing, Vincent Price’s exclusive contract with AIP prevented him from appearing in the film. AIP took over anyway, and filming went ahead with Milland.

"I'm so glad I went with the sunroof option on this coffin!"

WARNING: AN IMPORTANT PLOT POINT REVEALED BELOW

A redeeming feature of the film is the presence of Hazel Court, who always brought elegance and class to her roles. By this point in her career, Court had established her horror credentials by appearing in Hammer’s groundbreaking Curse of Frankenstein and the less groundbreaking but nonetheless atmospheric The Man Who Could Cheat Death.

On the set of The Premature Burial she was the consummate trouper, to the point that she became uncomfortably familiar with the feeling of actually being buried alive. In her autobiography, Court recalls that she nixed the idea of a stunt double for the climactic scene:

“At the end of the picture, I had to be buried alive. Roger asked me if I would do it or if I would rather have someone double for me. I said, ‘Heavens no! I will do it.’ Well, I lay on the ground, with a straw in my mouth so that I would have air, as they shovelled the earth over me. The straw was removed when the director said ‘Action!’ I was to hold my breath for as long as possible. I made it for over one minute -- long enough to get the shot. As I got to the end of the minute, the pressure on my body began, as the claustrophobia was setting in. It was one hell of an experience.” [Hazel Court, Horror Queen: An Autobiography, Tomahawk Press, 2008, p. 112]

Acknowledging that The Premature Burial was not as successful as the other Poe films, Court offered her own theory.

“Some critics felt it was because Vincent Price wasn’t in it. I felt it might have been because a lot of people have fears of being buried alive -- or of developing the condition of catalepsy in which one would be alive but presumed dead. The film was kind to me, and as I’ve mentioned, a very good part.” [Ibid., p. 115]

Hazel rests after a hard day on the set.

Regardless of its deficiencies -- or its effectiveness in bringing on queasiness at the thought of being buried alive -- The Premature Burial features a talented cast, delivers a couple of morbidly imaginative scenes, and looks absolutely fabulous.

Where to find it: For the moment, The Premature Burial is streaming free for Amazon Prime subscribers, or own it on DVD or Blu-ray with an assortment of interesting extras.