Astonishing Alien Robot Invasions, Part One: Target Earth

Predictably, the Pentagon’s UAP (Unidentified Aerial Phenomena) task force report that was released at the end of June was a big, fat nothingburger (see my “Unidentified Flying Horrors" post). It amounted to “yes, our people have seen strange things, and no, it’s not our technology,” capped with a shrug of the shoulders as to what they might be. 

After decades of denials and chalking it all up to weather balloons, swamp gas, temperature inversions, ad nauseum, an official “hell, we’re as baffled as you are” is at least… different.

But this squirrelly throwing up of hands is not likely to satisfy large swaths of the population. Polls indicate that huge majorities of Americans think the government is not owning up to all it knows. In 2019, a Gallup poll revealed that 68% of respondents believed the government knew more than it was telling, and in March of this year, a CBS News poll recorded 73% holding the same opinion.

A common response to all the hoopla and uncertainty about recent revelations is “well, if this stuff really is extraterrestrial, then why haven’t the aliens contacted us?” To which legions of true believers respond, “they have!” -- the contacts just haven’t been of the “take me to your leader variety,” like Klaatu landing his ship in the middle of Washington, D.C. in The Day the Earth Stood Still.

"Seriously? You're giving me a parking ticket?!"

While I’m officially neutral as to the origins of UFOs, it’s easy to see how visitors from an advanced civilization might be reluctant to engage us as more or less equals, given the mess we’ve made of the world. If the numerous abduction stories are to be believed, we’re wildlife to be bagged and tagged by alien biologists in the field. That makes a certain amount of sense. A fisherman doesn’t ask a fish to take him to its leader.

Whatever you think of the authenticity of alien contact and abduction stories, they can be fascinating, humbling and terrifying all at once. When you’re used to thinking of yourself as the smartest, most adaptable thing going -- the apex of evolution -- it’s disconcerting as hell to think that there’s a way more advanced species that can fly circles around your most advanced tech, paralyze you anywhere and anytime they want, abduct you and basically do anything they want.

The spindly grey alien has become practically an icon representing the extraterrestrial visitor, but over the years, other alien species have emerged from the contact lore, as if we’re finally interesting enough (or behaving badly enough) for a federation of planets to send numerous representatives to secretly check us out.

Depending on the source, there are as many as several dozen documented alien species that have shown up on earth and mucked around with people in some way or another. In addition to the ubiquitous greys, commonly reported aliens include the tall, blond Nordics, reptilians (shades of “V”!), dwarfs/littles, and even the infamous Men in Black, who some believe to be aliens in not-so-effective disguise.

The Shadowbox Collectibles Alien series, L to R: Neonate Alien, Grey Alien,
Roswell Alien, Nordic Alien, Reptilian Alien and the Man in Black.

Accounts of alien robots have been few and far between, but not unheard of. Back in 1973 in the small Alabama town of Falkville, a woman reported seeing a UFO land in a nearby field. The investigating police officer encountered a figure that was covered in a silvery metallic substance, had an antenna on its head, and moved around in a jerky, mechanical-like way. In 1989, in a park in Voronezh, Russia, a huge red sphere disgorged 9 foot tall entities with domed heads and silver outfits accompanied by a smaller “box-like” robot in front of astonished witnesses. [Brent Swancer, “Some Really Completely Bonkers Alien Encounter Cases,” Mysterious Universe, March 2, 2020.

Back in the ‘50s, when some cheery folks were envisioning a future of flying cars, vacation trips to the moon, and a robot in every home, robots were a regular feature in sci-fi. Some, like Tobor the Great (1954) and Robby from Forbidden Planet (1956) were our creations, designed to assist us as we blasted off to explore the endless depths of space.

Others were menacing sidekicks of alien kidnappers like the UK’s Devil Girl from Mars (1954). The U.S. independent film Target Earth, also released in 1954, took the idea of alien-produced robots even further and, in spite of its low budget, ambitiously tried to tell the story of an army of robots rampaging through a city as part of an alien invasion.

"On Mars we've perfected refrigerator technology. This Frigid-Air 3000 model follows you
wherever you go, so you're never out of arm's reach of a cold beer!"

(Ten years later the UK would contribute its own version of an alien robot invasion with The Earth Dies Screaming, which I will cover in part two.)

Now Playing: Target Earth (1954)

Pros: Believable characters and smart dialog make for an engaging first half.
Cons: Cheap effects and stock footage undermine the sci-fi thrills.

Target Earth was released at a time of high anxiety that the Cold War superpower confrontation could erupt at any time into an all-out nuclear war. The antagonists not only had the A-bomb, but both were testing a new doomsday weapon, the H-bomb, that made the bombs that leveled Hiroshima and Nagasaki look like firecrackers.

Leading up to the mid-fifties, filmmakers exploited existential fears with such thrillers as Invasion U.S.A. (1952), featuring a group of ordinary citizens witnessing a Soviet invasion and atomic bombing of the U.S., and Five (1951), which explored how a diverse, racially mixed and politically divided group of survivors might deal with the aftermath of a nuclear war.

Target Earth similarly exploits Cold War anxieties, but replaces the godless commies and their H-bombs with an uncanny alien menace. A group of disparate strangers wake up to find that their world has been turned upside down overnight. Their city is completely deserted, except for some stray dead bodies. Somehow they’ve missed out on a sudden, mass evacuation.

We’re first introduced to Nora (Kathleen Crowley), who has woken up after a botched suicide attempt with sleeping pills to discover that her apartment complex and the surrounding neighborhood are eerily empty and deathly quiet.

After Nora discovers a woman’s dead body on the sidewalk, she literally runs into Frank (Richard Denning), a traveling businessman who, after assuring her he’s not responsible for the woman’s death, explains that he got mugged outside a bar and was left unconscious in an alley.

The two eventually discover another couple, Vicki and Jim (Virginia Grey and Richard Reeves), living it up in an otherwise deserted restaurant, swilling champagne and seemingly enjoying a situation where they can help themselves to anything they want. They had been dead drunk when everyone was evacuated.

The "Didn't get the memo" club parties like it's 1999.

Early on, Nora and Frank bounce ideas off each other about what could possibly have happened. Nora floats the possibility of a nuclear attack, but Frank points out that a.), they’re still alive, and b.) the enemy wouldn’t have given advance notice to enable everybody to get the hell out of Dodge.

Nora wonders if there’s anyone else left in the city, to which the worldly philosopher Frank replies, “There’s probably a few. Ever try to empty a sack of sugar? Some of the grains always stick to the sack like the two of us.”

The two lost souls are happy to be stuck on each other, and when Vicki and Jim enter the picture, it practically becomes a party. A united front becomes paramount when the quartet discovers that instead of Soviet invaders, the city is full of 7 foot tall alien robots that are stalking and killing anyone who’s left with death rays projected from their faceplates.

To add insult to injury, the robots aren’t the only thing they have to worry about. Yet another lost soul, Davis, a sociopathic killer on the run (Robert Roark), sneaks up on the group in the middle of the night and holds them at gunpoint. His plan is to use them as decoys for the killer robots so that he can escape.

Unbeknownst to any of them, the military, which has tried to repel the invaders with infantry and jet fighters to no avail, is planning to use atomic weapons on the city if scientists can’t come up with another way to disable the robots.

Nora and Frank contemplate the horror of studios releasing movies
to theaters and streaming services on the same day.

Target Earth anticipated the end-of-the-world psychological dramas like The World, The Flesh and the Devil and On the Beach that debuted to much fanfare at the end of the ‘50s. While Target Earth lacks the antiwar message and social commentary of those later films, its characters’ depth and their backstories, including depression, attempted suicide and alcoholism are surprisingly sophisticated for a nothing-budget B movie.

The sleeping pills are Nora’s last, desperate attempt to deal with the pain and guilt of her husband’s death in a car accident; Vicki and Jim struggle with their deteriorating relationship and drown their feelings in alcohol when they’re not sniping at each other.

Frank is no paragon either, having been rolled for the wad of cash he carelessly flashed around at the bar. However, with his unassailable logic and more than passing familiarity with military tactics, he is the glue that holds the group together.

The script eventually gives each a chance to shine with new-found inner strength as they confront the twin threats of Venusian invaders and a desperate sociopath.

About midway through, Target Earth reverts back to ‘50s B-movie form with stock footage of military planning sessions, troop movements, and planes strafing and bombing the metal marauders.

In one unintentionally amusing scene, scientists are examining a captured robot in a lab. One scientist (played by Whit Bissell), talks about the “cathode ray tube” embedded in its helmet as if it were the most dangerous, alien and invulnerable piece of technology ever.

Unfortunately, the film’s bare-bones budget seriously compromises its ambitious second act. The robot that finally shows up to menace the protagonists looks like a refugee from a ‘30s Flash Gordon serial, and, like many of its B-movie robot brethren, is so slow and clunky you’d give even odds that a senior with a walker could outrun the thing. But at least it can shoot death rays out of its faceplate (it is a cathode ray tube after all!).

The killer robot from Venus targets its victims with the very latest 4K Ultra HD death ray.

Your results may differ, but the first half of Target Earth, where Nora and Frank are disoriented and wracking their brains to figure out what’s going on, is so effectively played that it’s a letdown when the military's fight against the invaders takes center stage. For all their troubles, the protagonists deserve better than a stock footage army and Whit Bissell in a lab coat to come and save their bacon in the final reel.

Still, Target Earth is worth a view for its pioneering alien-invasion-as-a-substitute-for-nuclear-anxieties subtext, and its surprisingly deep and well-written characters.

Where to find it: Streaming

Astonishing Fact #1: While the characters in Target Earth talk about a veritable army of robots overrunning the city, the production could only afford one robot suit. Stuntman Steve Calbert told an interviewer years later that “I was the whole army, the general, the captain and the private! I’d walk down the street, they’d cut to a close-up of Richard Denning or somebody else, and cut back to me walking the other way, supposedly another robot.” [John “J.J.” Johnson, Cheap Tricks and Class Acts: Special Effects, Makeup and Stunts from the Films of the Fantastic Fifties, McFarland, 1996, p. 14]

Astonishing Fact #2: Richard Denning recalled that to get location shots of the deserted city, the cast and crew had to rise and shine very early in the morning: “To get the scenes of the empty streets, we had to get out there at four in the morning -- in those days, there wasn’t that much traffic downtown. And we’d start shooting as soon as it got daylight, before the cars started coming through.” As for the robot, he said that “[F]or those days it was good. I remember I did marvel at it -- it looked phony when you were right up close, but then when you’d see it on the screen, it looked pretty good.” [Tom Weaver, They Fought in the Creature Features: Interviews with 23 Classic Horror, Science Fiction and Serial Stars, McFarland, 1995, pp. 152-53]

Astonishing Fact #3: Robert Roark was cast as the crazed gunman when his father, an LA doctor, told the producers he would invest in the film only on the condition that his son be given a part. Roark also had a small part in Killers from Space, released the same year; he would go on to appear in a couple of dozen or so movies and TV shows through the end of the decade. [IMDb trivia] 

"Okay, NOW will you hire me for the part? Huh? Huh?!"

Fabulous Faceless Foes of Fifties Sci-Fi: Special CMBA ‘50s Blogathon Edition

Note to my readers: This post is part of the Classic Movie Blog Association's (CMBA) Fabulous Films of the Fifties blogathon, running May 22 - 26. Check it out for some truly fabulous films covered by a group of very talented bloggers (there are even a couple more sci-fi entries besides this one).

Here we are at the beginning of summer 2014, and to quote one of the great boys of summer, Yogi Berra, “it’s deja vu all over again!” As temperatures heat up, here comes another Cold War front, blowing from West to East and back again, chilling relations between the world’s singular hyperpower and new-old rivals who are reluctant to take orders from Uncle Sam.

Even as his own house is falling down around his ears, the old red, white and blue coot apparently can think of nothing better to do than to grab a pointy stick and go looking for Russian bears and Chinese dragons to poke in their lairs. It’s not enough for the old man to clench his teeth, shake his fist and yell at the rest of the world to stay off his lawn. He insists on telling the rest of world how to tend their own lawns.

It’s gotten me thinking about the ‘50s again, and the sense of deja vu is overwhelming. It’s been a long time since I worried about The Bomb, but now visions of shelters and duck-and-cover drills have come flooding back into my sleep-deprived brain. I’ve been eyeing my backyard -- being mostly cement deck and landscaping rock, it doesn’t seem like a good candidate for a homemade bomb shelter (and I think the neighborhood association would look askance at that as well).  Maybe the better course would be to put in a hot tub to give us the option of one last, comforting soak before the ICBMs strike.

I don’t know about you, but today’s Cold War redux makes me doubly nostalgic for the ‘50s, when at least we had reasonably competent adults in government who knew the horrors of war and could respond to crises without constantly barking about military action. Ike, we miss you!

So here we are -- everything old has become new again. The films covered here mirror the public angst occasioned by the burgeoning atomic/space age, when it was hard to avoid visions of mushroom clouds and missiles raining down on defenseless cities. Some ‘50s sci-fi dealt directly with atomic war: Five (1951), World Without End (1956), The World, the Flesh and the Devil (1959), to name a few. Others, like the films below, presented the challenges of out-of-control science and politics more obliquely, with atomic-age threats that were faceless and amorphous, and all the more terrifying for it.

In today’s neo-Atomic, hair-trigger world, there are more apocalyptic TV series and movies than you can shake a pointy stick at. Lately zombies have been the preponderant pop culture stand-ins for decline and disintegration, but with the success of the recent Godzilla reboot, it seems the time is ripe for bringing back old familiar faces from the first atomic age. So, is the time also ripe for bringing back faceless, radioactive blobs? We’ll just have to wait and see.

Now Playing: X: the Unknown (1956)

Pros: Dark, imaginative, and well-acted, especially by American Dean Jagger
Cons: Hammer's early black and white sci-fi offerings should be more widely available on video or online

In brief: During an army training exercise in the Scottish hinterlands, a fissure violently opens up in the earth, wounding two soldiers. Dr. Adam Royston (Dean Jagger), a scientist with the nearby Atomic Energy lab is brought in to investigate, and immediately recognizes the soldiers’ wounds as radiation burns.

A short while later, two local boys are hiking through the woods at night. One of them sees something that terrorizes him as his companion flees. He’s brought in to the hospital with severe radiation poisoning and burns, and soon dies. Police inspector McGill (Leo McKern) joins Royston in investigating the mysterious radiation plague.

The mysterious force soon ups the ante. A hospital radiation lab technician is melted by the thing right in front of his girlfriend, and two more army sentries fall prey to it. A brave volunteer rappels down into the fissure and is pulled out just in the nick of time, but not before he catches sight of something utterly unearthly and terrible.

The army’s solution is to bomb the thing and seal up the chasm, but Royston realizes that conventional military action won’t stop something that can change its shape and grow ever bigger and more powerful as it gobbles up every radiation source it can find. Royston sets an elaborate scientific trap for the thing before it can get much farther in its quest for larger atomic installations to eat.

X: The Unknown is dark, atmospheric, and a great example of how, even with a limited budget, you can create mounting suspense by keeping your monster in the shadows and letting your viewer’s imagination do the work. This British version of the blob predated the Steve McQueen classic by a couple of years.


Key Cold War Confrontation: “American Joseph Losey, [then a] resident in Britain after being labelled a possible Communist sympathizer by Senator Joseph McCarthy’s House Un-American Activities Committee, was hired to direct. (Losey was possibly attracted to the script’s ‘ban the bomb’ ethos, most explicit in the scene where Royston is told: ‘you meddle with things that kill!’) Under the pseudonym Joe Walton, Losey supervised casting and set construction, only to contract pneumonia while location scouting (conveniently, given that his presence riled McCarthyite Dean Jagger and jeopardized American distribution prospects). Days before filming commenced, Anthony Hinds found a last-minute replacement in Leslie Norman…” [Marcus Hearn and Alan Barnes, The Hammer Story: The Authorised History of Hammer Films, Titan Books, 2007]

Key screenwriter: Beginning in 1949, Jimmy Sangster worked his way up the ladder at Exclusive/Hammer films from assistant director to production manager to hot-shot screenwriter. X: The Unknown was his first sci-fi/horror script for Hammer, and its success led to the career-changing gig writing Curse of Frankenstein (1957), which made Hammer’s worldwide reputation. He would contribute many more classic scripts to Hammer, including Horror of Dracula (1958), The Mummy (1959), The Brides of Dracula (1960) and Paranoiac (1963), among others.

"The menace that can kill, but cannot be killed!"

Now Playing: Quatermass II: Enemy from Space (1957)

Pros: Thoughtful, suspenseful adaptation that combines alien infiltration with a creepy, mostly unseen monster
Cons: Ditto: Hard to find on video or online

In brief: Undaunted by the dramatic failure of his first piloted space mission (The Quatermass Xperiment, 1955), the irrepressible Prof. Bernard Quatermass (Brian Donlevy) is busy planning to build a colony on the moon. Informed by higher-ups that the project has been canceled, his attention is diverted by reports of meteorites falling in the vicinity of the rural town of Winnerden Flats. Quatermass and his assistant Marsh (Bryan Forbes) drive out to a bluff overlooking the remote area. Below is a newly-built complex that looks suspiciously like Quatermass’ moonbase. Embedded in the ground all around them are mysterious rocks that look like recent arrivals.

March digs one out and it fractures, blowing something into his face as he collapses. Armed soldiers drive up and quickly surround the scientists. As the soldiers carry Marsh away over Quatermass’ strident objections, he notices that both Marsh and one of the soldiers have odd V-shaped marks on their faces.

Quatermass can’t get any help or information about the facility from the close-mouthed locals. Quatermass deduces that the aerodynamic meteorites are containers designed to harbor something living, something that breathes a completely different atmosphere.

Quatermass learns from Scotland Yard that the facility houses a secret government project to produce synthetic food. The rocket scientist persuades a curious MP, Vincent Broadhead (Tom Chatto), to allow him to join a group of government officials for a tour of the project.

At the facility, Quatermass and Broadhead peel off from the group to look for Marsh. Broadhead manages to get inside a containment dome at the cost of his life-- he comes stumbling out covered in a burning, acidic black slime. Quatermass manages to escape by the skin of his teeth.

Quatermass raises the alarm with Scotland Yard and whoever else will listen. But it quickly becomes evident that an alien intelligence has captured the minds of many police and government officials who are covering up the real purpose of the supposed synthetic food factory. Quatermass himself manages to steal a peek at a gigantic, pulsating protoplasmic thing housed in one of the containment domes.

An angry mob of locals storms the alien-run facility -- a human counter-revolution. But there’s also the original source of the alien contamination to deal with -- an asteroid in close earth orbit. Perhaps Quatermass’ moon rocket can be repurposed to deal with the threat…

Based on Nigel Kneale’s hit six part series for the BBC, Quatermass II is considered by many to be superior to Hammer’s first Quatermass adaptation, The Quatermass Xperiment (1955), and one of the very best films in the Studio’s entire catalog. Like X: The Unknown, it excels at creeping out audiences with the suggested and the unseen, while adding an Invasion of the Body Snatchers-like layer of alien infiltration and conspiracy.

One scene in particular, where alien-controlled humans use their non-infected brethren to stop the flow of deadly oxygen to the alien domiciles, uses the viewer’s imagination, rather than gore, to great effect.

Key Player: Depending upon who you ask, American Brian Donlevy was either the worst thing that ever happened to the Quatermass movies, or he was down-to-earth and a delight to work with. The American distributor insisted on a recognizable American name to help market the films in the States, so Donlevy was brought in to play the lead in the first two adaptations.

Writer Nigel Kneale hated, hated, HATED Donlevy in the role of his cherished Prof. Quatermass: “He really was very drunk indeed. He used to take a liquid lunch up in the village, and when he got back he’d sunken half a bottle of whiskey. They had to tell him the name of the film, the scene he was in and then raise the ‘idiot board’ so he could read off it.” [Quoted in Hearn and Barnes, The Hammer Story]

Director Val Guest, on the other hand, had nothing but kind words for his star: “[W]ho could be more down-to-earth than the Oscar-nominated Brian Donlevy? Brian had been-there-done-that and, he told us proudly, ours would be his 57th motion picture. What’s more he was a delight to work with, being sure enough of his trade to realise, unlike so many other ‘names,’ that he didn’t have to be difficult to hide his insecurity.

In fact, the only trouble I had with Donlevy was trying to keep his toupee on, or as he used call it, his ‘rug.’ … Twice Brian’s ‘rugs’ had taken off into the dust-filled yonder and we were now down to the last one hairdressing had with them on location. ‘Whatever you do,’ I instructed Brian, ‘keep facing the propellers and we’ll be okay.’ He did just what he was told and we got one of the best shots of the day. ‘Great. Cut. Print. We got it!’ Whereupon a jubilant Brian turned to grin at me and away went his last rug!” [So You Want to Be In Pictures: The Autobiography of Val Guest, Reynolds & Hearn, 2001]

"If you ever hear a sound like this, run for your life!"

Now Playing: The Flame Barrier (1958)

Pros: B veterans Kathleen Crowley and Arthur Franz generate some sparks
Cons: Confusing mash-up of jungle adventure and sci-fi; Obviously rushed into production to take advantage of Sputnik headlines; Also hard to find a reliable copy

In brief: It’s the dawn of the space age, and America has just launched its latest wonder, the X117 satellite. Even with the most powerful rockets, the X117 proves the old adage that what goes up must come down as it encounters what the film’s grim narrator calls the “flame barrier” -- the fictional boundary where the last of earth’s atmosphere and the vacuum of space meet, supposedly preventing man-made objects from completely escaping the earth. Back in the ‘50s, if it wasn’t jealous aliens, it was flame barriers that were going to kick us in the pants if we tried to reach for the stars.

Cut to beautiful, feisty Carol Dahlmann (Kathleen Crowley), wife of a wealthy industrialist and amateur satellite tracker who has disappeared in the Mexican Yucatan jungle trying to find the downed spacecraft. Carol is determined to find her husband, and has been given the name of American expatriate, entrepreneur and handy jungle guide, Dave Hollister (Arthur Franz) to help her in her quest.

In a remote Mexican village on the edge of the jungle, Carol first runs into Dave’s younger, free-spirited (and seemingly alcoholic) brother Matt (Robert Brown). Matt takes an immediate shine to the attractive but earnest blonde -- not so older brother Dave, who gruffly spurns Carol’s offer to pay him handsomely for help in searching the jungle for her missing husband.

Dave, a cynic to the core, tells Carol that he thinks she’s more interested in finding hubby dead so she can inherit his fortune. After getting slapped, he coolly negotiates a deal wherein he gets a big cut if they find the industrialist alive, and even more if they can prove he’s dead.

As they set out into the jungle, Dave callously hones in on all of Carol’s pampered ways and naivete. But as she perseveres despite encounters with tarantulas, poisonous snakes, iguanas, creepy skeletons, and panicked Indian guides, he develops a grudging respect for the plucky woman.

An awkward triangle develops between the brothers and Carol, which is quickly set aside when they stumble upon Dahlmann’s abandoned camp. In a nearby cave, they find the X117 satellite and Dahlmann’s corpse enveloped in a mysterious, gelatin-like mass. Bad enough, but the mass seems to be generating a deadly energy field that doubles in size every several hours. If they let it go, it could potentially envelop the world!

This spherical hunk of metal was directly responsible
for giving us The Flame Barrier!

The Flame Barrier plays like a mundane jungle action-adventure yarn that had space-age/sci-fi elements tacked onto it at the last minute to take advantage of the day’s headlines. (Indeed, it was released just several months after the Soviets launched the first orbital satellite Sputnik, rattling America’s confidence in its technological superiority.)

The few critics who’ve paid attention to Flame Barrier over the years have been hard on it, decrying the lame love triangle that takes up so much of the movie, and the crazy pseudo-scientific premise that generates confusion rather than suspense at the climax. The best thing Flame Barrier has going for it is Kathleen Crowley, who lends a lot of life and determination to her character. In spite of all the humiliations and frights courtesy of Dave and the jungle, she sees her mission through and emerges all the stronger.

Key player: Energetic, attractive Kathleen Crowley started in TV at the beginning of the ‘50s. Her other notable sci-fi/horror credits include Target Earth (1954) and Curse of the Undead (1959; featuring a vampire gun-fighter). By the 1960s she was almost exclusively doing television, including a stint in the Boris Karloff-hosted Thriller series.

Key writer: George Worthing Yates, credited with the story, was the nephew of the legendary founder of Republic Pictures, Herbert J. Yates. George lent his prodigious imagination to some of the iconic sci-fi films of the ‘50s and ‘60s, including Them! (1954), It Came from Beneath the Sea (1955), Earth vs. the Flying Saucers (1956), The Amazing Colossal Man (1957) and Attack of the Puppet People (1958). He also penned another obscure but highly original faceless foe pic, Space Master X-7 (1958). But that wasn’t all. His story “King Kong vs. Prometheus” inspired the Toho super-hit King Kong vs. Godzilla (1962).

Gunslingers and Graveyards

Curse of the Undead (1959)

If it weren't for the unambiguous title, I'd be tempted to classify Curse of the Undead as a western, albeit with strong horror elements. Certainly all the classic Western plot elements are there: a dispute over water rights; a beautiful, plucky heroine doing battle with a corrupt land baron; the heroine's hot-headed younger brother who itches to mix it up with the land baron and his hired thugs; the straight-as-an-arrow fiance who at first urges caution, but in the end must fight for what's right; a well-meaning but ineffectual sheriff trying his best to keep the peace; drunken cowboys drawing on each other in a saloon, and of course the hired gun dressed in black… who just happens to be a vampire.

While I was never a big fan of westerns as a kid (I've certainly come to appreciate them over the years), Curse grabbed my attention when it first played on local TV. It never occurred to me that you could mix monsters and six-guns, so, despite being a bit slow and talky in places, it made a bigger-than-average impression on me. It was like discovering that Little Joe on Bonanza was secretly a teen-age werewolf.

It didn't occur much to filmmakers of the era to mix the two genres-- an IMDb search for horror-westerns between 1940 and 1970 only pulls up 30 or so titles, most of them obscure, low-budget Mexican films made in the 1960s. What's left is a small, undistinguished list including z-grade fare like Teenage Monster (1958; a boy in a western town becomes a hideous killer after being irradiated by a meteor), Billy the Kid vs. Dracula (1966), and Jesse James Meets Frankenstein's Daughter (also 1966). The less said about these, the better.  Obviously, the film industry didn't see much potential in this sort of genre melding. (Although, horror-westerns seem to have come into their own in the past decade, with some very interesting-sounding titles: Legend of the Phantom Rider, 2002; The Ghosts of Edendale, 2003; Dead Birds, 2004; The Quick and the Undead, 2006; The Burrowers, 2008; Blood River, 2009; Gun Town, 2009; and the forthcoming Dances with Werewolves, 2012.)

In the midst of a horror-western desert, Curse of the Undead stands out as a very interesting, if somewhat flawed, genre-blending experiment. Set in an unnamed western town, Curse starts off on an ominous and somber note as Doc Carter (John Hoyt) and his daughter Dolores (Kathleen Crowley) drive their carriage past house after house with funeral wreaths on the doors. The doctor has come to see yet another young woman who is wasting away from some mysterious illness. The pair meet the worried parents and preacher Dan Young (Eric Fleming), who has spent the night by the girl's bedside, praying for her recovery. The doc admits that he's baffled by an epidemic that seems to affect only young women: "I'm tempted to throw away my bag and come over to your side." Dan responds affectionately, "You've always been on my side."

The bedridden girl seems to be recovering, so the relieved caretakers and parents assemble in the kitchen for a needed break and some breakfast. The pleasant scene is suddenly interrupted by a cry from the bedroom, and as they rush in they see to their horror the girl's lifeless corpse sprawled over the side of the bed. The roller blinds in a nearby window are flapping, as if someone or something has just escaped outside. Discreetly, preacher Dan examines the dead girl's neck and finds blood flowing from odd puncture wounds.

With a different setting and costumes, this could be the set-up for any gothic vampire film. But the film veers quickly from classic horror set-up to classic western, as we learn from Doc Carter's son Tim (Jimmy Murphy) about greedy land baron Buffer (Bruce Gordon) and his nasty plot to dam up the stream providing needed water to the Carter homestead. Tim's just been beaten up by Buffer's hired thugs, and he's itching to get back at the arrogant landlord and redeem the family name. In short order, the good Doc turns up dead, his blood-drained corpse falling out of the carriage seat just after it pulls up to the front door of his home. Tim, blinded by rage, blames his father's death on the no-good Buffer, and ends up in a pine box himself after baiting Buffer into a shoot-out. Interspersed in all the mayhem is the figure of a mysterious, black-clad gunman, who is first seen spying on the Doc, and then hanging around the cemetery on the day of his funeral.

The mysterious man in black takes a nap between gunfights.

Grief-stricken Dolores is suddenly head of the Carter household, and in a simmering rage tries to nail up wanted posters for Buffer around town, but the by-the-book sheriff pulls them down as fast as she can post them. The upstanding preacher (and Dolores' beau or fiance, it's not quite clear which) tries to calm her down. In a neat little bit of business, she replies to him in exasperation, "If the Devil can stop some of this pain in me, I'll even pray to him!" Just at that moment, the shadowy gunfighter in black, Drake Robey (Michael Pate) comes calling with the wanted poster in hand. Dan tries to get her to throw the "professional killer" out, but she's too intent on revenge, and Robey's silver tongue wins the day: "Preacher, you've been reading the good Book too long. You should look at life as it really is. Miss Carter's in trouble… why don't you think of me as a professional soldier come to help…?"

Preacher Dan knows evil when he sees it, and spends the rest of the film's running time trying to get his beloved Dolores to see the man for what he really is. His fears are doubly-realized when he stumbles upon an old diary at the Carter place, and finds out that it was formerly the site of Casa Robles. It seems that the two Robles brothers were in love with the same woman, but she ended up marrying Don Drago Robles. When he came back from a journey to find his brother making love to his wife, he killed him in a fit of rage, then, filled with remorse, committed suicide. The father writes of the terrible curse that fell on the village in the aftermath, as one-by-one young women were found drained of their blood. He describes the horror of grappling with a phantom figure in the dead of night, only to discover that it is his son Drago! Just in case there's any question about who's who and what's what, Dan finds a small portrait conveniently tucked into the diary's slipcover-- and it's the spitting image of Drake Robey! Hmmm… Drake Robey, Drago Robles…

It's interesting that Curse's director and screenwriter Edward Dein (along with co-writer and spouse Mildred Dein) dredges up the old eastern European conception of vampires as the revenants of suicide victims. What he lacks in budget and overt thrills, he makes up for with unique touches like this. We never see so much as the hint of a fang, and precious little blood. What we do see is a tortured soul (Drago/Drake) wrestling with two desires: to love the beautiful and strong-willed Dolores, and to feed off her blood. Despite being a monster, he has a strict code of ethics. When Dolores has a change of heart and tells him to forget about killing Buffer, she offers to compensate him for his time. "No thanks," he responds, "I don't take money for something I didn't do."

Like many a good movie villain, Robey is so dynamic and interesting that the ostensible good guy suffers in comparison. Preacher Dan is straight-laced and conventional to a fault, and it doesn't help that Eric Fleming's performance is mostly stiff and colorless to match the character. Watching Dolores calmly negotiating with hired gun Robey to kill Buffer, Dan rudely inserts himself into his fiance's business: "I'm not asking you to turn this man [Robey] out, I'm telling you to!" When she rebuffs him with "You keep your telling to the pulpit!", we cheer for her (and by extension, Robey).

The final showdown between good and evil.

As the preacher and and the monstrous gunslinger battle for the good woman's soul, it hardly seems a fair fight. Robey is dark, handsome, and sophisticated. Dan is conventionally handsome, but self-righteous and wooden-headed. Toward the end of the film, after Dan has learned Robey's secret, they duke it out not with guns, but with words. Robey protests that he never wanted this curse, but to simply live and love. Now he has another chance-- with Dolores. Dan of course, is having none of it:

Dan: How can you speak of love, when all you do is kill?
Drake: I kill to exist -- that is my life -- it's a force I can't control!
Dan: Why don't you call that force by its right name? Your force is the Devil!
Drake: He's so much a part of this world, he must be in me too. Now remember, without the Devil, you'd have no profession. You should be grateful!

Some deft use of eerie imagery and other unusual touches complement the elaborate dialog and help the film stand out from the usual B picture fare. After discovering the sheriff's body with familiar bite marks on his neck, Dan is chased through dark, deserted streets by a shadowy presence. Cowering at the front door of his church, he's saved by the well-placed shadow of the church's cross (see the clip below). Additionally, we get to see not once but twice what an unfair advantage an undead gunfighter has-- he can be as slow on the draw as he wants, since bullets can't kill him! Robey saunters away as one of his bewildered victims insists with his dying breath that "I'm sure I hit him dead center!" And, the climactic showdown between good and evil features a very unique, but logical method for killing an immortal vampire gunslinger. (Interestingly, the shootout appears to take place in broad daylight!)

Curse of the Undead is a neat little neoclassical tragedy masquerading as a B horror-western. It deserves a better fate than near-total obscurity. Creepy Classics has a good DVD-R copy for sale.


Preacher Dan Young is stalked by a shadowy figure as he walks down the dark, dusty street: