"The Earth Dies Screaming"
"The Earth Dies Screaming"
THE FACTS!
"The Earth Dies Screaming" is a 1964 black and white movie with a 62 minute runtime. The plot of the film follows after a mysterious gas attack kills off most of the Earth's population, a few survivors gather at a small country inn to figure out a plan for survival. However, attack was only the first part in an alien invasion by bulletproof killer robots who roam the streets with the ability to kill anyone with a simple touch of their hands. As the group of survivors soon find out, the robot invaders have another sinister ability in their arsenal, the ability to raise the dead!- Written by Harry Spalding
- Staring Willard Parker as Jeff Nolan, Virginia Field as Peggy Hatton, Denis Price as Quinn Taggart, Thorley Walters as Edgar Otis, Vanda Godsell as Violet Courtland, David Spenser as Mel Brenard, and Anna Palk as Lorna Brenard.
- Directed by Terence Fisher
Released in October 1964 by Fox.
THE REVIEW!
I personally love how older movies and T.V. shows can convey a story without narration or an obscene amount of dialog by the actors. The film starts out with a montage of people falling over dead and vehicles crashing, including a train derailing and a plane falling from the sky! We don't get a single word of dialog for the first 8 minutes! We didn't need to have the main character give us a 10 minute monologue explaining what we just saw, we used our minds and imagination to figure things out. It makes you pay attention to the movie, makes you actually watch it.The first survivor we meet is Willard Parker's character Jeff Nolan, who is obviously a man with a plan judging by his demeanor and the fact that he just waltzes right into an electronics store and takes a radio. For survival purposes obviously. The film has a strong first half, introducing the cast and adding a bit of backstory for each one while still maintaining an air of mystery that you an only get in older films. We learn that it was a type of gas attack that caused everyone to die, since the survivors were all in air controlled areas or rooms. At this point we get our first glimpse at the film's antagonists when we see a pair of men in "space suits". Violet assumes that these men are Air Force personnel and rushes out to meet them, she is shocked however when one turns around and is really some sort of robot! With a flash of light and a touch of its hand, she drops to the street dead. Nolan and Taggart are the only two armed survivors, they begin to open fire on the robot but to no avail. It is here that we learn that these mysterious invaders are bulletproof!
Later on we get our first true dose of horror when in the dead of night, as the majority of the survivors are asleep, the body of Violet begins to move and rises! Her eyes are now "grey blobs" as described by Taggart who coincidentally is the first to see the undead Violet and shoots her dead...again. But after this encounter, I felt as though the movie began to fall apart. It feels like to me that these undead are what helped to inspire future zombie movies. Their blank faces and slow movements a reminiscent of the Romero style zombies. I love that this movie doesn't explain every single detail of the hows, whats, and whys. It's this lack of knowing that I think gives us true terror, the guy with the chainsaw isn't so scary when we discover he has self-image issues and just wants to feel pretty. It's something film makers need to return to today.
The survivors head to a military assembly area to look for more supplies and weapons, turns out it's full of useless drill rifles and only a handful of old pistols. In the second half we also see that Taggart is a dastardly man with some form of evil intent, he knocks Nolan unconscious and forces Peggy to leave with him. They head back to town where Peggy manages to escape from his clutches, only to be pursued by a group of robots and undead. Nolan comes to her rescue and smashes his truck into a robot, destroying it. When Peggy returns to the group, we learn that Lorna is about to give birth. While Peggy and Lorna are off screen, Nolan and Mel (Lorna's husband) discover that the robots are being controlled by radio transmitters. This could have possibly helped to inspire the writers of "Independence Day" where the alien invaders in that film use our own communications satellites against us. They go off to locate and destroy the transmitter when a group of robots lead by an undead Taggart attacks the barracks! During this anti-climactic climax, the transmitter is destroyed and all the robots cease to function. This final battle could have been so much more but it felt constrained by either time or budget. I was expecting to see Lorna's newborn child to have the grey blob eyes at the end here, but maybe I've been ruined by modern day cynicism. We get a "happy ending" where our heroes fly off into the sunset, loosing only two of their party throughout the entire film.
My overall score being that of 3.5 out of 5 starts. We get classic visual story telling and mystery but an anticlimactic ending. Alien robots and zombies, a great combination!
And that is my review on “THE EARTH DIES SCREAMING”, please follow me for more reviews!!!
Thanks for reading! -Fargo
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