To suggest the movie would be more aptly titled, “The Earth Dies Yawning” might be a bit harsh. (A bit.) However, “The Earth Drifts into Unconsciousness while Distracted and Occasionally Glancing at its Wristwatch” would probably be just about right.
A brief (in an objective sense) 62 minutes, the film has a very nifty opening ten minutes, which sadly only serve to make the rest of the film that much more of a snooze. We open with a dead train engineer at his engine, as the locomotive crashes to its destruction. Then a car smashes into a wall, resulting in a fiery wreck. Following this, we watch as various Average Folk in England fall to the ground, apparently dead. This is most reminiscent of the quite similar opening of The Village of the Damned (1960). Indeed, we soon a small plane crashing to earth, a stock footage sequence I think was actually borrowed from that film.
This is followed by the appearance of a car in a small rural town littered with the dead. The driver wanders around, collecting a radio, etc. Again, this first ten minutes is pretty great, even if it recalls a zillion other “last people” movies such as Five, The Day of the Triffids, The Last Man on Earth, The World the Flesh and The Devil, The Last Woman on Earth, Omega Man, Target: Earth, 21 Days Later, etc. Still, the complete lack of dialogue and general silence of the opening part of the film actually makes the introduction of the other characters seem sort of intrusive.
As was often the case with these British sci-fi films, the nominal lead character is an American (the better to promote the film for our markets). He’s played by Willard Parker, a hulking Forrest Tucker type. Because, you know, all Americans are big, like John Wayne. Indeed, Tucker himself starred in several Brit sci-fi flicks, such as The Creeping Eye, Cosmic Monsters and The Abominable Snowman.
Although Mr. Parker is no one’s idea of a star, the film does boast some familiar character actors, like Dennis Price (playing, naturally, an officious prick) and Thorley Walters (a drunk). Also along for the ride are a couple of women, and then a young couple, including a very pregnant girl. The one thing that’s really striking, as was often the case with these older films, is how mature the cast is. Aside from the kids, the rest of the actors seem to be in their fifties. You just don’t see that much anymore, since it seems a law that casts must be primarily made up of twenty-somethings these days.
Meanwhile, the director is Terence Fisher, probably Britain’s most famous horror director, due to his work at Hammer. Don’t get too excited, though, as there’s not much he can do with this material. No matter how goofy, Brit sci-fi from this period is generally aided a lot by their serious, underplayed, non-ironic tone. This film seems a bit too stiff-upper-lipped, though, with the cast reacting to the outrageous, conceivably end of the world events perhaps a bit too much sang-froid. I realize people were psychologically hardier following World War II, but not this much.
Soon actual invaders appear, very low budget robot men who look (not much to the film’s credit) like the very earlier Cyber-Men on Doctor Who; silver quilted ‘spacesuits,’ big plastic helmets, tubes and wires, etc. These more or less seem to be ignoring the few remaining humans, which is actually sort of interesting, although it ends up they that seem to be doing so entirely because that’s what the plot dictates. When they finally attack, we have no clue why, other than that the heroes have discovered how to the defeat them, allowing (finally) for a bit of excitement at the climax.
There’s also some stuff with humans turned into zombie slaves, indicated by the actors wearing big silver contact lenses over their eyes. This element, again, doesn’t really go anywhere. Brit sci-fi often went completely loopy like this, as when they added an alien to the big bug movie Cosmic Monsters, or psychic powers to The Creeping Eye. Those films, especially the latter, made this part of their charm, however. Here they just seem desperate to eke out the film’s short running time.
In the end, this seems like a mediocre episode of some middling sci-fi anthology series. It resembles the equally cheap Target: Earth quite a bit, although that movie at least has some juice. Still, it’s always nice to cross another title off the list, and I’m glad I got a chance to take a look at this. Completists like myself will want to, too, although others may wish to steer clear. The film has its moments, but remains surprisingly sluggish considering everything going on in it.
The Earth Dies Screaming was just released in the slew of double-bill Midnite Movie DVDs recently released by Fox and MGM. This was from Fox, who put each of the two movies on its own disc (the MGMs put both on one DVD), and is mated with the similarly obscure Chosen Survivors. The quality of the print is pretty good, easily up to the standard you expect from films of this vintage on DVD.
