The title of this brisk, atmospheric, occasionally-creepy 1964 low budget black and white British alien invasion thriller is quite the misnomer. There’s a bit of terrified shrieking going on now and again but the Earth dies with a bit of a whimper, the human race subjugated by what’s assumed to be a surreptitious gas attack prior to the arrival of stalking silver robots who wander around zapping any survivors and turning them into glassy-eyed zombies. But we’re willing to give The Earth Dies Screaming a pass on its misleading title because it’s far better than its lurid title might suggest and a pretty decent example of a typically-British apocalyptic tale in the vein Day of the Triffids or some of the works of John Christopher.
The first five minutes, in particular, are terrific and still unsettling fifty-odd years later. Humanity is dying. Trains hurtle off the tracks, planes drop out of the sky, a car drives into a wall, people are dropping like flies. Into a desolate English village dotted with corpses and crashed cars drives rather mature American test pilot Jeff Nolan (Parker. He’s quickly joined by a group of remarkably upper class fellow survivors, the usual mix of the naïve and the shifty beloved of post-apoc fiction of the era. They’re just starting to formulate a survival plan when two blank-faced silver-suited robots arrive in the village – it’s hard to imagine that they didn’t influence the look of Doctor Who’s Cybermen, who debuted on TV a year or so later – and shuffle around looking for survivors to kill.
Running for little over an hour, The Earth Dies Screaming moves at a fair old clip and it certainly doesn’t hang about. The robots (we never see more than two of them in action at any time) look a bit cut-price but they’re actually quite effective in their remorselessness as they stroll unhurriedly about the village courtesy of the plentiful striking location filming. Regular Hammer director Terence Fisher creates a couple of genuinely-tense sequences as one of the robots gazes balefully through a window at one of the survivors at night and the ‘zombified’ humans languidly pursue Peggy (Field) around the hotel the group have initially gathered in. It’s actually quite a bleak and pessimistic scenario with no easy resolution despite its rather hurried and convenient finale and in many ways it’s a shame the film wraps up so quickly as there’s still plenty of dramatic potential in the story which another twenty or thirty minutes could have comfortably developed. As a result the film’s over and done before it’s even really started and consequently it was never destined to be remembered as a landmark lo-fi British genre movie. It is, however, despite its limitations, one of the better schlocky B-movies of the era and it’s heartening to see it resurrected on this crisp new Blu-ray edition which is thoroughly recommended to fans of good old fashioned British genre movies from an age long before flashy CGI took so much of the homespun fun out of the genre.
Extras: Commentary, trailer, posters and images.
THE EARTH DIES SCREAMING (1964) / CERT: 12 / DIRECTOR: TERENCE FISHER / SCREENPLAY: HENRY CROSS / STARRING: WILLARD PARKER, DENNIS PRICE, VIRGINIA FIELD, DAVID SPENSER, THORLEY WALTERS, ANNA PALK, VANDA GODSELL / RELEASE DATE: JANUARY 29TH
