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Year: 1957 Production: Los Altos Director: Roger Corman Starring: Paul Birch, Bevely Garland, Jonathan Haze, Dick Miller Screenwriter: Charles B. Griffith, Mark Hanna 67 minutes; B/W
The best of Corman's sf films of the 1950s, this elegant thriller anticipates many of the themes the director would explore more fully in his better-known Edgar Allan Poe adaptations. Birch is the alien in a grey flannel suit collecting human blood (and leaving drained corpses behind) for shipment back to his home planet of Davana. However, he is more than merely conventionally menacing. Rather, like the heroes of Corman's Poe inspired films,, he is a rarified figure, fragile - he finally dies because the high pitch of a motorbike siren causes him so much pain he crashed his car - yet powerful - when he removes his dark glasses anyone who gazed into his pupil-less eyes, dies - the representive of a dying race desperately seeking sustenance on Earth. The film also introduced Corman's unique brand of suspense-horror-comedy (notably in the encounter between Birth and Miller's eager vacuum cleaner salesman) that he would later hone to perfection in films like The Little Shop of Horrors (1960). But, more importantly, the film marked Corman's difference from his contemporary sf film-makers. In other hands the film would have been undoubtedly full of reds-under-the-beds implications which Corman eschews in flavor of an other-worldly nightmare in brittle shades of grey. |
| The Overlook Film Encyclopedia - Science Fiction |