Reel Politique: Movie Review, Unearthly Stranger, D. K. Holm Film Fest 1
This is the first of a series of essays commemorating films that will be included in this summer’s D. K. Holm Film Festival. For more information about showtimes and venues, contact Lance Kramer at kramer.lance@gmail.com.
Every once in a while your adult self manages to catch up with a film you saw once, fleetingly, as a kid, a film about which you remember neither the title, the cast, nor who made it. All that remains is a few vivid scenes or shots, and a basic premise. Periodically, for the next several decades, you spend untold hours of mental exercises or physical research trying to track down that film’s title.
Such things are easier these days. Back in the early days of VHS, you could ask one of those rarely enthusiastic video store clerks, or write Joe Bob Briggs, where there was a chance, if he printed your query, that one of his readers might recognize it. There wasn’t much I could tell them. This black and white British science fiction film starts out with a man running across a wet bridge at night, and ends with someone falling to their death on the street from a building, and with a circle of women looking down on the corpse. In between, the viewer learns that aliens have invaded the earth in the form of the female sex, marrying all the available scientists. One egghead gets suspicious when he accidentally catches his wife taking a casserole out of the stove without using a oven mitt.
I saw this film sometime in the early 1960s, probably 1965, with my mom on one of our weekly trips to the drive-in. In this case, it was the old Amphitheater, used during the day for car races. The walk from your car to the concession stand, hidden under the bleachers, could take up a reel of film. Just on the other side of the screen, I-5 roared, and the “throw” from the projection booth to the mammoth screen was so long that the film usually had a washed out look. I enjoyed these outings with my mom, because she was game to see anything, from The Russians are Coming, The Russians are Coming!, to some minor Hershel Gordon Lewis bloodfest (which was, as I recall, the second title on this particular evening’s triple bill).
Today, access is easier. In my case, I simply sent a query to Mobius Home Video Forum and got the title to the film that had been vexing me within minutes.
Thus it turns out that that film that had haunted me all those years was a film callled Unearthly Stranger. Its pedigree turned out to be interesting, however. Directed by John Krish for the small company Independent Artists, the script is credited to Rex Carlton, from a story by Jeffrey Stone. This obscures the truth that the film is an unofficial adaptation of William Sloane’s novel To Walk the Night The only information I could find out about him was on an Amazon page. Sloane wrote only two novels, but they are both highly regarded by science fiction specialists, To Walk the Night originally coming out in 1938, back in the days when science fiction was interested in ideas rather than thinly disguised war stories.
Unearthly Stranger became available recently, and the film version,despite its obscurity, and for being quite different from the source book beyond a basic premise, proved to be yet another creepy, slow-paced, black and white, British sci-fi-horror-noirish film from the era, like The Day the Earth Caught Fire or The Earth Dies Screaming. These are talky films that always seemed to have been shot in abandoned back lots on perennially overcast days. In this one, space travel scientist Mark Davidson (John Neville), part of a special team, is caught up in a series of mysterious deaths while growing increasingly worried about his mysterious new Swiss bride Julie (Gabriella Licudi).
Instead of being a pile of crap like most dimly remembered films seen finally decades later, Unearthly Stranger works, in a Twilight Zone or Alfred Hitchcock Presents sort of way, with limited sets and lots of dialogue to make up for the lack of special effects. Anglophile viewers will be pleased to see familiar faces pop up. Besides Neville, who later appeared in The X-Files, there is Patrick Newell, who played Mother in late episodes of Avengers, and Philip Stone, who played Alex’s ineffectual dad in Clockwork Orange. Jean Marsh is also on hand as an initially benign general secretary.
Unearthly Stranger is an “invasion” tale pitched at a much lower key than, say, Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Like Double Indemnity the film begins with a guy racing back to his office, in order to tell his tale into a tape recorder. The rest of the film is a huge flashback, the story he recounts into the machine. The story is insidious. It’s as if the boys from The Big Bang sitcom all found themselves in the unlikely position of having beautiful wives, only to learn that each of their mates was an alien creature, tasked with thwarting their research.
The final images of Unearthly Stranger are quite chilling, as they prey on the male (or at least adolescent or nerd male) fear of women and their power. The film does well with that most difficult of things, following a bunch of characters as they gradually and believably come to realize that something fantastical is happening around them. It also touches on, in a pop psychology way, common fears about the unknowability of one’s mate. Who is this person we’re fucking? What are they really? Will we ever truly know them? And when will they betray us? Even more, the film preys on the fear that what we fear (terrorists, communists, women) are everywhere. One of the film’s most chilling lines is, “You mean, there are others?” And only in science fiction, or perhaps British science fiction, is love not allowed to triumph. The film ends on a wonderfully chilling note.
