Not Of This Earth

"filmfogey"

at 3:20 am

Beverly entered films in 1950 when she was known as Beverly Campbell and had a larger nose. With new nose and new name she moved along the decade catching the eye in B-movies becoming in the process one of my ‘pocket-fancies’ along with Anne Bancroft (before she hit the big-time), people you discover for yourself without having to share them with the wider world, as you would with Audrey and Ava and Grace. Bev and Bancroft were somewhat alike with a similar warmth and that flashing-eyed intensity, they would have made a great sister-act. As a late-teen of those days I was also a sucker for cheapjack sci-fi horror of the kind turned out like sausages by Roger Corman, the Steven Spielberg of the Z-movie, who injected energy, storytelling flair and shrewd commercial acumen into the world of miniscule budgets, ten-day shooting schedules and risible special-effects. IT CONQUERED THE WORLD involved a mobile pillar-box with papier-mache teeth finally defeated by a determined housewife. Beverly played this rather splendid heroine like someone reaching for an Oscar from a hopeless depth and I’ve never forgotten it. She and Roger re-teamed for NOT OF THIS EARTH, his best achievement from this period though I seem to recall an opening scene that’s not on the current dvd. Alien visitors from a dying planet arrive on earth to collect blood-samples prior to a takeover. They fan out across the landscape like sinister-looking businessmen in dark suits with matching specs, brief-cases in hand. On the disc we get instead a written statement on screen exhorting us to suspend disbelief and embrace our dreams and cut directly to a teenage couple necking in a car in the kind of leafy suburbia to be staked out by John Carpenter twenty years later for HALLOWEEN. But here we’re in b/w standard screen and there’s no time to dawdle.. As the girl walks home alone in the dusk she hears a sound, looks down the street, no-one there, continues on – then she’s suddenly confronted by a ‘businessman’ (Paul Birch) who whips off his specs and fries her brains with direct contact from his white pupil-less eyes before opening his sample-case and draining off her blood. In need of daily transfusions himself he visits the local doc for same but refuses to submit to a test, incurring the curiosity of Nurse Beverly. When the doctor, in private, declines to treat him Birch overcomes the objection by simply part-freezing his memory. He arranges to hire Bev, for a princely sum, to attend him on a live-in basis at the well-appointed house he shares with a young ex-con who chauffeurs him around and has taught him how to drive. He hasn’t taught him the Highway Code, however, which attracts the interest of Bev’s boyfriend, a motorcycle-cop in the Ken Tobey mould. Bev settles in to her undemanding routine with a dip in the swimming-pool when she fancies and keeping the chauffeur at arm’s length when he walks into her bedroom while she’s getting dressed – two cute excuses to get her out of uniform. Neither employees are aware that at night in his study Birch gets instructions from the old home-planet via telepathy from a tele-transporter concealed in a closet and by day seeks to recruit ‘donors’ to swell his growing blood-bank kept in the fridge. One of these unwitting suppliers is an aggressive door-to-door salesman who won’t take no for an answer and if you’ve ever been plagued by this breed you’ll cheer inside when his persistence pays off in a way he could never have imagined.

Things start to unravel for Birch when a Chinaman he sends through the transporter doesn’t survive the trip and a second alien – a woman – joins him on earth as a refugee from the atomic war-ravaged planet. She needs a transfusion, natch, so he breaks into the doctor’s office rather than take her home where she’d be noticed. Unfortunately he gives her canine blood (blood’s just blood to him) and she dies of rabies. Everyone starts to suss out that “Mr. Johnson” is not what he seems but too late to save the hapless doc who gets his skull crushed by a vampiric flying lampshade Birch sends out that flies in through the window and envelops his head rather cosily in a laugh-out-loud moment worthy of Ed Wood. Essential plot-strands are drawn together in an action-and-suspense finale with boyfriend burning up the highway to intercept the alien as the hypnotised Bev is about to ‘transport’ herself – and that’s not the end of the story…. Despite wobbly moments and the leaden nature of the ‘telepathic conversations’ it’s fluent, thoughtful and smartly played.

Rating: 4 / 5