KILLER KLOWNS FROM OUTER SPACE. Sarlui / Diamant, 1988. Grant Cramer, Suzanne Snyder, John Allen Nelson, John Vernon, Michael Siegel, Peter Licassi, Royal Dano. Screenplay: Charles Chiodo, Edward Chiodo (uncredited), Stephen Chiodo. Director: Stephen Chiodo.

   Killer Klowns from Outer Space is not a classic — yet. It may well be in a few years, though, since it’s certainly done in the Classic Vein.

   A bunch of aliens land in their spaceship and proceed to pillage a small town, taking the locals unaware until a few brave young people get the Authorities on their side and put the blighters to rout. There’s even a nod to the 70s in the person of a redneck Cop who hates College Kids.

   The gimmick here is that the aliens look and act like big, ugly clowns; they shoot people with Popcorn Guns, track them down with balloon-sculpture dogs, mummify them in cotton candy and get around in a spaceship that looks like a circus tent. The concept plays much more effectively than I would have thought, thanks to some really imaginative special effects and nice timing.

   There’s one really suspenseful scene where a clown is trying to lure a cute little girl outside, smiling and crooking a finger at her, and holding an oversize wooden mallet behind his back. Sounds dumber than dogs, I know, but trust me, it works.

HELL COMES TO FROGTOWN. New World Pictures, 1988. Julius LeFlore, RCB, Roddy Piper, William Smith, Sandahl Bergman, Kristi Somers, Rory Calhoun, Cliff Bemis. Directors: Donald G. Jackson & R. J. Kizer.

   [After watching those early Rory Calhoun action westerns], small wonder that I broke down and shelled out the $10 necessary to own my own copy of Donald G. Jackson’s 1988 cult classic Hell Comes to Frogtown.

   The World really needed a post-apocalypse movie with a sense of humor and this is it, a clever, relentlessly trivial thing about the end of Life as We Know It and What Happens Next.

   Writer/Director Jackson manages to avoid most of the cliches inherent in the concept of a Future Society Ruled by Women, gets surprisingly not-awful performances from Sandahl Bergman and pro wrestler “Rowdy” Roddy Piper, and even manages to evoke a lot of sympathy for a washed-up amphibian chanteuse played, I think, by Shirley Maclaine in heavy makeup and an unbilled cameo.

   Rory Calhoun, needless to say, is just fine as a garrulous old prospector named “Looney” Tunes, and one of the fight scenes between Piper and a six-foot talking toad brought down the House (such as it was) when Piper called his warty opponent a “horny bastard.” Priceless.

Editorial Comments: The trailer for this film can be seen here on YouTube. For a scene entitled “The Dance of the Three Snakes,” go here.

   John Carter, the movie has not yet been reviewed on Mystery*File and this is a movie that demands to be mentioned here. I call it the Pulp Movie of the Century because it actually is. It has been 100 years since the novel appeared in the pulp, All-Story, as a six-part serial in 1912. The movie has been slammed by the critics and is not doing well at the box office, but it has been receiving very favorable comments on some discussion groups I belong to that are focused on pulpish subjects.

   Frankly, I don’t think some of the critics know what they are talking about. Despite some changes, this is a fairly faithful adaptation of the Edgar Rice Burroughs novels about Mars. His first published work was Under the Moons of Mars in All-Story and was the big first success in his Mars series.

   Without this serial in 1912, All-Story and Science Fiction as we know it might have had a different history. Burroughs was the driving force behind the decision by the All-Story editors to encourage their writers to write what has been called the Scientific Romance.

   When Sam Moskowitz decided to do a collection of SF stories from the Munsey pulps, he called it Under the Moons of Mars. (This by way, is a far better title than John Carter.) In addition to the stories, Moskowitz also included an excellent long history of SF in the pulp magazines up to 1920.

   What do I mean about the critics not knowing what they are talking about? They are treating this film like the plot is a copy of some tired previous SF movie. Gentlemen, this is the serial, the book, the plot, that started the whole craze for SF adventure in the pulps. Sure, there was H.G. Wells before Burroughs, but Wells is on a higher literary level for sure. Though he appeared in the pulps, it was mainly through reprints.

   The critics do not realize the impact in 1912 that Under the Moons of Mars had on the typical reader of popular magazines. It was like a bolt out of the sky shocking the reader who was hungry for imaginative literature.

   Things would never be the same after this serial in 1912. All-Story went on to publish scores of SF adventures and in 1926 the first SF pulp appeared. For many years after, readers in the letter columns requested reprints from the great old Munsey pulps. Then in 1939, a magazine was created that did indeed reprint the Munsey science fiction stories from All-Story, Argosy, and Cavalier. It was called Famous Fantastic Mysteries and is today considered one of the best looking and prettiest pulps ever published.

   So, to the jaded critics of today, sure John Carter has some faults, but in 1912 this story was a stunning achievement. Even decades later, readers would be amazed by the Mars books.

   I know I was at the age of nine years old. In the early 1950’s, I remember my father giving me a stack of the Mars and Tarzan novels and saying how great they were. A year later, I had read and reread them all, and used to think of which books I would try to save if the house ever caught on fire. My answer was always the same: the books by Edgar Rice Burroughs.

   Now, I’m not saying this movie is great, after all it has been 60 years since Burroughs grabbed hold of me. But it is good and not as bad as the critics are saying.

   As I was coming out of the theater, there were two young boys ahead of me, both of them jumping up and down with excitement. To me they looked to be around nine or ten years old, the same young age that I once was back when I first discovered John Carter and his adventures. One said to the other “Wasn’t John Carter great!,” and his friend replied that the movie was cool. They then started talking about seeing it again.

   There may have been only 15 or 20 people in the theater when I went for the noon showing but seeing these two kids made me realize once again Burroughs still had that power to excite, just like he must have excited readers in 1912. I have a feeling that John Carter may be a failure on this initial release, but like Blade Runner, it will be considered a success many years later.

MARTIANS GO HOME. 1990. Randy Quaid, Margaret Colin, Anita Morris, John Philbin, Ronnie Cox. Based on the novel by Fredric Brown. Director: David Odell.

   There may not be any underlying significance in what happens in this science fiction movie — it’s about an invasion of obnoxious green Martians who know everybody’s secrets, to their great rollicking delight — but there’s certainly thirty minutes worth of good laughs in their antics.

   As far as how they get here, the composer of theme music for TV shows accidentally sends a message into space inviting then to cane visit our planet, and so they come — by the millions! (Truth in advertising. We see only about a dozen of them at different times on the screen — this is not a big budget movie.)

   Bedrooms are not safe, the president’s office can’t keep them out, they’re all over the world; and they’re here to stay until our hero can find out a way to get rid of them. “Invaders can be dealt with. These guys are tourists!”

   I think the book may have been clearer on one point, though — sorry, it’s been 30 or 40 years since I read the book – that human society exists only by maintaining secrecy and privacy and (therefore) complete dishonesty in all our affairs.

   It’s a cynical point, and even though I enjoyed the movie, I think it’s one the people involved in making it let slip right through their fingers.

[UPDATE] 10-17-11.    While I was researching the credits for this movie on IMDB, I discovered that I must be one of the elite. There are perhaps only four or five people in the world who have liked this movie, and I am one of them.

   It has been released as a Region Two DVD in the UK, but I’ve found a copy on VHS, and it’s on its way to me now. With Margaret Colin in it, really how bad could it be? (That’s assuming I was wrong about it the first time, which I am not conceding.)

QUATERMASS II: ENEMY FROM SPACE. Hammer Films, 1957. Brian Donlevy, John Longden, Sidney James, Bryan Forbes, William Franklyn, Vera Day. Originally serialized by BBC-TV, Oct-Nov 1955, in 6 30min segments. Story & screenplay: Nigel Kneale & Val Guest. Director: Val Guest.

   Yet another surprisingly effective British Thriller that builds quietly to a really gripping finish. Brian Donlevy plays the eponymous Doctor Quatermass, who stumbles onto a top-secret Government Project that turns out to be a front for Alien Invasion.

   I was struck by the writers’ ability to come up with really alien-looking aliens and an eerily off-the-wall kind of Invasion. Director Val Guest does a good job of starting out Slow and Realistic (The top-secret Government Complex is actually an Oil Refinery — and looks it.) then working up to a Big Finish that’s all the more impressive for looking so out-of-place in such a modest film.

   In terms of Writing and Playing, Quatermass 2 is uniformly intelligent; the characters talk and act like ordinary folks, and Brian Donlevy is surprisingly effective as the gruff, ill-mannered, unlikely hero of the piece.

   I’ve always been puzzled, though, by the fact that they chose him to star in the Quatermass films, despite the popularity of the British Actor who played him on Radio. One assumes that they must have had an eye on the American Market, but Good Lord: BRIAN DONLEVY?!?!

   That’s not enough Star Power to light up a Marquee! Truly, the minds of Film Producers are inscrutable to us Mortal Men.

FRITZ LEIBER – Conjure Wife. Twayne, US, hardcover, 1953. Penguin, UK, paperback, 1969. First published in Unknown Worlds, April 1943. Reprinted several times, in both hardcover and soft, including: Lion 179, pb, 1953, cover art by Robert Maguire; Award A341X, 1968, and AN1143, 1974 (cover art by Jeff Jones on the latter).

      ● Filmed as Weird Woman Universal Pictures, 1944. Lon Chaney Jr., Anne Gwynne, Evelyn Ankers, Ralph Morgan. Director: Reginald Le Borg

      ● Filmed as Night of the Eagle (aka Burn, Witch, Burn!. Independent Artists, American International, 1962. Peter Wyngarde, Janet Blair, Margaret Johnston, Anthony Nicholls. Screenplay by Charles Beaumont, Richard Matheson & George Baxt. Director: Sidney Hayers.

      ● Filmed as Witches’ Brew. Embassy/United Artists, 1980. Teri Garr, Richard Benjamin, Lana Turner, James Winkler. Conjure Wife uncredited as the source. Directors: Richard Shorr & Herbert L. Strock.

   Last October I was also in the right mood for Conjure Wife (1943) Fritz Leiber’s classic tale of Black Magic and Campus Politics. It starts off rather predictably, as Professor Norman Saylor, successful sociologist and author of a popular book on primitive superstitions and modern behavior, discovers a trove of charms, voodoo tokens and sundry magic-spell components in his wife’s drawers (a rather fetishistic scene in itself) and learns that while he’s been relegating such things to unimportance, his wife has taken them seriously.

   Naturally, he convinces her to destroy them, and naturally, all hell (literally!) proceeds to break loose.

   I saw it all coming, but Leiber manages to invest the early scenes with atmosphere and a certain prosaic realism that kept me reading. Then he proceeds to give things a neat twist that generates considerable suspense and leads to one line that absolutely chilled me. I won’t reveal anything further, but I will say that Conjure Wife is a classic worth visiting.

   The book was filmed three times: once very respectably in England as Night of the Eagle in 1962, and previously as a dotty “Inner Sanctum” movie from Universal, Weird Woman (1944.) Written and directed by studio hacks (including Brenda Weisberg, one of the few women in the creative end of horror films, whose career, alas, is notable only for being unremarkable) Weird Woman is mostly beneath contempt, but it does offer a kind of silly charm if you can get past the notion of Lon Chaney Jr. as a scholarly academic irresistible to women.

   His solemn voice-over soliloquies add another layer of risibility, which fits in perfectly with the over-playing of over-heated dialogue from the rest of the cast. Looking back, Weird Woman is largely devoid of any artistic merit, but I have to say it’s done with an aesthetic consistency that held my unbelieving attention.

DOOMWATCH. Tigon British Film Productions, UK, 1972. Released in the US as Island of the Ghouls. Ian Bannen, Judy Geeson, John Paul, Simon Oates, George Sanders, Geoffrey Keen, Percy Herbert, Shelagh Fraser. Screenplay by Clive Exton, based on the BBC series created by by Kit Pedler and Gerry Davis. Director: Peter Sasdy.

   This cautionary thriller was based on the BBC television series of the same name starring John Paul, Simon Oates, Vivien Sherrard, and Robert Powell (1970-72) and adapted to this taut film about an environmental disaster on a small Cornish island dependent on fishing and the sea.

   Ian Bannen is Dr. Shaw ( a new character created for the film) with Doomwatch, an organization that investigates the environmental impact of ecological disasters. After an oil spill he is dispatched to the small island of Balfe (a fictional creation) to ask a few questions and take some samples to see if local wildlife has been harmed.

   Balfe (filming was done around Polperro and Mevagissey in Cornwall ) is a quiet place, insular and inbred. Shaw gets little cooperation and meets open resentment as he begins to nose around. The opening scenes build up a nice atmosphere as he encounters deeper mysteries; an unusually violent dog, someone following him everywhere, a child buried in the forest whose body disappears, and finally an attack by a strangely disfigured man that locals try to write off as an accidental fall on slippery rocks on the shore.

   With the help of local teacher, Judy Geeson, Bannen begins to delve into the mystery it is now clear cannot be caused by the oil spill, and uncovers Castle Rock, an abandoned Naval dumping ground, but when he approaches Admiral George Sanders he learns the low level radioactive material dumped by the Royal Navy could not have caused the problem on the island.

   A dive at the dumping site uncovers industrial experimental growth hormones dumped there illegally. The radiation caused the hormone filled canisters to burst and contaminated the fish eaten by the islanders.

   But even when they know the cause of the disease the insular and increasingly violent islanders don’t want their life disturbed, and may kill to protect their way of life. They believe the disease is caused by inbreeding and is a judgment of God. They are too ashamed to seek help, and frightened of being forced to leave their ancestral home: in its last stages the disease can produce violence and madness — and in several cases has led to murder and suicide.

   The film produces a powerful statement about the impact of such a disaster, and while it was science fiction at the time it hardly seems so today. If anything, the scenes of the clean up of the oil spill at the beginning of the film are more chilling now than they were then. But it works as an intelligent and thoughtful mystery thriller despite and sometimes thanks to its minuscule budget.

   Filming was done effectively in and around the rugged Cornish coast, and the unique architecture of the island towns gives it an curiously threatening and yet quaint look. Bannen is effective as the passionate scientist and Geeson the outsider only partially accepted by the islanders. Sanders, seems mostly tired as the Admiral and Keen (probably best known to American viewers as the Foreign Minister in the James Bond films) has little to do as the industrialist who farmed out the clean up to the lowest bidder.

   Character actor Percy Herbert has one or two brief scenes as one of the islanders effected by the disease but hanging on to his humanity and common sense. Shelagh Fraser is good as Bannen’s landlady, trying to maintain her secrets and contain her grief over her desperately ill and grotesquely deformed husband.

   The ending, as Doomwatch and the Navy try to clean up the mess, is effectively downbeat, and if it’s a letdown from the monsters and horrors suggested earlier in the film it offers instead a sober, intelligent, and moving picture of the devastation left behind by greed and carelessness and the difficulty of dealing with such a small secretive and inbred community.

   Running only 88 minutes (I’ve seen it listed as everything from 70 to 92 minutes, but the DVD I viewed was 88), this is an almost gentle film, handsomely shot, and done with real intelligence and a determination to avoid sensationalism and replace it with real drama and suspense, and in those things it succeeds.

   As in real life there are no real villains and no easy answers. The corporate types tried to save money and chose the low bidder to dispose of the waste and the company who disposed of the waste was stupid not criminal.

   The writers eschew sensational sub-plots and stick to the human story, and it is more powerful for it with no corporate intrigue, chases, and hired hit men tacked on for filler; just real people in a real crisis. Just how much tension and threatened violence they ring out of that may surprise you.

    Doomwatch is sometimes unfairly compared to The Wicker Man, but only the setting and the idea of the insular island society and an outsider’s reaction to it and uncovering its mysteries are the same. It is primarily a mystery and suspense film, but often promoted as horror or science fiction.

   Writers Kit Pedler and Gerry Davis also wrote a Crichtonesque novel, Mutant 59: The Plastic Eaters adapted from an episode of Doomwatch TV series, as well as the novels Brainrack and The Dynostar Menace.

   Kit Pedler (aka Dr. Christopher Magnus Pedler) was the unofficial scientific adviser on Doctor Who and wrote several scripts, among them “Tomb of the Cybermen,” in which he created one of the Doctor’s most enduring foes, the Cybermen.

   Screenwriter Clive Exton’s credits include adapting Edgar Wallace’s On the Spot and Francis Durbridge’s The World of Tim Fraser for television, the screenplays for Night Must Fall and 10 Rillington Place, and would be best known here for the Jeeves and Wooster series with Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry, and the Poirot series with David Suchet.

   Director Peter Sasdy directed several Hammer films including Countess Dracula, Taste the Blood of Dracula and Hands of the Ripper. He also directed the film of Nigel Kneale’s The Stone Tapes, and somewhat less successfully Harold Robbins The Lonely Lady with Pia Zadora. His other work includes Sherlock Holmes and the Leading Lady with Christopher Lee and the television series Callan, with Edward Woodward.

   The disease the islanders suffer from is acromegaly, a disease of the pituitary gland, probably the best known sufferer of the disease being actor Rondo Hatton, the Creeper of Hollywood fame, whose distinctive features were exploited in several Hollywood horror films (The Pearl of Death from the Sherlock Holmes series, The Return of the Spider Woman, The Brute Man) before his early death from the disease in 1946.

INVISIBLE INVADERS. United Artists, 1959. John Agar, Jean Byron, Philip Tonge, Robert Hutton, John Carradine. Director: Edward L. Cahn.

   As bad as second-rate sci-fi movies are today, in 1959 they were even worse. Even so, while this one is as ineptly written as they come, the solid earnestness of the cast makes it bearable to watch. It also doesn’t manage to turn you off with an excess of stomach-wrenching special effects, as opposed to what just about every other space-invasion monster-movie supplies us with, whether we wish so or not.

   Maybe that’s because the invaders from the moon, the self-proclaimed “masters of the universe”, are invisible. What is not really explained very well is why (1) they have been content to stay on the moon until now, and (2) why they need to possess the bodies of corpses while they’re on Earth.

   Add number (3): while they are in possession of the bodies of corpses, why must they walk in such a vacant-eyed, lurching fashion, and speak with the cavernous voice of John Carradine, the first dead man whose body they took over?

   And, well, while I’m at it, how about question (4): why do they bother “warning” Earth in the first place? If they’re so anxious to take over the place, now that mankind is on the verge of space travel and reaching the stars ourselves, why not just come in and wipe us out, without our even knowing?

   Put the answers to these questions down to the fact that there are certain things that Mankind is doomed to never know. (Nor, I am inclined to believe, are we meant to.)

[UPDATE] 09-02-10. I don’t remember this one at all. It’s available on DVD from Midnight Movies double-billed with another SF film called Journey to the Seventh Planet, which maybe I ought to buy, unless you can talk me out of it. (Some reviewers on IMDB call Invisible Invaders a minor classic, but I’d rather hear from people I trust.)

BEYOND THE BERMUDA TRIANGLE. Made for TV movie: NBC, 6 November 1975. Fred MacMurray, Sam Groom, Donna Mills, Suzanne Reed, Dana Plato, Dan White. Director: William A. Graham.

   One of my life-long weaknesses has been the indolent habit of napping in the afternoon. However, I have always observed that I don’t have any interesting dreams when I nap, and I have concluded that I might put the time to better use by propping my eyes open and reading a book or watching a film that I might, in my more alert moments, not want to waste my time on.

   I would like to think that this might occasionally lead to one of those “fortuitous” encounters in which the Surrealists believed and where marvelous consequences sometimes follow upon the most banal circumstance.

   For those of you who would like to delve more deeply into Surrealist philosophy on this point, I refer you to Andre Breton’s Nadja, especially those pages describing his addiction to the American chapter play, Trail of the Octopus.

   I was, earlier today, at a point where waking and sleep are no longer contrary conditions when my somnolent fingers brought into view on the TV screen, the opening scenes of a WTBS Sunday afternoon movie, Beyond the Bermuda Triangle.

   I have always been intrigued by psychic phenomena, ever since those years when I used to look for the door to the Land of Oz in the closets of my grandparents’ farm.

   Even in my bemused state, I quickly gathered in the essentials necessary to follow the storyline, which involved the disappearance of a boat in the area of the Triangle, and a young girl’s belief that her mother was still alive, somewhere “out there,” and was calling to her.

   I had some trouble with character relationships, but deduced that Sam Groom is courting the sister of the missing woman who is taking care of her young niece, while Fred McMurray (with either a hair-piece or his hair dyed a sinister black) is probably the grandfather of the bereaved child, but is somewhat distracted by his pursuit of a much younger woman who is, herself, to disappear into that same hungry triangular area where the compass goes batty but where there is always time to send one last radio message before static claims the airways. Whew!

   There is also a character to whom I felt peculiarly drawn, a retired professor who, years earlier, had lost his wife in the triangle and, at the last moment, close to the opening of the door to the “other side,” hesitated and was forever barred from crossing over.

   That had obviously bothered him no end, and, in a touching and significant scene, he tells MacMurray that there is one thing bigger than this life “down here” and that’s “love.”

   That choked me up a bit and fogged my glasses, and when I could see clearly again Fred was casting off to sea with Groom’s girlfriend.

   That lead to a really tense climax in which Groom, pursued by the Coast Guard, raced to intercept Fred’s boat. I don’t want to give away the ending (which would be foreign to the spirit of this blog), but let me tell you that the Old Professor was right on target, and some old geezers are quick studies.

      This made-for-TV movie had everything: a grieving child in peril, weird music, mysteries beyond our mortal ken, references to Atlantis, and an impressive, late-career performance by Fred MacMurray.

   Now, I know that some people think Fred wasn’t much of an actor and got by on an earnest look and a commanding, sonorous voice. Well, here it was all in the eyes: the body was slack, the demeanour reserved, but the eyes seemed to reflect glimpses of something that sent a shiver down my spine (or rather up, since I started sliding out of my seat at one point and almost jackknifed on the floor between the chair and footstool).

   I wish they had given the movie a less obvious title, something like Empty Boats. Still, since this might be a picture that only a recent retiree can appreciate, if you ever get a chance to watch it and don’t agree with me, don’t call me, I’ll call you.

   But while you’re waiting for my call, don’t go into your closet. You never know who … or what … might be coming into it from … out THERE!

CRACK IN THE WORLD. Paramount Pictures, 1965. Dana Andrews, Kieron Moore, Janette Scott, Alexander Knox. Screenplay Jon Manchip White & Julian Halevy, based on a story by Jon Manchip White. Director: Andrew Marton.

   That pretty well sums up this fast paced British science fiction thriller from writer/producer Philip Yordan, director Andrew Marton (King Solomon’s Mines), and Welsh novelist, scholar, folklorist, and screenwriter Jon Manchip White (Nightclimber, The Game of Troy, etc.).

   Nobel Prize winner Dr. Stephen Sorenson (Dana Andrews) is dying of cancer and wants one last triumph to benefit mankind in his name, a project to tap into the Earth’s magma core and provide and endless supply of energy and rare metals. His method: deep core drilling, and the use of a thermonuclear warhead to break through the last thin crust before reaching the magma.

   Team geologist Dr. Ted Rampion (Kieron Moore) fears the use of the nuclear device will only aggravate cracks in the planets crust caused by nuclear testing. The Macedo Trench, deep beneath the ocean, could break open, a thousand mile wide crack in the world pouring molten lava and magma into the ocean and causing apocalypse.

   Complicating things are two factors: Sorenson is married to the much younger Maggie (Janette Scott), also a scientist, who was once in love with Rampion, and he is keeping hidden from her — and everyone — that he is dying of cancer.

   As Rampion races to London to convince Sir Charles (Alexander Knox) of the UN commission to stop Sorenson’s project, Sorenson pushes through. The missile is fired and all seems well. Rampion is forgiven and returns to the project.

   Then his worst nightmares start to come true. The Earth’s crust is beginning to shatter like a windshield hit by a bullet. But if they can set off a second thermonuclear explosion at the right point — a volcanic island on the Macedo Trench — they can use the hydrogen trapped in the magma core to create a backfire and stop the spreading crack in the world.

   A capable cast, fine production values and color photography, a literate script, and good direction, plus a melodramatic but appropriate score by John Douglas, contribute to a fast-moving science fiction thriller along the lines of other literate British science fiction films of the period as Five Million Years to Earth, First Men in The Moon, The Day The Earth Caught Fire, and Day of the Triffids (also produced by Yordan with Kieron Moore in the cast). Unlike some other sf offerings of the same general era there is no cheesy acting, zaftig leading ladies, or unfunny comic relief to get in the way.

   The touch of soap opera is just enough to make this one a bit more adult than the usual sf fare from the period without getting too much in the way of the suspense and excitement. The realistic special effects don’t hurt either. Excellent use of model work, location shooting, and imaginative cinematography all combine to keep the viewer from asking too many questions — which is their role in this kind of film

   After the bomb in the Macedo Trench fails, the planet seems certain to be torn apart and sent hurtling in pieces throughout the solar system as twenty thousand square miles of Earth’s surface are torn away — in effect the birth of a new moon, either destroying the planet or saving it by acting as a safety valve.

   Andrews is particularly good in this one as a proud man who fears failure more than death and pity more than abandonment. I’m not suggesting it’s an award-winning performance or anything, but it is a deeper and more nuanced than what we usually expect in this kind of film from this period. By this point his career was on the skids, thanks to both drinking and age, but he could still provide a good performance as he does here or in John Sturges’s much underrated The Satan Bug.

   Moore makes for a stalwart leading man, his penchant for playing villains and more complex characters (Mine Own Executioner as the disturbed veteran, the bully in Darby O’Gill and the Little People) adding a little depth to what would other wise be the usual colorless leading man stereotype of these.

   Janette Scott is mostly there for eye candy and plot points, but she manages to suggest there might be an actual character there torn between her heart, her mind, her passions, and her needs.

   Add some well-done set pieces inside a volcano and a harrowing escape up an elevator shaft into something out of Dante’s inferno, and this one has the factors it needs to hold the attention and provide that sense of wonder that marks the best science fiction on film and in print, and the birth of the new moon is exciting enough for anyone (not that they deal with the problems that would actually cause or the devastating after effects — this was well before anyone suggested the idea of nuclear winter).

   Still, this is an attractive little sf film you can enjoy without parking your critical faculties and one that may linger in your imagination longer than you expect.

Note:   Of the films mentioned here, The Day The Earth Caught Fire is outstanding, an intelligent sf disaster film told from the point of view of the city desk of a major London newspaper with an outstanding performance by Leo McKern, of Rumpole of the Bailey fame, as a Fleet Street city desk manager worthy of Gerald Kersh’s Bo Raymond stories.

   It’s something different than the usual cliches and thrills, with one of the most memorable endings of any sf film of its time.