Classic Horrors Club

What a great title! However, screenwriter Harry Spalding supposedly never liked it. In a 2003 interview with Tom Weaver, he claimed that someone said the title as a joke and “somehow it kind of stuck.” As I said, it’s a great title, but not necessarily for this movie. In fact, it’s ironic that nobody even speaks a word for nearly the first ten minutes of The Earth Dies Screaming.

What a terrific ten minutes it is, though! A man lies unconscious on a train that then crashes. A car runs into a brick wall. A man on a train platform collapses, as does the proprietor of a clock shop. A plane crashes. Bodies are scattered across the ground. We seen even more visions of human beings dropping dead before the camera pans up to the sky for the credits.

Jeff Nolan (Willard Parker) drives his Land Rover into a seemingly deserted village. We soon know he’s a good guy because he picks up a dead bird and sets it on a ledge rather than leaving it on the ground. He enters an inn and, after removing the bodies, learns that he isn’t the last man on Earth. A handful of other people have survived.

They surmise they survived a gas attack. Each of them was located in some type of shelter when it happened. Two of them were in the hospital because… one of them, Lorna Brenard (Anna Palk) is pregnant. Interestingly, this makes them “the most important people on Earth right now. Non-interestingly, it’s going to complicate their plans to escape.

Escape from what, you may ask? Well, there are alien robots patrolling the street dressed as prototypes of Mr. Freeze (the good Batman: the Animated Series Mr. Freeze) and they are resurrecting the dead as their slaves. At one point they encounter one of the robots followed closely by two “zombies” that have “gray blobs” instead of eyes.

This all sounds so exciting, and the running time is just over one hour, so it must be very thrilling, right? For me, it wasn’t. At some point it morphed into The Earth Dies Sleeping. It’s hard to imagine that a movie with such a great start and premise, with only 60 minutes to tell the rest of the story, could become so slow. 

There’s probably one scene too many of robot/zombie shenanigans inside the inn. Perhaps if some of that time were shifted to an explanation of how our heroes plan to stop the invasion, the rushed conclusion would be more substantial. As it is, I’m left sharing the sentiment of one of the characters earlier in the movie, “Nothing makes any sense to me.”

It’s simultaneously too much and too little. It includes history for the characters (except Jeff) and resulting drama. For example, Quinn Taggart (Dennis Price) is holding a woman hostage, claiming to be her husband. We learn where they all came from and how they survived. Because of the pace, though, I didn’t much care.

Any shortcomings are disappointing because The Earth Dies Screaming was directed by Terence Fisher of Hammer Films fame. For the first few minutes, it’s like he was making an apocalyptic masterpiece. The rest is like producers Robert L. Lippert and Jack Parsons exclaimed, “Whoops! We have only enough film for one hour!”