I should have blogged about this one last Wednesday

One of my recent DVD purchases was this six-movie science fiction set. I think I've already blogged about The Night the World Exploded, but don't think I've seen the other five. So I put one of the discs in my DVD player and watched The 27th Day.

Eve Wingate (Valerie French) is a British woman spending a nice day on the southwest coast along with her painter boyfriend. She goes off to towel off, and hears a stentorian voice telling her to come with him, followed by a blinding flash of light. Jonathan Clark (Gene Barry) is a reporter for a Los Angeles newspaper, covering the night shift, and he hears a similar voice. The same thing happens to Pvt. Godofsky, a sentry at the Kremlin; West German scientist Prof. Bechner (George Voskovec); and a woman from a war-torn(?!) part of China.

It turns out the five have been brought on board an alien spaceship somewhere in outer space. The Alien (Arnold Moss) informs them that he's a representative of an alien race from a planet far away, one whose sun is about to go nova, destroying the planet and their civilization with it. The need a new planet to live on, and see that Earth fits the bill quite nicely and has several hundred million years before life is going to die out, so they're going to settle Earth.

Of course, Earth already has sentient life forms on it, and these aliens have just enough morals that prevent them from simply destroying Earth life as we know it and replacing it with their own civilization. Instead, they come up with a rather devious idea, which is to take earthlings' naturally self-destructive tribal tendencies and exploit those to get us humans to destroy ourselves. Because that's obviously so much more moral.

To achieve this, the Alien gives our five humans a compact-like case with three capsules that are something like the supposed neutron bomb, that is, something that was designed to kill humans while leaving the rest of the infrastructure intact, although neutron bombs were designed to kill over a much smaller radius. These cases could only be opened by the thoughts of the five people given the cases, each person being able to open only his or her own case. No other power on earth could open it, although once open, anybody can use the weapons. If mankind can avoid using these weapons for 27 days, the aliens won't invade, but the aliens are confident they won't need the full 27 days. After explaining how the weapon is operated, the Alien sends the five humans back to Earth.

Now, my first thought is that the five people given these weapons could simply dispose of them by burial or whatnot, with nobody finding the weapons and nobody but the five being able to open the cases. Besides, only these five know about the weapons, so there's no reason to use them. Indeed, Eve is smart enough to take her case and throw it into the English Channel. But the aliens aren't so stupid. In a gambit reminiscent of The Next Voice You Hear, they're able to take over all TV and radio broadcasts, and give out the names of the five people who have these weapons! So now, everybody wants access to these weapons, possibly to stop them from being used, or most definitely in the case of the Soviets, to gain a tactical advantage over the Americans by using theirs first.

I didn't name the Chinese woman because she kills herself, which causes her weapon to disintegrate just as the Alien said. Eve, after throwing hers away, flies off to Los Angeles to find Jonathan. (How she evades passport control is not answered.) Jonathan picks her up and the two go into hiding at a race track that is currently out of season. The Soviets put pressure on Godofsky to explain and then use the weapon, while Prof. Bechner is picked up at the airport in the US leading the Feds to try to examine his weapon and figure out what to do.

The 27th Day is another of those movies with a really great premise that ultimately winds up having some problems with it that might mitigate your enjoyment of it. For me, the big problem was the resolution, which involved Bechner trying to figure out mathematically how the weapon works and coming up with a bit of a deus ex machina. I also mentioned the problem of Eve being able to get into the US. Some potential problems were actually covered, with a mention of relativity accounting for time dilation. There's also the broadcast naming the five possessors of the weapons, which solved what would otherwise have become a big problem for me. I also really liked how thought-provoking the movie is.

All in all, The 27th Day is quite good for a low-budget sci-fi movie, even with some of the problems it has. The box set is quite inexpensive, making The 27th Day more than worth the low price.