The Earth Dies Screaming

If you like B science fiction, then you'll probably like one of the movies that's back in the FXM rotation for the first time in many years: The Earth Dies Screaming. It's going to be on again tomorrow at 10:20 AM and again Tuesday at 4:55 AM.

The movie starts off with a train engineer collapsing and the train derailing off a curve. Similarly, a car crashes into a wall, and other people just drop dead. It's a promising enough start, before Jeff Nolan (Willard Parker) shows up in a small English village to examine the situation. After finding seemingly everybody dead, he walks into the local inn, and tries to turn on the TV to get some news, but just gets a buzz. The same thing happens when he turns on the radio.

At this point, Jeff learns that he's not the only person still alive. A man and woman show up, with the man pointing a gun at Jeff. That man is Quinn Taggart (Dennis Price), there with his wife Peggy (Virginia Field). At least, he says Peggy is his wife; in a private moment with Jeff, she tells him otherwise, which implies that Quinn might be a villain in this whole thing. There's still the question of what happened and why. A bit of investigation suggests a large-scale gas attack, as each of them was in a situation where they had their own air supply. Another couple shows up, Edgar (Thorley Walters) and Violet (Vanda Godsell).

And then, as the look outside, they see a couple of men in what look to be some sort of space suit, or maybe the sort of suit you'd see somebody wearing in a highly contaminated Ebola zone or that village where almost everybody died in The Andromeda Strain. Violet thinks help has arrived, and goes up to the men to ask for help, but it turns out they're some sort of aliens who kill her with a touch of the hand!

One more couple shows up, Mel and his pregnant wife Lorna. The survivors hunker down in the inn to try to figure out what to do, with some slight dissension among them because of Quinn's dishonesty and Edgar's drinking. They've got a bigger problem, however, in that Violet suddenly gets up and heads off downstairs, now looking a lot like a zombie. One can only guess that the rest of the townsfolk are going to turn into zombies eventually as well.

The Earth Dies Screaming is nothing more than B science fiction, with a running time of just 62 minutes and stark black-and-white photography. There's nothing particularly new here, but there's nothing notably wrong, either, above and beyond those problems that are typical to the low-budget B-movie genre. The movie ends a bit suddenly, and there are a few plot holes, such as why Quinn's character is as willing to oppose the rest of the group as he is, considering there are so few survivors.

But to be fair to The Earth Dies Screaming, nobody expects an all-time classic in these B movies. The Earth Dies Screaming entertains, which is what it set out to do, and in that it's more than worth a watch. I suppose I wouldn't have been surprised if it had gotten a DVD release on some box set of cheap sci-fi -- and there are some box sets that appear to be out of print. But The Earth Dies Screaming got a standalone Blu-ray release from Kino Lorber's Studio Classics division.