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The title is from William Carlos Williams and no mistake, the opening surveys a bachelor party as cheerless as Paddy Chayefsky's. The groom (Tom Tryon) leaves the saloon the night before his wedding and is readily engulfed by cosmic smoke, the doppelgänger from Andromeda takes his place next to the bride (Gloria Talbott). (Storm clouds over the honeymoon hotel give a flash of the tentacled face behind the saturnine visage.) Doing preliminary work for the invasion, the extraterrestrial voyagers wear human bodies like ill-fitting suits ("The design is pretty lousy") and develop a distaste for booze and oxygen. The female of the species, a fruitless search, the fear of a barren womb that becomes the horror of a womb full of alien seed. The impostor all the while comes to long for emotion, gazing at the smooching couple next door and sighing. "You're learning how to love?" "I'm learning what love is." Arnold's It Came from Outer Space is a precedent for the wry portrait of the married state, with the utmost matter-of-factness Gene Fowler Jr. adds the space creature's viewpoint of Eisenhower domesticity suspended between bedroom and barroom. The visitors commiserate over the planet's strangeness, one can't shop for dolls without being hit on by the local floozy, only the smarmy comrade (Alan Dexter) enjoys the masquerade. "You celebrating Be Kind to Humans week?" The satire has squid-men running insurance offices and a castrating posse recruited right out of maternity-ward waiting rooms. Red-infiltration anxiety plus queer and feminist implications, or, simply, the mystery of the person sharing your bed (cf. Roeg's The Man Who Fell to Earth). With Peter Baldwin, Robert Ivers, Valerie Allen, Ty Hardin, John Eldredge, and Jean Carson. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |