Not of this Earth (1957)

Not of this Earth (USA, 1957) 67 min (71 min TV version) B&W DIR-PROD: Roger Corman. SCR: Charles B. Griffith, Mark Hanna. MUSIC: Ronald Stein. DOP: John J. Mescall. CAST: Paul Birch, Beverly Garland, Morgan Jones, William Roerick, Anna Lee Carroll, Jonathan Haze, Dick Miller. (Allied Artists)

---

“If the events you about to witness are unbelievable it is because your imagination is chained.” So explains another of Allied Artists’ mind-bending title crawls that preface their low-buck science fiction films. This perfectly captures the dementia of this, another of Corman’s sci-fi gems- a dark, moody tale that manages to be even more offbeat than It Conquered the World. Paul Birch stars as an alien from the planet Davanna, with the identity of a “Mr. Johnson”, who attempts to collect a lot of blood from humans in the hope that it will rejuvenate those of his dying race. Since his eyes have no pupils (a clear symbol of having no livelihood, no character), he roams around our planet with sunglasses looking for wastrels to quench his thirst for blood.

He even has live-in nurse Nadine (Beverly Garland) on hand to deliver his transfusions, while he secretly prowls the neighbourhood looking for humanoid victims, and then awkwardly attempts to transmute them back to his home planet for sampling. Dick Miller has one of his best cameos as a hip-talking vacuum cleaner salesman, who shows up at the alien’s doorstop, and soon becomes mulched up for interplanetary consumption. Plus, in order to keep things moving fast enough before you have time to say “How can he afford to live in this mansion?”, Jonathan Haze is cast as Jeremy, his chauffeur and some-time injector. It isn’t long however, before they begin to uncover their boss’ true identity. (Plus, having a teleportation device in one’s living room might also have something to do with it.) Jeremy utters the immortal line: “You mean the boss is a man from Mars?”

In one nifty sequence, with the feel of an underground, French New Wave beatnik movie from Mars, Johnson voicelessly, telepathically communicates with another black-clad woman in sunglasses at a newsstand, discussing the progress of saving their race at home.

Although short on sense, this movie goes a long way in atmosphere, thanks to the shadowy black-and-white cinematography of John Mescall, and the swirling music of Ron Stein (now a veteran at this sort of thing). This is a much more moody film than the gauzy-looking programmers that Corman had previously made. Even the shoddy day-for-night sequences have some ambience.

With Mr. Johnson’s amazing powers of hypnosis, to get these pathetic Earthlings to do his bidding and become his zombie-like victims dispatched to another world, Beverly Garland becomes his next blood sample to be sent across the galaxy. Will her bland doctor boyfriend save her in time? 

Not of this Earth was unavailable on any home video format, until the 2011 Shout! Factory DVD release of the Roger Corman’s Cult Classics set, which included this with War of the Satellites and Attack of the Crab Monsters, two other films also making their home video debuts. The version I viewed for this review was actually a transfer of the TV version, in which the aforementioned prologue was added for broadcast. Several 1950s science fiction-horror films from Allied Artists, including The Cyclops, Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, The Wasp Woman, Not of this Earth, The Disembodied, and Macabre, were expanded for television release (as many of these films barely extended an hour), either with lengthy crawls of “scientific explanations”, or a later segment duplicated and added as a pre-credits teaser, or in some cases, newly shot wraparound footage.

---

Updated from a review originally published in The Roger Corman Scrapbook.