glenaobrien

Directed by horrormeister, Terence Fisher, The Earth Dies Screaming (1964) is a charming low budget British science fiction feature. Like others of its type, it contrasts with American visions of alien invasions by providing a small scale bucolic setting rather than giving us visions of large urban monuments being blasted by flying saucers. Okay, it's probably budgetary constraints as much as anything, but there's also a sort of British restraint here as a small group of survivors attempt to survive a world without people (or with very few people) after the population of Surrey is either destroyed or turned into mindless zombies by robot invaders. The opening scenes of planes falling out of the sky, trains and cars crashing, and the streets littered with the dead are quite effective and there is no dialogue at all until eight minutes into the film.

A tall heroic American (Willard Parker) leads a group of morally ambiguous Brits (including Virginia Field and Dennis Price) in evading the robots who, let's face it are so slow moving and easily overcome, so they don't seem to represent much of a threat. Except, of course, if they do manage to touch you, you die, only to return as the wide eyed walking dead. 'She hasn't got any eyes - just grey blobs!' Sometimes referred to as a precursor to Night of the Living Dead (1968), it's nowhere near as good but still has a lo-fi-sci-fi charm of its own.