Watch The Earth Dies Screaming For Free

I like movies that are aware of what they are selling... without [any] greater aspirations than to make people laugh and that's it.

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

Blistering performances.

This decent sci-fi / invasion flick stars token American "name" Willard Parker as Jeff Nolan, a test pilot working in England who discovers that most humans (that he can see, anyway) have been decimated by an alien force (likely a gas attack, as he surmises). He runs into a few other survivors, and they must dodge the robotic characters that are silently stalking around the streets of an eerily quiet country village.Canadian born writer Harry Spalding ("The Watcher in the Woods", "Chosen Survivors") concocted this minor, yet diverting little movie. Film director Terence Fisher, known primarily for his work with the famed Hammer Studios, derives an enjoyable amount of tension from the set-up, even though the automatons don't come across as particularly threatening. (For one thing, they move quite slowly.) The storytelling and the filmmaking are very much to the point - "The Earth Dies Screaming" has no filler and clocks in at barely over an hour long. Some of its tension comes from the fact that one of the humans is an antsy, selfish twit well played by Dennis Price.The whole cast is good. Parker is an efficient, no-nonsense hero, the kind of guy whom you'd be inclined to follow in crisis situations such as this. Virginia Field, Thorley Walters, Vanda Godsell, David Spenser, and Anna Palk all have appeal as the various people whom he encounters. Poor Walters is kind of a tragic character, when you realize that he has to lose somebody he loves more than once.Incidentally, the title is not that accurate but, as people have pointed out, "The Earth Dies Screaming" does sound better than "The Earth Dies Sleeping".Seven out of 10.

Warning, this review contains spoilers.This British made Sci-Fi movie boasts a snappy title, which may be the best part of this film. Aliens attack earth. A small group of survivors hold up in an English village. Their de-facto leader, a test pilot, is played by Willard Parker. Alien invaders wearing what looks like a retro biohazard suit roam the streets. Although unstoppable by pistol and rifle fire, the aliens are not invincible and are shattered to pieces by blunt force trauma from automobiles. I found the acting, stiff, and the film's pace too slow. The dialog was predicable. The mix of survivor characters includes the hero test pilot, a pregnant woman, and a male survivor who drinks too much. Tossed in for good measure the earthlings killed by the aliens, later come to life, controlled by the aliens to do their bidding. So there you have it, a predictable plot, stiff acting, stilted dialog, all packed into a film that is about an hour long. I probably won't be seeing this one again. In fact, I'd like to see the title changed from "The Earth Dies Screaming" to "The Viewers Die of Disinterest".

Solid movie of its type, a 1960s British-made, low-budget, sci-fi drama that plays like a stage production and stars a veteran American actor to appeal to the U.S. market. In this case, the lead is Willard Parker of "Texas Rangers" TV fame, and Thorley "Doctor Watson" Walters is one of his costars. Parker plays a test pilot who returns to earth one day to find almost everyone dead. He stumbles upon a few other survivors, who were all shielded in various ways at the moment of doom. The handful of survivors holes up in a hotel in a small town and fight an army of alien robots that have come to conquer our planet. Most of the film is interaction among the survivors. There are no special effects and little action. And yet, in the hands of masterful director Terrence Fisher, the film is atmospheric and reasonably suspenseful. The robots are just plain silly, but everything else works. Reminiscent of "Village of the Damned," and in fact apparently used footage from that long-ago classic. See it.

The Earth Dies Screaming starts as something of a misnomer: budget limitations mean we only see the disaster's main effects within a very localised area of Northern England. As for the screaming, there's no human sound heard until 8 minutes into the film. Like many of the small cycle of English invasion films made at this time, Fisher's is small scale, almost domestic in setting, implying a catastrophe at a personal level just as much as on a national one. In contrast to those produced in America, English invasion movies were often less grandiose and paranoid, relying more on alien intrusions into more realistic, even humdrum worlds, places where the ordinary is ever present. Like the cult Devil Girl from Mars (1954) substantial scenes of TEDS take place in the comforting atmosphere of a pub or nearby where, it seems, British folk naturally congregate for comfort and safety: think of Shaun of the Dead's last refuge Director Fisher is most known for the series of Gothic horrors which have most occupied critical attention. His SF work has been readily dismissed as a genre in which he had little interest. TEDS was the first of a trilogy for the appositely named Planet Productions company, the others being Night of the Big Heat (1966) and Island of Terror (1967). All three feature alien invasion and a small group of people trying to fend off the intruders. Negative responses to these works perhaps stem from the fact that, often, the people are more interesting than the monsters and junk science on display, and the films lack the vibrancy of his horror work.At the heart of TEDS are three relationships: that between Quinn Taggart (a splendidly caddish Dennis Price) and Peggy (Virgina Field); the often drunk Otis (Thorley Walters) and his party friend Violet (Vanda Godsell), as well as the young couple Mel (David Spenser) with the pregnant Lorna (Anna Palk). Independent of this group is Jeff Nolan, played by the film's sole American actor. Producer Lippert had a successful formula of adding transatlantic appeal to films by stocking them with token imported talent. Here Willard Packer fits the bill. Packer is the man taking charge of events, organising the survivors, and figuring it out – right down to where the alien's transmitter can be found. He can be seen, in his mild way, as a typical 'Quatermass' figure: a technically competent individual taking charge to protect British society from intrusion. While no pure scientist, Nolan still has enough know-how to quickly grasp what has happened, how the invasion can be thwarted and to take decisive action. By the end of the film, he wins the right to a relationship of his own.Critics such as Peter Hutchings in 'We're All Martians Now' (British Science Fiction Cinema (Routledge, 1999)) have identified such influential figures as typically being a 'boffin-like protector of a society which seems incapable of protecting itself'. At the same time, through the imported novelty of his presence, Nolan is a reminder of British insularity. At time many of these films appeared British society was still relatively isolated, but under pressure from new pressures and changes, both international and local. Only the cynical Taggart has a competing world-view in the film that's as strong as Nolan's. For Taggart the new global conflict is over. Worse, "whoever did it has won… its every man for himself" - fatalistic sentiments in stark contrast to the famous spirit of the blitz, striking to many of those watching then. The punishment for his criminality and selfishness will be the loss of his tenuous relationship with Peggy and, ultimately his humanity, part of the alien zombie army.The biggest social change in Fisher's film is obvious – a successful first strike against British society, together with silver-clad aliens walking the streets, zombie workforce in support. Blank-eyed and as slow-moving as their masters, these zombies are among the most effective elements in the film. They must have been rather a novelty to contemporary audiences. I can't, off-hand, think of an earlier representation of the creatures in British cinema before this (Hammer's Plague of the Zombies appeared two years later, but even so is set in the past). They provide one of the highlights of the film – a scene when Peggy is pursued, then trapped breathlessly in a bedroom closet, when Fisher makes use of a very dramatic close up to add terror.In contrast to the unsuccessful efforts of the un-dead to find a female, Nolan succeeds in gradually establishing a relationship and, one presumes, goes on to a successful romance. His success against the invader acts as a catalyst. By the end of the film he is entitled to reintegrate back in society. There's a parallel to be found between the zombie's painfully slow pursuit search and unnerving, soulless staring at the closet in which Peggy hides to another scene where Nolan had looked on, affectionately, as she pottered over small things in the pub's kitchen. The difference between humanity and the alien, the film suggests, is that the former can bring value and sentiment to what it sees and so, once again, the British invasion variant gravitates naturally to the domestic.TEDS is further helped by a very effective score by Elizabeth Lutyens, as well as some crisp, atmospheric cinematography by Arthur Lavis, especially effective when shooting on village location. These are elements that help to make it my favourite out of Fisher's small group of SF movies, a feeling which even the over-acting of Walters can't dissipate. It 's also blessed with a dramatic pre-title sequence - a world wrecked by sudden accident, recalling the night before Day of the Triffids, as well as an eerie sense of a familiar landscape made empty, a horror-fantasy tradition which persists right down to such British films as 28 Days Later. Fisher's film may be short, cheap, and with a disappointingly flat denouement, but its modest pleasures easily invite revival.