Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, welcome to Weird House Cinema. This is Rob Lamb.
And this is Joe McCormick. And today on Weird House Cinema, we're going to be talking about the nineteen fifty eight sci fi horror movie I Married a Monster from Outer Space, directed by longtime Hollywood film editor Gene Fowler Junior, starring Gloria Talbot and Tom Tryan spoiler warning. As always, I figure we should put that right at the top. If you're new to this show. We always end up talking
about the plot in some pretty extreme detail. So if you want to go into this movie unspoiled, go check it out. Now. I know it's a few decades late now on that, but you know you still have the chance if you want to pause here and go watch the movie. I don't know where the best place to start is, but maybe with the title I Married a Monster from Outer Space that the wordiness of the title really catches up with you when you're like typing it
a lot in the notes. It's one of those fifties movies with an overly descriptive title, and yet unlike a lot of these movies with really wordy titles. It's not misleading like It Conquered the World. This one is wordy, but as a plot summary, it's right on the money.
Yeah, this is exactly how it goes down.
Yeah. So the story is about a young woman named Marge who begins to suspect that her very hunky new husband Bill may actually be an alien in disguise, and he is. This was a new movie for me. I just saw it for the first time over the weekend. I watched it with Rachel, and I was really pleasantly surprised. I kind of picked it because, for one thing, because of the funny title, and also because you know, I'd read some people online saying it was worth a look.
I thought it was actually really good. There are definitely some dated and goofy elements, and I'm excited to talk about those as well. One of the funniest parts of it being that you can literally never tell what time it's supposed to be in the movie, because it's obviously the middle of the night. Characters are asleep and they get up out of bed and leave the house, but it's shot in broad daylight. But the movie really does
hit hard on multiple levels. I think it's got a quite strong script with pretty tight plotting that is smart and interesting in several ways that we can talk about as we go on. I think has really good central performances, especially by Gloria Talbot and Tom Tryan. It has some fantastic for the time visual effects. I'm thinking particularly of the blooming smoke which steals men's souls. And I really
like the creature suits that we see as well. The heads are somehow a combination of the Darth Vader helmet with a cypress root. Paul It's kind of radiation suit meets a vascular plant. So this all comes together and makes for I think a really effective little film.
Absolutely, Yeah, I Married a Monster from Outer Space is really solid. My first exposure to this movie, as with a lot of classic B movies, came via nineteen eighty two's It Came from Hollywood, which, well, if you're not familiar with it, it was a clip field celebration of classic Hollywood weirdness and some classic Hollywood awfulness with mild riffing and some comedic skits by Dan Aykroyd, John Candy, Cheech and Chong and then Gilda Radner they're all to
varying degrees very funny. No, not all the humors as aged super well, but a lot of it is still pretty solid, I do.
As far as the riffing goes, I don't think you can do much better than we just sprayed for brains last week.
Yeah, there's some good riffing in here, pre msd riffing. But there were some clips from I Married a Monster from Outer Space in it came from Hollywood, and the monsters like really resonating. You're being bombarded with all these
different space monsters during these segments of this film. But there was something about these that really stood out, this kind of something about the sublime melding of black and white photographic effects, solid costume work really had that kind of classic Outer limits vibe to the creatures and so much later on. I don't even remember when exactly I did seek it out and I watched it in full, but it was it wasn't as dedicated to viewing as
I gave it this week. So I remember watching it, digging the effects and being like, oh, yeah, these effects are really good, maybe laughing at some of the outdated elements, but this time around, yeah, I thought the special effects absolutely held up, but I was even more impressed with everything else, particularly the lead performances and its thoughtful sci fi treatment of distance and alienation within a married relationship.
Yeah, I would agree with all of that. Now, I did want to talk about the movie's title a little bit more, because it is not just wordy or overly descriptive. It's actually an example of a recurring format. It's kind of a meme title style, this confessional title that starts with the word I. Other examples being things like I was a shoplifter or I was a teenage werewolf, which is actually was by the same director as today's movie.
It was from the year before. So I got interested in this and I was looking to see if anybody had written about where this meme title format originally came from. And I found an interesting analysis in an article it's actually about this film about I Married a Monster from outer Space on Turner Classic Movies by Richard Harlan Smith, and Smith explains as follows quote. Tabloid magazines enjoyed a veritable golden age in the United States after the Second
World War, at a time when economic prosperity wetted. A ravening national appetite for gossip, whether the subjects were unfortunate nobody's or celebrity scandal magnets. Americans appreciated having the inside scoop or the illusion thereof, particularly when spilled first person singular within the pages of confidential whisper or the National Inquirer.
In Hollywood, the movies began to reflect this voyeuristic bent with brazenly confessional titles along the lines of I was a criminal from nineteen forty five, I was a male warbride nineteen forty nine, and I was a shoplifter nineteen fifty. So Smith is arguing here that it begins in nineteen forties tabloids and gossip magazines. It's this phrasing that offers a kind of lurid intimacy, like I'm going to tell
you a secret and it's going to be shocking. So first it is a type of tabloid headline, and then that format, or that sensibility at least, is brought over into the marketing of films. So Smith goes on to say that over time these I was a something films tend to become more shocking and also more specific, and they really start to focus on Weird Secrets about or
from within a marriage quote. In nineteen forty two, both I Married an Angel and I Married a Witch posited happy fantasy unions of humans and otherworldly creatures of uncommon beauty. By the end of the decade, however, the mood had darkened considerably, though their titles would be changed for theatrical release. I Married a Communist aka the woman on Peer thirteen
from nineteen forty nine. That's a film noir. And also I Married a dead Man aka no Man of her Own from nineteen fifty broached a connubial incompatibility of epic proportions, a marital malaise that reached its apotheosis in nineteen fifty eight with I Married a Monster from outer Space.
Yeah. Yeah, this whole legacy of I Married a blank film, it's pretty fascinating. I did read that I Married a Communist was the initial title for Peer thirteen, then the kind of the woman from on Peer thirteen, and then the kind.
Of backed off of it.
I guess audiences didn't like it as much, but but in general, like you can definitely see the power of it. You know, this this kind of the bait is that there's a. You know, the will the would be filmgoer is gonna have to contemplate the change and identity within the confines of a married relationship. Uh, in a kind of promisingly evocative way. So like that sweet loving person that I married, Oops, they're actually a dracula, They're actually a franket, stuff, and so forth.
Yeah, you can see why it's a successful pitch. It packages a lot into a few words. It Uh, it implies automatically relationship stakes and drama, human drama. Like you can see how there I married a blank always seems to imply surprise of some kind, which implies deception, which you know, is something that the characters are going to have to work through. So that's guaranteed drama on the front end. And then also, of course I'm married a whatever.
Even if it's not going to be explicit, it implies that there will be something about sex, you know, it just like conjures the idea of sexual union into the mind. Well yeah, like even sexual secrets will be discovered.
Yeah, Like even in this picture, which again is fifty eight very much a bedroom door closed picture, still the idea of sex and the idea of human reproduction is very much an important part of the film. It just is alluded to, you know, at times, you know, very very chastily, very clinically in some regards. It's happening in the background, but is absolutely essential to the plot.
I agree this movie is not very explicit in any way. I mean, certainly not visually explicit, but the sexual and reproductive themes of it are definitely central and one of the strongest elements. Actually. Yeah, So this film I Married a Monster from Outer Space was originally released as part of a double feature with The Blob. Could you have guessed the weird pairing, isn't it?
It's a great pairing, though. Imagine getting to see two classics like this back to back. I mean, assuming you were there to actually watch the film and not make out. Some people were there to watch the film though.
I Married a Monster was originally supposed to be the A film, with The Blob running second, but reactions from test audiences made Paramount decide to flip the bill, so I Married became the b title. If you ask me, I've seen them both, I would argue that I Married a Monster from Outer Space is the better of the two movies, at least in terms of writing and acting in cinematography. No slam in the Blob, but I think
this is the stronger film. But reports from the time are that the Blob won out because it was in color. It's hard to beat colored. This is what the teenagers wanted at the time. Even if you have a lot of other stuff going for you, if you're in black and white, it's just hard to compete.
Yeah, yeah, the Blob is pretty brilliant in color. And yeah, the Blob is an Alzheimer Steve McQueen star jelly. That great title sequence with the Bert Backerac theme song, you know, it establishes that there's a party that's about to happen. So for the driving especially, that makes sense. But I'd agree that I Married a Monster Is is a far more contemplative work with effects that I think stand up even better. I don't know, it's kind of hard to
compare because we're used to the Blob. The Blob has kind of like a bigger pop culture shadow. But yeah, the effects in this film are terrific, and at the very least are in their own way, on par with the Blog.
In this movie, they're terrific, but they're more modest. I mean The Blob is an effects centric film, and this is not. This is a tense, frightening, little relationship drama with you know, aliens and alien special effects woven in. Yeah. So if you've seen a bunch of other sci fi horror movies from the drive in era, you will probably not be very surprised by the core plot or premise of the movie. I would say this one actually makes use of two different alien invasion premises that were popular
at the time that you'll find in other films. So maybe we should talk about both of them and how they kind of work into the themes of this movie, and how they work into themes of other movies, and then how they work in differently in this one. So one of these plot types is the aliens in human skin plot. The premise is that the alien invasion is covert, not over, so it's not a flying saucer attacking Washington. It's you know, the aliens are blending in with us.
They're trying to seize power by blending in with human society and pretending to be us or acting through us. And this can take several forms. Sometimes these movies have a kind of puppeteering premise where aliens take control of human bodies directly, either through technology like a mind control ray or by taking up residents inside us as some kind of parasite. I think of the brain eaters. You know,
we've done plenty of movies like this. And then the other major version is body duplication or body snatching, where aliens copy the appearance of an earthling but remain themselves on the inside.
And these are both. These are these are great choices to make, especially with a scrappier B movie budget, right, because you can if you can afford monster effects that look pretty good, great, you can use them, but you can use them sparingly. And if you've got actors who are even just halfway decent at their job, you're gonna be able to lean on those performances more and not have to worry about what kind of you know, plaster goop is attached to their faces.
Yeah, and of course you get instant tension and drama from the idea of someone pretending to be something they're not.
Yeah, it absolutely works.
So a lot of these body snatching movies from the fifties are now interpreted. I was actually wondering about this. I should have looked it up before we recorded how often it was interpreted this way at the time, but at least retrospectively, they're now interpreted as Cold war paranoia, you know, consciously or unconsciously expressing fears about communist infiltration, Like they look just like your neighbors and your coworkers, but secretly they are Red spies. You know, they're subversives
trying to destroy your way of life. I have seen a few comments online that seem to casually lump I married a monster from outer space in with those other movies like, oh, it is another cold war political paranoia body snatching movie, you know, assuming it's about fears of secret political infiltration. I really don't agree with that reading.
I think the themes of identity and mistrust raised by the body snatching plot here are actually in service of a different constellation of ideas, mostly related to sex and gender. Actually that and actually I'll come back to this in a second, but the same ideas are raised by the second main familiar sci fi premise this movie uses, which is the reproductive conspiracy.
Yeah, yeah, I agree that this film seems mostly concerned with relationships and distance in those relationships, and there are
various ways you can interpret that. I've noticed some online re examining this film in terms of closeted nineteen fifty sexual identity and orientation, and I can see where those connections can be strongly made with a lot of it, I think, hinging on what we now know about star Tom Tryan's closet homosexuality, at least as far as his public persona was concerned as first an actor and then as a writer.
I would be interested to read about that. I would say, I don't know at the surface level if I see that kind of content intended within the film itself, but maybe I don't know. Yeah, yeah, but anyway, So the other thing that is, like a common type of fifties sci fi horror movie plot that appears here is the reproductive conspiracy. So the idea is space aliens have lost
the ability to reproduce sexually on their own. Often these plots are because one of the sexes has been wiped out by a catastrophe, so they decide they need to mate with humans in order to continue their line. We have covered several movies like this before, though always sillier versions like Ship of Monsters from nineteen sixty. Actually one of my favorite movies we've ever done on the show.
Yeah, love, and I can't believe you're arguing that it's not serious.
Well, yeah, it's It's seriousness is masked by the heart of a clown. There's that one. And then also Devil Girl from Mars, which is less overtly silly than Ship of Monsters, but is still pretty silly.
Yeah, it has a certain amount of cant to it.
Yeah. I would say that the reproductive plot in I Married a Monster from Outer Space feels significantly more serious and frightening than it does in those two movies, which is partly due to just approach, you know, differences in the writing like those movies are sillier, but also because of the swap to gender dynamics, like in those movies women from space need earth Men, which is usually played
for comedy in the movies. In I Married a Monster from Outer Space, men from space are trying to have offspring with Earth women, which that premise tends to create a darker and more threatening tone. And I think I think also in an interesting way, indirectly racist theme of sexual autonomy and reproductive rights for women. I don't want to overstate that element or overstate the feminist credentials of
this film. Because it is a drive in movie from nineteen fifty eight, You're not going to get explicit discussion of stuff like that on screen, but it does, I think, raise those ideas in an interesting and provocative way. And I think one cool power of speculative genres like science fiction and horror is that within them you can sometimes raise questions by implication and analogy which might not be given a fair hearing by the same audience if you just brought them up directly.
Yeah. Yeah, I think that's a great point, and I would agree that it is treated with I mean that this is saying men, but it is treated with a lot more seriousness than say nineteen sixty eight's Mars Needs Women or sixty fives Frankenstein Meets the Space Monster, in which you have like bikini ladies brought into parade before the Martian overlords so forth.
I guess, yeah, there are some movies like that that also just treat it for comedy. Sometimes that for some reason feels just more in bad taste.
Yea, we may have to come back to Frankenstein Meets the Space Monster. Though there's a lot of as I recall there's a lot of canned footage in there of like planes and rockets and whatnot, but also some legitimately goofy weirdness.
Is that the one with the bald guy with the pointy ears.
Yeah, yeah, he's another one that I remember mostly from it came from Hollywood.
Yeah, But anyway, I think maybe we can talk a bit more about these themes when we get into the plot section later in the episode.
Yeah. Yeah, I'm just going to throw out here real quick. We've been doing Weird House Cinema for a few years now. You can find all those episodes in the audio archive wherever you get your podcast. We cover movies from different decades.
This is our twenty third Weird House Cinema selection from the nineteen fifties, and I often will look and see, well, what did Michael Weldon have to say about this film and psychotronic Encyclopedia film or it's companion book, and he describes this one as quote an overlooked, well made science fiction hit that should appeal especially to women. I mean, yes, but I mean I think it would appeal to everybody. It's it's a pretty solid film, all right, Joe, do you have an elevator pitch.
The title is already an elevator pitch. But yeah, the other one is just what time is it? Totally unclear?
Yeah, yeah, is it day?
Is it night?
Sometimes there are there's some strong hints, like, well, they're having a picnic outside surrounded by the people. It has to be daytime.
The only business that's opened seems to be the bar, so I think it's night.
Yeah, you're wearing your nightgown. Must be night. Though the nightgowns of the late nineteen fifties are not that now it's harder for us to necessarily distinguish if this is a nightgown or this is a dayware. So yeah, all right. If you were interested in watching I Married a Monster from Outer Space, well, it is widely available. You can stream it or buy it digitally in a number of places, and if you would like to get a little physical media while, it's available on Blu Ray from Imprint as
well as Shout Factory. Shout Factory put out a double feature set that also includes nineteen fifty five's Conquest of Space. All right, let's get into the folks behind this film, starting with the director, who was also a producer on this film. That's Gene Fowler Junior, who of nineteen seventeen through nineteen ninety eight. I think we already alluded to his past as an editor. He was actually an Academy Award nominated film editor or would become one for nineteen
sixty four's It's a Mad, Mad, Mad Mad World. He worked primarily as an editor of TV and film from about thirty five through nineteen eighty five, but he also directed a series of projects along the way, beginning with the nineteen fifty two TV film China Smith, which spawned a TV series of the same name, which he also directed, and he followed that up with the nineteen fifty seven trend setting hit I Was a Teenage Werewolf, starring a young Michael Landon.
According to the Turner Classic Movies Retrospective by Richard Harlan Smith I mentioned earlier, Fowler took the chance to helm I Was a Teenage Werewolf because he wanted to try his hand at directing, and then, based on the title, he assumed nobody was gonna see this movie and he was wrong.
Yeah, yeah, And it was a hit. The film was enough of a success, and it hit enough of a nerve with the teen powered pop culture of the day.
That it led to multiple mostly unrelated projects looking to cash in on success, and then later It's cult following a nostalgia factor, but basically a whole string of teensploystation films followed, and these included Let's See I Was a teenage Frankenstein from fifty seven, The Blood of Dracula from fifty seven, which, despite the rather generic Dracula title, is apparently essentially a teenage vampire movie.
Oh that's funny. I would have assumed that has Christopher Lee in it.
Yeah, teenage cave Man from fifty eight, Teenagers from Outer Space from fifty nine. That one has some really cool effects in it as well.
One that one was on Mystery Science Theater was there's a.
There's in particular, the teens look a bit old. These are your you know, your standard issue twenties and thirties teens. But there's a great scene where somebody kills a dog with a ray gun.
Points the ray gun at it, and then it just turns into a skeleton. Yeah.
Yeah, really solid old time the effect. But yeah. Fowler of though he'd moved on to a handful of nonspecuative genre of films before coming back in fifty eight to him today's film I Married a Monster from Outer Space, which isn't a teen movie, but benefits from that same sort of snappy title composition as we discussed, you know, I Married a blank instantly draws you in.
Yeah.
So Fowler went on to direct I'll See nineteen fifty nine's The Revel Set, also seen on Mystery Science Theater three thousand, nineteen fifty nine's Here Come the Jets spoiler the Jets are not warm in this case, and various TV show episodes. He may have had a hand in a final film, nineteen seventy eight's The Astral Factor later
re released as Invisible Strangler starring Robert Foxworth. The workpieces the workpiece, but details on his involvement in that particular film are sketchy, so I can't tell he actually had anything to do with it, and if he did, do what degree.
Fowler allegedly took the job to direct I Married a Monster from Outer Space in part because he was promised broad creative freedom. The one stipulation from the financiers was that the aliens had to glow, and you know what, I'll take that as far as creative metaling goes, I think that idea works. It looks good. I like the glowing aliens.
Yeah, as we'll come back to the glowing effect is absolutely solid. So they nailed it. They nailed the one thing that was required, and then they delivered on pretty much everything else as well. All right. The screenplay for this film comes to us from Lewis Vittis, who have nineteen eleven through nineteen sixty nine. A screenwriter who frequently
worked with Fowler, including on Jets and Rebel Set. His speculative titles include the nineteen sixty four sleepwalking thriller The Eyes of Annie Jones and the nineteen fifty seven atomic monster film Monster from Green Hell and By the Way I Married. A Monster from Outer Space was remade as a TV film in nineteen ninety eight, directed by Nancy Malone.
I have not seen it. I looked at some stills from it, and as I expected from a nineteen nineties TV film, I wasn't really impressed by what I saw. Maybe the film is good, but I'm not so certain about those effects.
Well. The poster for it, which we looked up is the poster from Basic Instinct. Both the text and the actors swapped out. That's an interesting choice.
Yeah, I don't know. It's like, this film does such a great job with everything that it has, and its effects are so stellar, especially for the time. Yeah, it's It's a great concept though, and I celebrate the idea that it was remade and maybe it is good it. Folks out there, if you've seen I Married a Monster, the remake of I Married a Monster from outer Space right in and let's know what you thought.
Let's talk about Gloria Talbot, our star.
Yeah. Yeah, she has second billing, but she's our clear protagonist here, Gloria Talbot playing Marge. She lived nineteen thirty one through the year two thousand. Nineteen fifties, Brunette Starlett perhaps best remembered for her various B movies, which also include nineteen fifty seven's The Cyclops as well as Daughter
of Doctor Jekyl. And then there's nineteen sixties The Leech Woman, another film that has been featured on Mystery Science Theater three thousand and one that I remember being pretty fun and having some legitimately creepy moments in it.
I want to see Daughter of Doctor Jekyl because for several reasons, one of which is that it follows up on the premise of Doctor Jekyl and Mister Hyde the novel, which is that, as you'll recall, doctor Jekyll turns into a werewolf.
Hmm all right, Yeah, there are a lot of I feel like when it comes to some of the classic literary monsters, Doctor Jekyl and Mister Hyde is one of those where interpretations can vary in very specific but very interesting ways, Like you can't. I don't know, we need to come back at some point and do a jacculine Hyde movie. I don't think we've actually done one, but there are numerous choices to be made there.
Maybe this is the one.
Yeah. She also appeared in a number of Western She did a lot of TV work, and that included various Western TV properties as well. But I have to say she's pretty great in this. I thought, yeah, perfectly wonderful performance and while at the same time delivering on sort of that nineteen fifties starling eye candy as well. Obviously
gorgeous woman opposite gorgeous lead male performance. Is that necessary for a film, Well, if you're going to if it's a nineteen fifties drive in it's kind of like, that's the idea, these two will kiss, don't you want to see it?
Yeah, Tom Tryon's hunkiness is its own kind of thing. It's a major presence in the film, and I think affects how the movie is received. And maybe we should come back and talk to that, talk about that later, but yes.
So.
Gloria Talbot was at least retrospectively known as a scream queen of the fifties. She did a number of horror movies, and apparently Talbot said in interviews that she considered working on this movie a significant step up in her career. Both of the horror movies she did in fifty seven were very low budget. For example, I was reading some stories about the production of The Daughter of Doctor Jekyl.
According to Talbot, the majority of the production took place at somebody's house, and in the final film you could occasionally see cars driving by in the street outside through the windows, and the movie's supposed to take place in like nineteen ten. Her other movie from fifty seven, The Cyclops, was a bert I Gordon feature not regarded as one of bert I Gordon's best movies. Mister Big, by the Way, directed some other movies we've done in Weird House before
Attack of the Puppet People and The Magic Sword. We've done another one.
No, I mean, we want to do The Amazing Colossal Man at some point, but that one has been just very hard to source legitimately for a long time. I don't think it's received an official Blu Ray release. You can't stream it anywhere. But I really want to come back to that one.
It's in Blu Ray purgatory. Yeah. So by contrast, I Married a Monster from Outer Space was a modest, mid budget production, and in that article for TCM I mentioned earlier by Smith, he mentioned he says that Talbot has said she quote appreciated the relative luxury of the Paramount backlot. A few more details from that article, which are most of which are originally sourced to an interview Gloria Talbot
gave to the film historian Tom Weaver in nineteen eighty six. Overall, she liked the experience of making this movie, and she was proud of the final film, but noted a few frustrations. One is that during the middle of production she developed an absessed tooth ough yikes, and so I was looking for that once I knew that detail, Like, can you see the pain in any of the scenes. I don't know if I can tell that.
I did not need to know that about my actors, please.
I don't know if I can tell that from the acting. I mean, she is going through pain in some scenes.
Well, you don't use it if you got it, But yeah, I don't need to know about their dental pain.
She also claims she found the screenwriter Lewis Vittis to be something of a stickler. She says he would park his body right underneath the camera and watch the actors like a hawk to make sure that they did not change a single word of his dialogue. Which that is an approach, you know, that is maybe not an improv friendly set. But uh then again, as a writer, I can sympathize somewhat.
Yeah, yeah, I mean I don't know. I'm always the mind like when I when I have written text that an actor is going to read, I'm always kind of like, is this is this good? I don't know, Like you I'm going to pass the ball to you and then you score the touchdown with it. That's kind of my approach. Maybe I'm just that says more about my uh, you know, my relationship with with acting and you know, and and writing.
But you know, I guess it would just depend what they're doing with it, Like, yeah, I feel like they're improving it. Oftentimes I would feel that way.
Yeah, But you know, there's a lot to be said of both approaches. You know, Obviously a lot of filmmakers have made some wonderful discoveries and created some great content by enabling there and allowing their actors to bring stuff to life in their own words. But if you're if you're more of a script purist, and then you've got good company with the likes of the Coe Brothers, who pretty famously don't use much in the way of improv on the part of their actors and pretty much stick to the script.
Yeah. One final detail from that article is that Talbot remembered her co star Tom Tryan playing her husband quote as cordial but aloof and that Tryan hated making the film. So it's a good experience for her at least as far as she remembered, not so fun for him.
Well, that'll be interesting to contemplate because on one hand, maybe he's able to bring that energy into his performance because there is this you know this distance to him, and there should be, because he is an alien for most of the picture. Most of the picture, he is an alien pretending to be a human named Bill, and while he doesn't hate humanity, he is having an interesting time trying to figure out how it works, especially from an emotional perspective.
The character of the alien Bill, I think is really interesting, and Tom Tryan's performance is really good. He of course, it is valuable to the film that he is an incredibly handsome actor, I think, because that changes the way this character is received. That he has amid this amid
this coldness and the problems within the relationship. He does have a kind of raw sexual appeal, and that keeps things especially weird and complicated when we're working through these scenes where he's displaying this coldness or you know, there's this threat about what he represents.
Yeah, and I think one of the great things about this film too, is that there's not a point in the film where Bill is just like, oh, you got me. I'm an alien and now I'm just going to be a straight heel for the rest of the picture, Like we're we end up in a much more thought provoking area, where as we'll discuss you know, it's like his alien nature is known, but he's also not like but he's also trying to be more human. Like they're trying to make it work even though one of them is an
alien from another planet. Yeah, so yeah. Tom trying Here lived nineteen twenty six through nineteen ninety one. Golden Globe nominated Actor for nineteen sixty fours The Cardinal. That was an Auto Priminger film that co starred John Houston. It was an inter war drama that took on various social issues as well as the rise of fascism through a
Catholic lens. It was not a hit. And you know, without knowing exactly how career concerns factor and had everything, I wonder if Tryan's feelings about this movie might have been related to that. Like, you know, in the Hollywood of the nineteen fifties, generally speaking, like starring in a horror movie or a sci fi film wasn't necessarily like you're ascending the latter. I mean sometimes it worked out
that way. We were talking about the Blob. Steve McQueen. Obviously, Steve McQueen went on to much bigger and greater things, but it wasn't always seen as you know, a step in the right direction.
Yes, and that wasn't just the nineteen fifties. I mean, we were recently talking about actors reflecting on working in the in the eighties, when it was still widely believed like, look, you do horror movies, you're just not going to be in mainstream movies. After that, people don't want to mess with you. They think, okay, you're you're dealing in the in the weird genres. You know, you're not part of what we're doing now. Yeah.
Absolutely, this in a similar way, It's like they used to say that about TV. I was like, oh, you're doing TV. Now you're a TV actor. You're done with mainstream cinema. And you know, nowadays it's a little more complicated than that.
Yeah. Well, and obviously even at both of these times in history, you could find exceptions people who went from one to the other. But at least there was a wide perception among actors that you know, in the genres that's sort of on the downslope, or at least you're you're not getting out of that valley.
Right, especially if you were a star player, if you were if you were a featured player, as opposed to a character actor who maybe sometimes character actors maybe had a little bit more of along jayvity and a little bit more ability to move between these sorts of things. So Trian was mostly a serious dramatic actor who's only other, even faintly horror sci fi related credit was nineteen sixty two's Moon Pilot. This was a Disney comedy. This was not a serious sci fi film, so it was only
marginally sci fi. His other credits include nineteen sixties The Story of Ruth, sixty two Is The Longest Day, and sixty five's In Harm's Way. However, just because he only ever acted in one horror movie doesn't mean that he didn't have a taste for horror as a genre, because apparently the story goes that after he experienced Rosemary's Baby in nineteen sixty eight, I think maybe was a combination of seeing the film and reading the book, he wrote
his own horror novel. He switched careers, he dropped out of acting, devoted himself to writing, and he wrote nineteen seventy one's The Other, a supernatural horror tale about identical twins that became a best sell. He adapted it himself to screenplay for a film the following year, and you know,
from that point on just focused on writing. He followed that book up with seventy three's Harvest Home, which was made into a nineteen seventy eight mini series, The Dark Secret of Harvest Home with Betty Davis, and then the nineteen seventy eight Billy Wilder movie Fedora, was based on one of his short stories. He wrote six more novels, culminating with the posthumously released Night Magic in nineteen ninety five.
So yeah, I think he's pretty great in this. You know, whatever attitudes he had about the project, he either uses those or you know, gets those out of the way, because it's just, you know, a great kind of distant, brooding performance for the most part, that also has its own,
like weird alien heart to it, as we'll discuss. Like we reached the point in the picture where he describes to Marge that like he doesn't know what love is, but he's trying to learn what love is, you know, And I don't know you can single that line out as being a little hammy, but I thought it was pretty pretty strong within the context of the scene.
Oh, I feel like it only sounds hammy by virtue of appearing out of context like this, I think in the scene it hits pretty hard.
Yeah yeah, yeah, well acted on both counts. It's a great scene between the two of them. Yeah, all right, So we'll have more to say about these two performances because these are the main performances there everyone there. There are so many supporting fifties white guys in this movie that I'm honestly not even gonna attempt to classify them all and credit them all.
Because he's a note about this later. He just like cannot keep up with all of Bill's friends.
Yeah. Bill has a number of friends, and you know, they're all well acted, but they're not main characters. They're just his buddies. And some of them are replaced by aliens as well. Some of them are not.
Most of them, I think are replaced by aliens. Yeah, and aren't they Yeah.
Yeah, So I'm not gonna mentioned them all. I'm just going to mention a few of these supporting players here. Some of them have interesting connections. First of all, there's Officer Hank Swanson played by Peter Baldwin, who lived nineteen thirty one through twenty seventeen. An actor of the fifties and sixties whose credits include fifty eighth, The Space Children and one episode of the original Outer Limits. He went on to become a pretty prolific TV director on shows
like Newhart in The Wonder Years. I think he was at least nominated for an Emmy for his work on The Wonder Years. Oh okay, let's see. We also have Doctor Wayne played by Ken Lynch, who lived nineteen ten through nineteen ninety American character actor who often played cops and detectives. And you can get that, you get that energy off of this performance because I don't know, there's something He's very authoritative, and he also ends up playing that role. He ends up becoming more of the like
not really local law enforcement. He essentially becomes like the vigilante leader once the people are brought around to Marge's story.
I want to talk about this later if it means anything, And maybe it doesn't, or maybe it's not supposed to mean anything, but like, why is it that Marge's doctor ends up being the one trustworthy man in town?
Yeah?
Yeah, yeah, interesting.
Yeah, but anyway, he's good in this. His credits also include fifty nine's North By Northwest and Anatomy of a Murder. All right, I'm gonna skip over a few people here, let's see. I'm gonna and I may come back to them later as we get through the plot. Oh but we have a character named Helen Rhodes. She's Helen is one of Marge's friends, and she ends up married to one of the guys Sam.
Yeah, that's the one guy whose name I know.
Okay, she ends up marrying Sam. And she's played by Gene Carson, who lived nineteen twenty three through two thousand and five. She appeared in the original Twilight Zone episode A Most Unusual Camera, and she often played comedic roles on TV. She had kind of like this kind of this husky voice that she could like play up. For instance, on The Andy Griffiths Show, she had a recurring role with this character Daphney, who was one of these two fun girls who had come to town and get Andy
into trouble. So a couple couple of blonds that were up.
To the fun girls from Mount Pilot.
Yeah, yeah, those are the Oka yeahose are them? Yeah? I'm not to say they were up to no good. I don't think they were necessarily criminals. But they were fun ladies all right, going behind the camera, but also someone in front of it too. We have he's uncredited officially, but we have another monster suit superstar in this picture, and that is Charles Gamora, who lived nineteen oh three through nineteen sixty one. We've talked about him on the
show before. He was born in the Philippines, a Hollywood makeup artist who became known is the King of the Gorilla Men because he did a lot of gorilla costume and monster suit work in his career, both in making the costumes and then wearing them as well.
How many full time gorilla suit performers do you think there were in Hollywood at any given time.
I mean, there's only going to be room for a few, you only they're they're they're yeah, few and far between. But even today we have some some folks who, in their own way and with the current technology, are sort of like the gorilla men.
But oh, like the Andy Cirkus. I'd say that.
I mean Andy Cirkus, you know, his abilities, you know, certainly go beyond being a gorilla man. But yeah, absolutely a gorilla man in the best sense of the word.
But a seasoned creature performer.
Yeah, yeah, so yeah. Gomora has like sixty makeup credits on IMDb, but also sixty acting credits. Most of them are gorillas. He designed and sculpted the excellent monster costume
in this picture and seemingly wore it. I was looking at the book Keep Watching the Skies by film historian Bill Warren, and he pointed out that in the original script for I Married a Monster from Outer Space, the alien is kind of as described as having a mask that featured various breathing tubes running from a helmet to the chest, so very much like a fifties helmet alien.
But in what is sometimes categorized as a miscommunication, Gemora designed and sculpted these elements not as technology but as organic parts of the creature's whole body. So tubes not going from a helmet to the chest, but growing like out of the face of the creature and then into the torso of the creature. And the result is just top notch. Here it looks, i mean, to my eye, unlike anything we'd seen before, and really there's not a
lot that looks like it. You could you could make an argument for it almost being gigorsque in a way. Without that without like the Freudian energy of Geeker's design, but very much in terms of just its fleshiness.
Oh yeah, man, it would fit in with the themes of the movie if the costumes were more sexually charged. They're not really at all. But it is absolutely the case that it looks like a mix of technology and biology. And so yeah, we get these hoses that play into this gross, weird ripping thing that happens at the end with dogs, which I can't wait to talk about. But yeah, it's like that. But also I mentioned this earlier. To me, the way the biological elements and the helmets look is
almost as much plant as it is animal. Do you see what I'm saying. It has a kind of bark like texture.
Yeah, it reminds one of things a little bit of like swamp thing or man thing in that regard, very rooty looking. And I think it's great that this works so well in black and white because we don't get a sense of the color, like it could be green, it could be brown, it could be pale white, and we don't have to fill in that blank. It takes on this it feels it does feel kind of corpse like in its own way.
Yeah, I didn't think about that with the color, but yeah, it's a welcome ambiguity.
Yeah, all right. One more actor note, just because his story is a little interesting and also his name's funny. But we have a bartender that we see and the bartender's name is Max but been. He's played by Slapsy Maxy Rosenbloom, who lived nineteen oh four through nineteen seventy six, a pro boxer or former pro boxer by this point, so nicknamed apparently because of his open gloved boxing style.
I do not know what this means, but I guess whatever it means, it made him look like he was slapping people when he was boxing.
Slapping instead of punching. I don't know how would that work.
I'm not sure. I put the call out to our boxing fans out there, what is open glove boxing style? Why would you name him Slapsy? But at any rate, he was I guess, well thought of in and out of boxing circles and got into acting, played a lot of heavies and is simply essentially worked out a niche for himself playing lovable but sometimes comedic heavies, which is
essentially what he has here. Like he's kind of a rough looking dude, but he clearly seems to have a heart of gold and seems like, you know, kind of a funny, silly guy.
And in one scene he gets mad at all the aliens because they're not drinking alcohol.
Yeah, he's like, what's wrong with my liquor? You just order it and you sit there and you don't even talk to each other.
Yeah, it's our business if we want to order it and not drink it. And then he presses the issue and ends up punching Tom Tryan a bunch of times and it does nothing.
Yeah, and maybe that would I think maybe the idea here is that a lot of the viewers would know that Slapsy Maxi should be able to punch somebody really hard.
Oh okay, Yeah.
But outside of that, he also apparently ran a nineteen forties Hollywood nightclub called you guessed it, Slapsey Maxis.
It had a drink called the Slapsy Maxi and the sandwich called the Slapsy Maxi.
I would hope, so, I would hope, So all right. Special photographic effects in this film came from John P. Fulton, who lived nineteen oh two through nineteen sixty six and those those those photographic effects are on excellent display here. We'll talk about all the various things that they do, from making the aliens glow to that soul stealing black mist,
really terrific stuff. Fulton was a six time Academy Award nominee for Special Effects and won the award twice for nineteen forty six is wonder Man and nineteen fifty seven's The Ten Commandments, so you know, the parting of the Red Sea, I think. In particular, he worked on a number of the classic universal horror films, including Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman, Bride of Frankenstein, The Visible Man, and The Mummy. He also worked on nineteen fifty seven's Funny Face and
sixty one's Breakfast at Tiffany's. And we'll just basically skip over the music. The music here is all stock music. The title music is I believe credited to Van Cleeve, who lived nineteen ten through nineteen seventy. The music is mostly what you would expect, leaning a good bit on the melodrama of the scenes, and there is a lot of melodrama in here, so it plays well.
All right, are you ready to talk about the plot let's get into it. So we open on the planet Earth hanging in space. Someday I would like to do a breakdown of the broad differences between sci fi films that begin in space versus the ones that begin on Earth. I wonder if there's anything happening there, Like what's the difference? Like why? How does it change the film when the first thing we see is stars and the blackness instead of just a scene on Earth.
Yeah? I mean we can instantly think of any number of films that begin out of space looking at Earth. But what if they just all did?
What if?
What if? What if every movie had to begin with this shot? What would it mean? What would it change? How would it change things? It breakfast? Tiffany's began with a wide shot of the planet Earth.
I don't know, Jumanji begins with the Earth and the moon rise. Yeah. So yeah, we open on the planet Earth and you could see like the Milky Way galaxy spanning the background. A very classic opening, and the opening music is also very classic for this kind of film. It's like a cold, eerie texture that sounds like twinkling stars and then this blast of aggressive horns. This's climbing and climbing sounds like an alien menace is drawing closer and closer. Then we zoom in on Earth and eventually
drop in on a town somewhere in Middle America. I think this town is called Norrisville, so it doesn't seem to be a real location.
Ye might as well be Normalville.
Yeah, Normalville, Americaville, USA. And so the action begins at a lakeside drinking establishment where a group of five or six men are meeting for a bachelor party. Extremely handsome bachelor Bill Ferrell this is Tom Tryan is about to get married to his sweetheart Marge. This is Gloria Talbot, and the boys are out having a few rounds. Now. This is not one of those movie bachelor parties with like strippers and loud music and high energy. This is
more like a funeral for bachelorod. It is a neutral to bad vibe. Before we meet the boys, the camera pauses with a couple of ladies drinking at the bar and they're like, you know, what's up with those guys
over there? You know they're handsome guys, but we keep making eyes at them, and not one of them has come over to buy us a drink, And so the ladies decide maybe the guys are all married, and then what do you know, when we get over to the table, it is indeed just a festival of complaining, complaining about women, complaining about married life, old battlax stuff.
Yeah, the movie frequently goes here with our male characters, and as a twenty twenty six of youer, it does make me wonder how much of it is just snapshot at the times you know, this is how men talk and we're just trying to be real, and how much of it is a deliberate part of the texture of the film, in which a cosmic distance exists between the men and women of contemporary America.
I think it's got to be intentional because of the way it plays so directly into the themes of the film of like, you know this distance in relationships and
you know things about men and women in marriage. But yeah, I also had the same question of just like, I don't know how common was it back then for regular people to actually just talk like this, just we get together and complain about marriage, ah, women, or is that more something that was like really played up in the movies because it made good dialogue, or they thought it did. I don't know anyway, one of these guys is, and again I cannot keep all of Bill's friends sorted out.
There's a bunch of them. One of these guys calls for a drink. He calls the waiter over and he's like, mister Ferrell is getting married in the morning. He needs a stiff drink. He asks for freedom on the rocks. I didn't get it, yeah, and then oh, he just keeps going, piling on. Another guy's like, I'm already married. I really need a drink. And then they decide that well, every one of them either was married, is married, or is about to get married, so they all have to
get hammered. They have no choice, but Bill, the guy who's getting married in the morning. Bill is actually kind of the odd man out. He's the only one who's not sitting here complaining about women. So he, you know, the rest of the guys are like, we must get miserably drunk with the he man woman haters club, and he's like, no, I need to go see my fiance. So he gets up and leaves. He's going to stop by and see Marge on the way home. And then
it takes a dark turn. One of the guys makes a joke that's kind of over the line and provides some foreshadowing. I think the guy says he has found the only viable way for men to avoid the pain and struggle of matrimony, which he says is mass suicide. And at this point the other guys stop laughing and they just kind of look forlorn. So it's like, I think these guys have some issues about women. I think they do, yes, or at least all of them except Bill.
Now there's one thing I wanted to note here that it was kind of interesting. I don't know if it's supposed to mean something, but on the way into the bar, we pass by a man and a woman kissing passionately, and a convertible in the parking lot, and a guy who's walking by the car tries to get their attention with a loud noise, but they just ignore him. And then later, when Bill is coming out of the place,
he passes them again and they're still kissing. He stops and looks at them for a second, almost kind of sadly, and then suddenly the kissing stops, and the woman slaps the man in the face and looks at him coldly. You don't see what provoked that reaction, but it's an interesting detail. I think it in a subtle way, just raises things about tension in romantic relationships, ideas of crossing the line, or the idea that intimacy entails vulnerability and sometimes danger.
Yeah. Yeah, I mean it could be as simple as like, oh wow, even this relationship which was going so great and has been going great for maybe twenty minutes, has suddenly it hit a rocky patch.
Yeah, something went wrong. Yeah. So Bill gets in his car and drives away from this bar where he's been drinking with his friends. It's implied that he's they've been drinking a good bit, so I don't know. In nineteen fifties, the car is a mid fifties American station wagon with tail fins that feels the size and mass of an aircraft carrier. Every time it came on screen, we were in awe. We were like, it's the car. It's so big.
Yeah, it's like some sort of massive plymouth.
Right. Yeah, So Bill is driving drunk down a lakeside country road. This is the first of many what time is it supposed to be things The context would suggest evening, but The scene is shot in broad daylight, and suddenly Bill notices a man's body lying in the road, so he slams on the brakes, stops the car, and gets out, but then there's nobody there. He like looks in the road and it's empty. Yeah.
Wait, at first it looks like the body's lifeless husk of some sort. But there's not really much follow up here, so I don't know what we were supposed to.
The car bumps the body and it moves as if it's weightless, like hollow inside.
Maybe it was a trap.
Oh maybe. So it's like he gets out and it's not there anymore. And then suddenly, while while Bill is standing there, from off screen, a clawed, glowing reptilian hand with long crooked fingers reaches out and grabs Bill by the shoulder. He whirls around and he sees the alien. So interesting thing about I married a monster from outer space does not make you wait till the final reel to see the alien in its true form. You get to see it a few minutes in.
Yeah, it's really kind of surprising because the glove is great. I love a good monster glove. But then you know the next step generally comes a bit later where you get to see the rest of or at least the face of the creature. But now he turns around, he
sees it, and yeah, great, look to this creature. As I mentioned earlier, by all accounts, this film should have and very well could have had a generic space helmet wearing alien, but perhaps due to a miscommunication or maybe just pure creativity, we ended up with this fantastic organic design that's brought to the next level via the lighting
and the special effects. The design also works especially well later on when we'll get the special effects shots of the actor's faces shifting to the creature's warped visage during flashes of lightning.
Oh yeah, I love that. So when Bill sees the figure, something begins to emit, a high pitched, throbbing electronic sound. We will hear the sound at times throughout the movie, whenever the aliens are using their powers and Bill collapses against the car and then a bizarre thing happens. I love this effect. A slowly expanding, blooming cloud of dark smoke or mist flows into the movie frame. It's like a jet of ink expanding in a pool of water.
But it's very, very dark. Very opaque. You can't see through it, and gradually it blots out Bill's form, and then when it recedes, Bill is gone.
Yeah, looks amazing, Like this is one of the I'm not a you know, I'm not opposed to great digital effects by any means, but this is a practical effect. Just looks amazing, And in the context of watching it, I'm like, it just looks ahead of its time. It looks better than anything I can compare it to digitally. Just amazing. Yeah, dark, otherworldly cloud just creeping out.
So the next morning we meet our protagonist Marge. Marge is at her wedding. She's wearing a white wedding dress and a veil, staring out the window of the chapel to see if Bill is going to arrive. He was supposed to come and see her the night before, like he said, but he never showed up. Andy never called to explain, and now he's late for the wedding itself. So Marge is obviously upset. She doesn't understand what's happening. She pulls as his groomsmen to interrogate them. She says,
what exactly were you boys drinking last night? And two of them answer at the same time, but give different answers. One says wine and the other says beer. So I think maybe it was neither wine nor beer. I think it was a hard liquor kind of night. Yeah, And so they try to cover for Bill, but Marge is not impressed with their assurances, and this raises something about Marge's personality. I'm interested in the way she's characterized. She
is not portrayed as an especially suspicious person, like. She is portrayed as somebody who really wants to trust and wants to see the good in her husband and make the relationship work. She's like not looking for fault in
things or in people. And at the same time, she's not a dummy, like, she's not gullible, and that creates an interesting tension in her character that, like, she is quick to pick up on when there are problems and is sharp about observing things, but also has this emotional desire to maybe sometimes overlook problems and make things work out and make things all right.
Yeah, but she has right to be concerned here, because again, he is late to his own wedding at this point and she hasn't heard from him in hours and hours.
However, Suddenly Bill comes through the door. You know, better late than never, I guess. He comes in looking bewildered and at a loss for words. He apologizes for being late, and Marge rushes to kiss him. So they get married, and then they come out of the chapel. They sprint to the tail fin station wagon while their friends are throwing rice. You know it was a pre bird seed era. We're getting the rice going all over the car and
you can see it bouncing off of the hood. And then they drive away, and for a very brief period it seems like Marge is truly happy. They drive along to their honeymoon destination with Bill at the wheel and Marge is sleeping with her head on his shoulder. But Bill does not have a peaceful expression like March does. He's looking grim and cautious. At one point while they're driving, Bill almost gets into a collision with another car turning
onto the highway. The other guy stops and yells at him about how he should have had his lights on. Marge wakes up and points out that the guy is right the lights were off, but raises a question, how could Bill have been driving at all without his head lights when it's so dark outside.
Oh he has dark vision, not a human.
Another weird thing here. Bill snaps at Marge when she mentions the lights. You know, he would never snap like that before. It doesn't seem like the Bill she knows. Anyway. They make their way out to the resort where they're staying for their honeymoon. I'm not sure exactly where this is supposed to be, but they say it's on the ocean. It's on the sea, so it's like a hotel on a dark waterfront with churning black waves stretching out to
the horizon. It's a very cool scene that where the you know, the weather and the landscape and indicates something about the relationship to Yeah, and as they settle in, Marge is again trying so hard to make things work, but something is off about Bill. He literally forgets her and leaves her in the car when they arrive. And this is an era where I think she's expecting he's supposed to come around and open her door for her, but he just forgets. He does not want to have
a drink with her at the restaurant. He has developed a sudden aversion to alcohol, which he did not have before.
This is really telling of the time period that it's a big red flag when your man is not having a tumbler of hard dark spirits every night, like on a weak night. It's like, something's the matter here. This is not healthy.
Yeah, he did red flags for about men. He does not reach for the scotch. So and then also they're at the restaurant eating and he's just a cold fish. He's aloof he's barely talking. Marge is repeatedly trying to find things to engage him on. You can see her searching for conversation topics, and he just is not picking up what she's putting out.
Yeah, they've only just gotten married. They surely haven't heard all of each other's stories yet, you know.
Yeah, and all through this part, Bill, so there's a menacing element in that he seems to have changed and become cold. At the same time he is strangely innocent, almost childlike. At one point, the two of them are standing out on the balcony overlooking the water and there's a crack of thunder in the distance, and Bill asks what the sound was, and Marge tells him it was thunder, and he says thunder like he's learning a new word or experiencing it, Yeah, experiencing it for the first time.
Yeah, because to be clear, yeah, Bill has been replaced by an alien at this point. Yeah. But it's like the alien is wearing like a copy of his body, but also wearing his thoughts and memories and his knowledge, but not in a way where like he just has instant natural access to it all. Like he's having to
like sort of if it's like a costume. It's like he's having to like put his fingers into the glove and then see how that glove moves with his hand, so like he might, you know, he knows what thunder is, but has he experienced it before? Has he has he had had that sort of relationship to the concept, and so he's having to like, really he's having to learn everything in real time here.
And you can see him trying to fake it. He's not doing a very good job, but he he gets the sense that he needs to say something to assure her. So he tells Marge he loves her more than anything, but the words feel awkward, something doesn't work, and Marge, seeming a little bit sad, goes inside. And then here's the part where we first see this weird, asymmetrical inhuman face superimposed over Bill's face. The lightning flashes and then an animated alien layer of his face is revealed.
Yeah, looks really good, especially with that perfect hair and everything. Yeah. Again, that monster's weird organic vibe just melts so well here and just looks great in black and white.
Yeah.
Now, there's a there's a scene here on the Honeymoon that I really loved. There's a there's the blocking in particular of this one scene where Bill and Marge are chatting and there's a mirror in the shot, and we see reflected in the mirror the twin beds. So twin beds like this were, of course to a large degree, but not entirely a product of censorship of the day.
Though.
The story behind like why we see so many twin beds instead of like a king or queens size bed typically in like a married couple's bedroom, The actual story behind it is a bit more complex, but more complicated
than I than I anticipated. I actually ran across a book by Hillary Hines titled A Cultural History of Twin Beds, and it pointed out that while media is part of the situation, twin beds were actually a seemingly popular sleeping arrangement for married couples between eighteen seventy and nineteen seventy for a number of reasons, including consumer preference, social mores, and product placement as well. But when it came to films, it did become a standard. I'm going to read a
quote from this work. Quote. While the code referring to the Hayes code here itself did not specify the need for twin beds, by nineteen thirty seven the advice to movie makers was unequivocal. A double bed was too explicit in its sexual associations for safe presentation in films intended for the general cinema going public. Only twins had the necessary cultural delicacy. They had the advantage of implying marital sexual intimacy without showing a bed that might have facilitated it.
Wow, I can't have film audiences knowing where babies come from.
Right even though again, especially in this film, because we're about to like leap forward a year and part of what we learn is like they've been trying to conceive for a year, they've been having sex, and it's an important part of the storyline. But yeah, you had to in the words of the Hayes Code, what you had to think about the sacred intimacies of modern life or
marital life. So in this particular scene, though I don't know, I thought it played really well, at least to the like the modern twenty twenty six viewer, because the twin I suspect it was unintended. But it just feels kind
of palpable. You know that we have distance between this newly pronounced man and wife, the awkwardness of implied physical intimacy to follow in the symbol of those twin beds in the mirror, as if illustrating the golf between them, a golf that is at once between romantic partners and the golf between far flung planets, between different species with different evolutionary origins.
Yeah, yeah, I did not notice that the first time I watched it, but I saw your note here and I caught that the second time. I think that works really well and it's subtle. It's like, yeah, like you said, it's reflected in the mirror while they're facing each other in the room.
Yeah, I'm not sure how much of that is, just like the modern viewer looking back on it, how much of it was an intended part of the film, but it may have well been very intended. Like I said, it's a very well composed shot. And you know, they knew what the twin beds were about. They knew why they were using twin beds and films like this, and there's explicitly they're expressly trying to tell a story that has a major plot about human reproduction and sexual relations.
So after this we cut to the future. A year has passed and in the transition we see Marge writing a letter to her mother. She says it's been a horrible first year of marriage. She is frightened and bewildered, and she writes, quote, Bill isn't the man I fell in love with. He's almost a stranger. There is a scene where two of Bill's friends from the bachelor party are drinking together at the Bar and Grill, a recurring
location for the rest of the film. Surprising amount of this movie takes place at Bar and Grill.
This is where Slapsy Maxie works.
Yes, he's the bartender there, and it's also right next to a building call a store that sells church supplies that just says church supplies in the window. I like that detail.
Yeah, it's one.
Yeah, exactly. This is where you buy your wafers in bulk. It's like a costco for churches. And then so we join the couple of guys here in the bar, and they are still complaining about women. They're still on the same stuff. One of them, the guy named Sam, he you know, has enough complaining and he walks out, stumbling drunk, to head home. But on the way he stops to puke in an alley and then he gets smoke bloomed by the a lad and so they come get him. And then the next time we see him he has
a very different vibe. In the very next scene, we learn that he has suddenly proposed to his girlfriend Helen, and now they're going to get married. There's also a scene a little bit later where we see a police officer get claimed by the smoke in the same alley. I think it's making the point that slowly, one by one, over the course of this year, the men of the town are being replaced.
Yeah, the entire local patriarchy is being supplanted.
There's also a scene where Marge goes to visit her doctor, doctor Wayne. Marge is concerned because, as we alluded to earlier. She and Bill have been trying to have children, but so far they haven't been able, and doctor Wayne gives her a checkup and says he can't find any evidence of a condition that would prevent her from getting pregnant, so he tries to give her some confidence. He reassures her, but he also suggests Bill come in for a checkup
as well. Now after this we get into an early more menacing subplot of the movie, because for a lot of the film we're really balancing this question of exactly how dangerous is the alien Bill. We the audience already knows he's been replaced, but we're trying to figure out what is he going to do? How dangerous is he? What?
You know, what kind of threat does he represent? So, in what comes off as a desperate attempt to inject some joy into their marriage, Marge buys a dog from a pet shop as an anniversary present for Bill, very weird domed cage. She's carrying the dog around in She like carries it up. It's this huge, almost kind of dog suitcase. But when she lifts the tarp off the top of the cage to show it to Bill, the dog cannot stand him. It growls and snaps at him
on side. It's like a terminator, you know, dogs can't stand him. And Bill says, maybe dogs don't like me, and she says, but Bill, you've had dogs all your life. And then he says, maybe I'm a little out of practice. And then later in this scene he says, maybe he just needs a little time to get accustomed to me. Knowing the premise, you might assume this part comes off as like chilling and overwhelmingly threatening, But there's a complexity
to Alien Bill that I really appreciate. Here. It's a kind of sadness, like he hoped maybe it wouldn't be this way, but he doesn't know how to fix it and wishes he could.
Yeah, so he tells her go put it in the basement.
Yeah, and then this leads to a horrible dog murder scene in the basement. I mean, the murder itself happens off off screen, but yeah. Bill goes down there and the dog is still snapping and growling at him, and he realizes, like this can't go on, you know, there's no way for him to continue with this dog in the house. So he kills the dog and then he tells a very implausible story to Marge to cover it up.
It's like the dog slipped in a puddle March and is dead now No, I think he says that it's collar too tied or something.
Yeah. So later Marge and Bill are sitting on the couch together and Marge brings up the top of children. She reiterates how much she really wants children, and she brings up how the doctor wanted to have Bill come for a checkup about this, to see if that maybe something, maybe something about Bill could be addressed to deal with fertility issues. Bill verbally agrees to do this, but you can see his frustration and even rage kind of contained
under the surface. Marge steps away to answer the door, and when she's out of the room, Bill crushes this heavy metal cigarette lighter with his hand, so it's like he's he's feeling extremely frustrated with the situation, and this leads into a tense and interesting scene. It's a visit
from Sam, the New Sam, the Alien Sam. There's one kind of interesting wrinkle here, which is that in some of these body Snatcher movies, the aliens can always recognize one another on site, even if they're disguised as humans, so the alien always knows another alien. In this movie, it seems like the disguise works against their own kind as well. So these aliens in human skin are kind of wary of each other at first, like I don't know if you're cool. I don't know if we can talk.
Yeah. I like this detail. I wonder if the vibe was borrowed from says, sort of like deep cover crime or spy storytelling.
Yeah.
But in any event, it works well here, and it also plays well into various interpretations of the plot. You know, there's a deeper identity at play here. Is this deeper identity something to do with closeted sexuality? Is it akin to some generally unrecognized aspect of the self concerning attitudes and desires regarding the opposite sex? I mean it's all open to interpretation.
Interesting. Yeah. Anyway, Alien Sam wants to share information with Alien Bill even when they're when they're alone together in the room, Sam is kind of dropping hints and Alien Bill resists at first, like he's I'm not sure he can trust him. They talk about alcohol. You know, I've lost my taste for the stuff. I've lost my taste for it too interesting, And this also brought to mind don't people have fans of a theory about the thing where like the thing can't consume alcohol or something?
You know, I haven't read that one. But the next time I actually watch, is it Carpenter's the thing we're discussing?
Yeah?
Yeah, next time I watch where we watch it, I'll have to take that with me.
I don't know if that's correct. I'm half remembering that, but anyway. At one point, the conversation shifts and Sam lowers his voice and he says, did you make many mistakes at first? But Bill is still kind of like holding back. He pretends he doesn't know what Sam's talking about. And Sam says humans are not too bright, their bodies are frail, but they do manage to enjoy themselves. And then he says they've improved the methane reservoirs in these bodies.
You're due to report to the ship tonight. First Bill still plays dumb, but then final Sam unleashes that throbbing electronic sound and shows his you know the cartoon tree face, and again an interesting question about why Bill takes so much convincing but once it's undeniable Sam gives the orders,
you've got to go to the ship tonight. So later that night, once again this is a very daylight filled kind of night, Marge pretends to be asleep because at this point she she already knows something is wrong with Bill, and she she wants to find out more. So she waits until Bill leaves the house and then follows him on foot in her nightgown, kind of draped awkwardly in a long overcoat, and so she follows him through the
neighborhoods he's walking out on foot as well. At one point she hears a cat screech, and then following in Bill's path, she finds a dead cat in the road. I didn't understand why this happened.
I think dogs are natural enemies of these aliens, and so are cats. So it's like sleepwalker.
Yeah, he's attacked on site by cats.
Yeah, we have only Officer Cloak was on the case here.
Yeah. So she follows Bill to a forested ravine at the edge of town and watches him make his way into the woods, and then eventually she sees him make contact with the ship. So the alien form here somehow exits Bill's body, leaving it frozen standing in this pile of dead leaves, and Marge sees the alien's true form glowing in the dark. It leaves to head inside the ship. Then she goes over to Bill to try to get
his attention, but he cannot be roused. He's unresponsive with eyes wide open, like he's frozen alive, and she touches him and he falls over, so she screams in horror and retreats to town. She ends up seeking help at where else the bar and grill, you know, like hot
jazz music is playing inside. Everybody's drinking through the night, and she goes up to the bartender and a man sitting at the bar to try to get their help to explain what happened there is there's one of the guys sitting at the bar is this kind of creep who has a almost kind of a here's the guy who hosts Unsolved Mysteries. He has I don't know for why why. He kind of reminded me of that guy, but more of like a criminal vibe to him.
Well, it's interesting that you should mention Robert Stack. He was, of course on the old Untouchables TV series of the fifties and sixties, and so was this guy really playing the creep? A guy who by the name of Steve London who lived nineteen twenty nine through twenty fourteen. I did make note of him because I was like, oh man, this guy's good. This is this is a nice, little creepy performance. He's like, clearly, this disturbed woman has come into the bar and he's trying to pick her up. Yes,
so we'll see more from him. His is a small role but has a weird character art to it.
Well, he presents a parallel threat, you know. It's a different kind of Yeah, it's interesting. So the men here at the bar do not take her story serious. They do not listen to her, and they do not offer genuine help. I mean, they pay attention to her, but it's the wrong kind of attention. The creep at the bar is reacting to her only as a potential sexual partner, so he tries to buy her a drink and hit on her. And it's interesting that these men are not aliens yet as far as we know, but they also
cannot be relied on. So the next scene, she decides she needs somebody who can help her, so she goes to see her godfather, who happens to be the local police chief, Chief Collins. He is not dismissive like the men at the bar. He's dismissive in a different way. He has a kindly manner and he tries to put her fierce to rest. He listens and then he tells her, well, you know, I believe maybe you saw something, but it was probably caused by hysteria. But just in case she's right,
he promises he'll look into it. And then after she leaves, the Chief turns to face the window and with the lightning flashes, we see, uh, oh, he's got that root ball face as well. Well he's got the alien face. So he's already been gotten. And so finally Marge really has no choice but to go home to Bill. She has made bids for help in these different locations and just nothing went anywhere. So she goes back home to Bill.
When she gets there, he's sitting in the dark in a chair in the living room waiting for her, and together they go up to bed and it's just this kind of sad, menacing scene where there's like she doesn't know what else to do except to go home.
Yeah, just continue to just go through the sugar d here.
Yeah.
Yeah.
After this, at some point there is an there's a wedding rehearsal scene Helen and Sam are getting married. Of course, remember Sam is alien Sam now, but Helen is getting married to him. Marge at the wedding rehearsal pulls Helen aside after the runthrough, and she herries to convince Helen not to marry Sam, though she has a very hard time explaining why she shouldn't. She's saying, like, it may not be true of Sam, I just don't know. But Helen's like, what is it? What are you trying to say?
And Helen is obviously not very happy to be hearing whatever this is. And she's trying to explain to Helen, but she doesn't get a chance. Bill comes in and interrupts them, and there's no opportunity to explain. She never gets a chance in the film to compare notes with another woman, Like she has a few female friends, but she doesn't really she's not given an opportunity to like
have a deep and private interaction with them. You know, they can have brief, shallow interactions that are kind of like interrupted and managed by the men around them.
Yeah, yeah, and going back to you know, what we said earlier about the scene at the bar, it's like we're increasingly in a situation where it's clear that, like pretty if you haven't been replaced by an alien being at this point, then you're probably just a local creep who is never going to be able to help you anyway, or you're just completely indifferent. So it's definitely not a scenario where it's like, oh, all the men have been replaced and now all the men are suspicious or no help.
And I think that was certainly the better choice here, because there's probably you know, another on another shelf of the library of Babel, there's a version of this film where the aliens just replaced all the men in town and it would be less interesting.
I think I agree with that. I think it is more interesting and kind of says more in that we were getting this mix of different kinds of threats from men, you know, and some are quite mundane. And then so there's this later scene between Bill and Marge at home. This is one of these scenes where Marge points the Bill has not touched his drink and he's like, I told you I have an allergy to alcohol.
Now I don't go to the doctor ever, but assure let me assure you, I have an allergy.
Yeah. And then Bill starts confronting Marge about her behavior and about her being weird. He's saying, what's wrong, he says, in the last year, you've changed. He says that to her, which I think is a great I think this term was not in wide use of the time, but a great use of gas lighting here. He's trying to make her feel like, no, she's the one who's acting weird. Yeah.
Yeah, I'm gonna accuse you of the thing I've been doing.
Yeah. So she goes up to bed, but then Bill watches out the window and outside the house there's the creep from the bar, the guy who reminded me of Robert Stack. He's like lurking outside the house on the street. We learn that he has been trying to follow Marge because he thinks her marriage is on the rocks and he thinks he can swoop in and pick her up.
Yeah. But it's also interesting, isn't it that he's he's not really positioned this way, but he in many ways is also that outsider who I don't know, Like he's not here to save the day.
But he in terms of plot structure, this character would be like that, Yeah, but he's not trying to be helpful. He's he is a different kind of predator Bill. Here he uses his alien powers to summon the alien friends, the ones in the police bodies. They arrive on scene, they confront the bar and grill guy and they kill him. They kill him.
There, brutally shoot him in cold blood, just go down in the street. And then inside Mark is like, I've heard something, and Bill's like, don't worry, it's just police firing their guns in our neighborhood. Nothing to be concerned about.
Yah, I mean, it's a chilling scene actually what he tells her. He says it's a car backfiring, and she's like, oh wow. Yeah. So anyway, we go to another scene at the bar. We're starting to see, i think, just more scenes of the aliens being directly violent and dangerous. So, uh, there's a scene at the bar where where Bill gets frustrated where with the way Marge is reacting to him.
He goes out to the bar and grill and he goes drinking with Sam and one of the other guy friends, which is funny because they're all body snatched, but they're still doing the same. They're still getting together at a bar and complaining about their marriages and avoiding their wives.
Yeah, and I think that that is one of the wonderful textures of the film, is that the men who have been replaced by aliens are still doing things that men do. And that's clearly part of the statement that is trying to make here.
There's some plot explanation in the scene as well, like when they think nobody's around to hear them, they talk about their plan. One of them says that their scientists are still trying to find a way to make reproduction with human women possible. They're very close. Soon they'll find a way to make the germ cells compatible. So it's almost time. And this is the scene where we get the bartender Slapsey coming over to be like, what's the
matter with my liquor? At one point he starts insulting the guys, and one of the I wrote down a line he said. He says, you're like a bunch of ghouls waiting for a corpse to ripen. Whoa nice But this, yeah, this is a scene where he starts punching Bill, and Bill just stands there, absorbing the blows and doing nothing, and the bartender is quite freaked out by this. And then the scene right after this is another frightening scene. It's the death of Francine, the woman who hangs out
at the bar. There's implication, it's never stated explicitly, but implication that she's a sex worker. She hangs out at the bart flirting with men, and she leaves the bar alone after the music stops and sees a man standing across the street looking into a shop window. She approaches the man, tries to flirt with him, and then the scene takes this weird, eerie turn. She looks in the shop window and the man is looking at dolls, and she says, I'm crazy about dolls. Would you like to
buy me a doll? And then the electronic worrying noise starts up and the man doesn't reply, and she gets angry because he won't say anything, and she says, if you was a gentleman, you'd at least speak to me. But then she sees his face and she screams and runs and he turns and he blasts her with some kind of laser that we have we seen the aliens use it up to this point.
I don't think maybe the first the first place where we see it that the effect here is great. It doesn't turn vaporizes her and it looks super super cool, very clean.
Yeah, and scary. I thought this is a scary scene. Yeah, yeah, along with the scene with the creep earlier, like the way the aliens are killing people is frightening. Yeah.
I mean you can go back and forth about the implied morality of a film like this regarding a character like this, but like, she did nothing to deserve, no, to be vaporized on the city street.
Here, totally. No, I mean, she's just a victim who I think the what she got in trouble because she saw the alien's face and so like she knew, so they couldn't let her live. So let's see, after this
we get the death by oxygen scene. That's kind of weird thing and one of the more awkward things in this movie, I think is right in the middle of scenes that are working really well as horror and relationship drama, you get some more kind of hard science fiction content insurged in that's a little bit goofier, And this is one of those scenes I think I didn't mean to say hard science fiction, like highly scientifically accurate, but just
dealing with the science fiction premises as physical realities. Some of those are some of the weirdest and most awkward parts of the movie. So, like, all of the married couples are out for a day at the lake. They're hanging out having a picnic. Sam and Helen are on They're out in the lake and in a row boat and Sam falls into the water. They pull him out of the water, and then doctor Wayne happens to be there,
and I was really confused. I was like, wait, isn't he marches obg y N. But I think maybe it's just like it's a small town and doctor he's the general doctor. He does everything. Okay, Yeah, So doctor Wayne is there and he's got a he's got a giant oxygen tank and a face mask. Uh. And that's weird enough on it. Why does he have a suitcase full of oxygen tanks? But he gives Sam some oxygen after he's been pulled out of the water, and for some reason,
when they give him oxygen, he dies. So the doctor says, you know, he was alive when we pulled him out. I'd say it was the oxygen that killed him, And we.
The viewer know from earlier that apparently these these creatures depend on methane and they have to have methane reserve reserves in their body.
Yeah, so the aliens are vulnerable to oxygen. Uh, and they have to keep these internal tanks to breathe. So there is a part in the middle of the movie where we see Marge making other attempts to try to fix the situation. He's resourceful. She comes up with a lot of ideas. She tries to call Washington d C. I don't know if I don't know who she was trying to call, like put me through to the President, but she learns from the operator that all the lines
to Washington are out. She tries to send a telegram, but the guy at the Western Union office takes her telegram and then rips it up. When she leaves, she tries to drive out of town, but the roads are closed and she gets turned back. Almost like the Truman Show, she just can't leave. Finally, we get to a scene that is I think the heart of the film, the scene where she confronts Bill in the living room. So she comes home and they meet each other in this
dark room, and she tells him that she knows. Bill says, how about some light? And Marge says, you don't need any and Bill says, don't be too sure, and then he asks her what she knows, and she says, I know you're not Bill. You're some thing that crept into Bill's body, something that can't even breathe the same air we do. Bill says, aren't you afraid to be telling me this? And she says yes. Does frightening women make
you proud? Or is pride something monsters don't understand? And Bill says, we understand pride, but we can't afford it. So he's being open now he's admitting it. He levels with her and he explains the alien's backstory. I'm going to read from what he says. Quote. We came from a planet in the Andromeda constellation. Our son became unstable, so we built some spaceships enough to carry all our
people safely away before our sun exploded. But it took time to build those ships, and in that time, as our son's rays became more intense, our women died, so they were doomed to extinction until they found Earth. And he says you have no idea how rare life is in those cold, countless miles of space. So I feel like we also might get the idea that this creature could be ancient. Who knows how long he's been alive. They don't specify that.
Yeah, yeah, And I love that line about because essentially she's like, why us, you know, were not somewhere else, And he's like, yeah, you have no idea how rare life is, Like it's imp heavily imply we did not have a choice. You were maybe all we found.
Yeah, we didn't pick you. You were the only ones. And then there's another There's several more really interesting exchanges. Marge says, did you love your women before they died? And Bill says no. Their species did not have love between the sexes. They came together briefly for breeding purposes only. But now here something is different. Bill says, quote something
happened that we hadn't foreseen. Along with these bodies, we inherited other things as well, human desires, emotions, And Marge says, are you telling me you're learning how to love? And Bill says, I'm telling you I'm learning what love is. So it's an interesting complication. It doesn't make the aliens friendly, because what they're doing is still evil and horrible. But the aliens do not have they don't have the kind of intentional hate or maliciousness you see in some aliens
from movies in the fifties. In their own way, they are trying to understand the emotional dimensions of marriage, but in a way that is wrong because it's an asymmetrical way, like it can never work because it exists within the context of a deception. They're not trying to be cruel, but they are nevertheless cruel. They're acting in a predatory
way toward both the men and women of Earth. They're trying to dominate and control the bodies of both sexes without their consent, by stealing men's identities and eventually by deceiving women into procreating with them. And this leads into the exchange where Marge says, your race has no women, it can't have children, it will die out, and Bill says, eventually we'll have children with you. Marge says, what kind of children? And Bill says, our kind. So deeply frightening, disturbing,
but interesting scene. And I think this comes back to one of the issues I brought up at the beginning of the episode, how it indirectly highlights issues about like bodily autonomy and reproductive rights, like the horror of the idea that the women in this in this story wouldn't ultimately have a say and when and how they have children, as well as bringing up ideas about how love can't really exist within a lie, even if the liar is trying to love in their own way.
Yeah, yeah, it is. It's just yeah, it's so well composed. And again, this is this is something when i'd seen the film previously, I just I didn't really pick up on. You know, it's probably just what maybe even headed on in the background. It was mostly focusing on the monsters. But the human story here is so well composed.
And then while we're on the subject of how those two common story types I mentioned earlier in the episode are manifesting here, I guess that's how the movie deals with the reproductive conspiracy and a kind of frightening and interesting way. But the other thing is the body snatching subplot and how that leads to this environment of distrust and paranoia. I mentioned earlier that I don't think this movie uses it the same way a lot of the others do to highlight ideas about the Cold War and
political and filtration. Instead, this is using the body snatching and mistrust theme to highlight a tension and imbalance of power between the sexes. Throughout the movie, Marge keeps seeking help she has, but she has to appeal to men because in this movie, in this world, the men have all the guns and the keys and the dogs, and the power and the control over institutions and so like, really the power to do anything to stop this conspiracy. To stop it, you have to appeal to men somehow.
But that doesn't work because any of the men she goes to talk to could be a part of the alien conspiracy, or even if they're not aliens, they could be somebody who is just not a reliable helper, someone who doesn't take her seriously, somebody who's just trying to get something from her. So Marge is portrayed as isolated from help and support in a world controlled by men who cannot be trusted.
Yeah, and she's a strong character, but in a world that just does not give women a lot of options.
Yeah, And so any man she appeals to, even when he claims to want to help her, like Chief Collins could secretly be working against her, and there's no way to tell from the outside. Guys who look human and seem nice might not actually be trustworthy. But anyway, I guess this brings us back to how does Marge actually beat the aliens. I don't know if this means anything. Maybe it's just kind of you know, they had to get to the end somehow, or maybe it does mean something.
I don't know. She finally appeals to the one guy in town who can actually be trusted, and it's her doctor. As she goes and she explains things to doctor Wayne, and here I was expecting, I don't know, another scene of maybe he turns out to be an alien too, or he just doesn't listen to her and rebuffs her. But for whatever reason, he's just like, Okay, I understand what you're saying. She makes the case to him, he's convinced, and he's like, I'm gonna help you. I'm gonna figure
out how. And the solution that Doctor Wayne comes up with is interesting. I also am wondering exactly what this means in the context of the movie. I don't know how much it is intended to mean but doctor Wayne is like, the only way I can figure out which men haven't yet been replaced by the aliens are the men who have recently fathered children. So he goes to the maternity ward and gets together a posse of new fathers.
He goes down there, He's like, men, you're not doing anything. You're just setting around.
Yeah, you have brand, you have, you have newborns. But it's time to get your guns and your dogs, and we're going to go destroy the aliens.
Yes, so he raises up a breeder posse to go out and look for the aliens.
Yeah. Yeah. So this leads up to the Final Confrontation, where this posse goes out to attack the spaceship and it turns out that there is a way to save the men, to save the men who have been body snatched. Robi, I know you had some notes on the final confrontation here. Do you want to talk about it?
Yeah? Yeah, So, I mean, the basic situation is we're going to learn is that the men who are replaced their bodies are still alive, but in some form of suspended an mation aboard the alien spaceship. We didn't know that until until here in the final stages, and that's how we're going to be able to bring them back
and have our you know, perfect resolution. And we also are going to quickly learn that not only can the aliens be killed by at least by dogs, not by guns, but dogs, we can also kill them by breaking the connection between the host bodies and the alien that is pretending to be that person out in the field.
Yeah.
In any either case, when the creatures die, they melt in this really horrifying way where like, like, you know, it's modern sensibilities in all, but it's kind of crazy that we have we have to show twin beds in this movie. But it's fine to watch even our top build star melt out into a pile of sick, like, you know, out of the the neck of his outfit, that sort of thing out of the cuffs of his coat.
It's gross. I mean, it is like a thick, gushing, multi textured slime just pouring out of men's clothes.
Yeah, but we end up getting into such an interesting place in the final stretches of this film because in one sense, it's very much a page from the nineteen fifties genre movie playbook Masculine Authority Figures race to save the day. But we've reached that point in the narrative here where our alien impostures are. They're not completely sympathetic, but they're not unsympathetic like we Again, we're in that weird area where they're doing something out of desperation to
try and save their race. They're learning what love is, they're trying to adapt. They just like they don't know enough about humans to even know that they are evil. And in some respect, you know.
Yeah, of what they're doing is clearly wrong, and we see in deep and profound ways how it's wrong. But also we learned that the aliens are themselves confused and afraid.
Yeah, And they're increasingly confused and afraid during this theme because they realize, oh, the vigilantes here have each our spaceship and the use of the attack dogs is also rather vicious. Yeah. So they they'll leap up onto the onto the creatures and like rip their the tubes out of their neck.
Yeah. The things that look like roots going into the trees of their heads, you know that are there hoses? I guess there are methane hoses. Those get ripped out and that causes the alien melting.
Yeah, and these are like German shepherds. These are you know, police dogs, so they're pretty intimidating. They also do before the dogs attack, they do some sort of weird walk like they're in stealth mode. What is that?
Yeah, you see the dogs creeping along on the That was interesting. I didn't know what to make of that.
Yeah, so they'll do that creep and then they'll pounce, and then they'll kill an alien. And so yeah, the the the aliens here are being hunted by men with guns and dogs in the woods. And then yeah, this scene where they're unplugging the original bodies one by one, which causes the the impostors out in the field to suddenly die and die so horribly like the pain is I guess so excruciating that the aliens will turn their disintegration rays on each other to keep them from having
to experience the full effect of that situation. Yeah, it's also reminiscent of what we would get decades later in the Matrix, where like unplugging people from the matrix and then having them die in the digital world.
Yeah.
Yeah, so yeah, and then I'll also throw in as well that the way that the original human bodies are positioned in the spaceship. They're kind of hanging, and so there's really this kind of sense of like execution at the gallows as they go, you know, in order sequentially like unhook this one kill an alien out in the field. And as they do this, they eventually get to the alien that has been impersonating Marge's husband.
Right, So, ultimately Marge is reunited with the real Bill, who we know very little of actually.
Yeah, and she probably knows little of him as well, because she spent the whole last year in a relationship with an alien being disguised as him.
More time with the alien than with the real Bill, possibly, I don't know how long they knew each other before their marriage, but yeah, so they're reunited and you get a kind of happy ending there. But you also get this interesting broadcast right where the aliens become aware that they've been discovered and they send out a broadcast to this fleet of other alien ships. They're like, forget about Earth, it's not going to work here. We got to find a different planet.
Yeah, Earthlings are too dangerous, and they leave and we get that we close out really with that wide shot again of Earth. At this time, they are all these different spaceships and they're like leaving the planet. So I don't know if this means that more invasions were planned, like this was just like the Seed invasion or was this happening all around the world in different communities.
I don't know.
Yeah, but there's a you know, so we get our happy ending. We get our you know, humans rally defeat the alien menace, but with a lot more nuanced than you generally get out of a movie like this from the nineteen fifties. Like you're left feeling like, Okay, this was a victory for humanity. It's not you know, it's certainly not shades of gray. But yeah, we feel some amount of sympathy for the aliens here as well.
Yes, I mean it's a happy ending in that these aliens are rejected and like Marge is reunited with the real Bill. So that's the good part. But also, yeah, it's bittersweet because, for one thing, a lot of the threats that Marge was dealing with along the way, we're not even from the right.
Yeah, all those threats are still very much in play. The world has not changed. Yeah, so we were left to contemplate that as well. Yeah, all right, Well, there you have it. I married a monster from outer space. As we've been discussing, stands up really well, Yeah, I was impressed with this one. It was great to come back can revisit it and really watch it in a
way for the first time. A lot of these movies, you know, if I've seen it for Weird House before, that doesn't mean I've necessarily gotten to really settle in and appreciate it. So yeah, I really enjoyed this one.
Are we going to come back and watch Daughter of Doctor Jekyl do the full Gloria Talbot film filmography? Maybe so?
I mean, she was terrific in this I would not say no to another film featuring her.
It doesn't have a reputation for being amazing, but it might be amazing in that other way.
Yeah. Yeah, for that matter, I'm also interested in coming back and maybe doing The Blob at some point. I've always had The Blob is a film I have a lot of love for, But in a way I'd be kind of torn. Do we do the original fifties Blob or do we do the eighties Blob? The Eighties Blob is also a lot of fun, and does you know has amazing effects as well. I think I've found myself in that situation before where I'm like a classic blob
blobb remake. Don't make me choose? All right? Well, just to remind everybody, Steff to Blow Your Mind is primarily a science and culture podcast with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, but on Fridays we set aside most serious concerns to talk about a weird film here on Weird House Cinema. We've been doing this for years now. You can find tons of episodes in the audio archives wherever you get your audio podcasts, and if you are on letterbox dot com, look us up. We are a weird house.
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