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The clangorous title is a gag on a muted British apocalypse. Rilla's Village of the Damned is the point of departure, the Surrey countryside strewn with lifeless townsfolk and derailed trains and crashed airplanes, only static on TV and radio. Friction promptly erupts among survivors, the American pilot (Willard Parker) scans the surroundings to find a supercilous charlatan (Dennis Price) with reluctant companion (Virginia Field) in one hand and pistol in the other. "Put that away, I'm not the enemy." "I don't know who the enemy is." The second couple (Thorley Walters, Vanda Godsell) are still in their evening wear, the third one is "a cheeky kid and a pregnant girl" (David Spenser, Anna Palk), all huddle in a deserted inn. "Some sort of shock attack," lumbering figures in platinum space suits stalk the streets. "Oh, maybe those little men from Mars are back again." A thrifty global decimation, just the eerie calm of vacant spaces where life used to be. (The parallel is with Godard's roughly concurrent RoGoPaG segment, "Il Nuovo Mondo.") The invaders are automatons with circuitry for features visible through glass helmets, cf. Ulmer's The Man from Planet X, who give death through gloved touch but are not invulnerable to barreling jeeps. Human casualties return as catatonic quislings with "gray blobs" in place of eyes, Terence Fisher demonstrates vividly with Godsell rising from her deathbed and descending a darkened staircase into a staring close-up. (Another zombie later on approaches the closet where Field hides, the camera adopts her trembling gaze through a grilled opening,) A hopeful vision after all, cash becomes nothing but paper for fire while "all of a sudden people mean something again." Certainly one of the many films that go into Romero's watershed nightmare four years later. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |