The Earth Dies Screaming (1965)
Directed by Terence Fisher

Film Review

George A. Romero is credited with starting the zombie craze of recent times with his Night of the Living Dead (1968), but one film that got there before him was The Earth Dies Screaming (1965), a lesser known British sci-fi movie that has much the same plot but less of the blood-curdling horror.  The title was presumably dreamed up by the distributor as it has virtually nothing to do with the sparse plot, which involves an odd mix of humans being menaced by marauding zombies and a couple of prototype Cybermen.  It's basically Doctor Who for grown-ups, with thrills that score pretty low on the Romero scale of horror, save a few fantastically eerie moments that send a galvanic tingle down the spine.  The opening sequence showing the Home Counties succumbing to the effects of a gas attack is spookily effective and when the zombies first appear, looking like a contingent of geography teachers after an all-night drinking binge, they are genuinely frightening.  The ending, by contrast, is pretty dismal.

Taking a break from his run of Hammer horrors, Terence Fisher was drafted in by independent producer Robert L. Lippert to direct this pedestrian little chiller, and to be fair he makes a decent job of it, in spite of the lack of imagination on the writing front and even more obvious lack of money.  A slow-burner, Fisher ekes as much tension as the routine, over-talky narrative will permit, and there is a generous frisson of fear to the scenes where the women are menaced by the tin-men and their zombie slaves.  Why it is only the women who are menaced and why they manage to evade capture so easily are just two of the million or so questions you are left to ponder as you contemplate the hole-riddled plot.

Willard Parker is the token American (essential for distribution in the US) in a cast that includes some much loved British character actors, Dennis Price and Thorley Walters.  The characterisation is, predictably, next to non-existent - the screenwriter couldn't even be bothered to explain Price's character, so he's just left as the enigmatic Mr Unknown thrown in to distract us from the risible lack of plot.  Parker, being the American lead, gets to be the butch hero and does exactly what butch heroes do, which is to bore us to death as he sets about resolving matters in the traditional American B-movie way (i.e. by blowing things up and flying nonchalantly off into the sunset) whilst the more interesting, down-to-Earth characters are left having babies, getting drunk or merely ranting on and on about the sudden depreciation of the British pound in the aftermath of the Apocalypse.  The Earth Dies Screaming is anodyne and parochial to a fault but it still manages to be entertaining, and if only it had been titled Zombie Invasion of an English Village it might have held onto its credibility a bit better than it does.

Film Synopsis

When his aircraft lands in the south of England, American test pilot Jeff Nolan finds the entire population dead, apparently the victims of a mass gas attack.  Arriving at a small village, he encounters a handful of survivors who cheated death by the happenstance of being in a place of safety at the time of the gas attack.  They are debating what to do when they notice two apparently space-suited figures walking around the streets.  These turn out to be deadly robots who kill just by touching their victims.  Things take a turn for the worse when the apparently dead humans suddenly come to life like zombies and start menacing the party of survivors...