The Earth Dies Screaming (1964)

Absolutely the worst movie.

It’s an especially fun movie from a director and cast who are clearly having a good time allowing themselves to let loose.

The acting in this movie is really good.

The acting is good, and the firecracker script has some excellent ideas.

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

As a 10 year old, I saw this with my friends as a Saturday matinée at the local theater and it nailed my sci-fi preferences right on the head. We played this one out in the neighborhood in numerous scenarios having a deliciously creepy time dealing with "the guys with the globby eyes", whom we found preferable to the robots as scare factors. I ran across a pirate-copy DVD on-line a couple of years back and couldn't resist. Not surprisingly, the DVD quality stank, but the movie held up remarkably well. It would certainly earn no awards for excellence in any category, but carried a remarkably good atmosphere, particularly the scenes at the village inn. If I could find a better copy, I would most definitely make the investment.

Unconscious people peacefully slump over the controls of the trains, planes and automobiles they were piloting. This is naturally followed by the crashes of the aforementioned vehicles. A few lone survivors show up and band together as they try to figure things out. The screaming doesn't actually start until some strange space-suited creatures begin slowly lumbering around town and are eventually joined by those they've recently killed.The movie perhaps tries a little harder than comparable films in trying to create a dramatic scenario of survivors dealing with the aftermath of a holocaust they don't understand, but not a lot harder. Plot, character development and dramatic tension are mostly absent and the film plods along nearly as slowly as the completely out-of-place zombies. This may be a low-budget sci-fi film with laughable special effects and an over-the-top title, but the camp value is almost non-existent. On the plus side, its short running time does take some mercy on fans of the genre who feel compelled to see this movie in spite of its limited entertainment potential.

Best Title Ever Saw this film last night and it goes down as a classic noir horror.During the early 60s the Brits make a bunch of truly great horror films which all featured an American hero and great black and white photography. 'These Are the Damned,' 'Bunny Lake Is Missing' just to name a few.'The Earth Dies Screaming' follows a rather typical end of the world zombie horror film. All over England people instantly drop dead. On the quite earth the few survivors start linking up and all realize they survived due to their isolation from the general air during the presumed gas attack.Is the gas attack, natural, foreign, or alien? Are the survivors generally innocent bystanders as they claim or is one of them a spy? To make matters worse the survivors soon encounter killer bullet proof robots in space suits. Even worse and scarier than the robots themselves are their victims whom come back as zombies.At only 60 minutes the film moves at a much faster pace than other quiet earth films. And the scenes are very intense and terrifying. They really do a great job of keeping you on the edge of your seat by their presentation. The zombies may just look like dumb sleep walkers but in the proper presentation they come across as truly terrorizing.Great musical score and photography.