Saturday, August 19, 2017

Devil Girl from Mars (The Danzigers, Spartan Productions, 1954)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night’s Mars movie screening in Golden Hill, http://marsmovieguide.com/, billwas a double bill of a 1954 British “B” called Devil Girl from Mars and a 1964 (though imdb.com lists the date as 1965) American cheapie alternately called The Wizard of Mars and The Horrors of the Red Planet. Devil Girl from Mars was one of those weirdies in which a femme fatale from another planet descends on earth because millions of years of war between the sexes has essentially emasculated the indigenous male population to the point where the only way the Martian women are going to be able to make little Martians is if they can import breeding stock from some other planet … and of course they’ve chosen Earth because at just 33 million miles away at their closest point, we’re practically their next-door neighbors. The gimmick on this one is that the Martian spaceship, which looks less like a flying saucer than a flying bathtub stopper (or maybe a flying merry-go-round, since it’s circled by a band of flashing lights that rotates when the ship is in motion but grinds to a halt after it lands), is flown by just one crew member, a hot-looking woman called Nyah — it’s pronounced to rhyme with “Maya” but in cold print in the closing credits it looks like a line from a Three Stooges script — played by Patricia Laffan and dressed in an amazing form-fitting black polyvinyl chloride costume, with an accompanying cape, that looks so spectacular Ronald Cobb got a special credit for designing it. Alas, it also meant Laffan could neither eat nor drink on set because the difficulty of getting her in — and, even more importantly, out — of the costume meant they couldn’t risk losing valuable shooting time by letting her use the restroom. (Some of the actors on the original Star Trek had this same problem: since Gene Roddenberry had decided that 25th century clothes would have invisible fasteners that didn’t exist in the 1960’s, many of the Star Trek actors literally had their costumes sewn on around them.) 

Alas, the rest of Devil Girl from Mars is pretty dull: it’s set in a pub called the Bonnie Charlie in a remote part of Scotland, and it’s based on a stage play by John C. Mather and James Eastwood (presumably no relation), which Eastwood adapted into the film’s script and David MacDonald directed. It’s all too obvious that this movie started out as a play since it almost never leaves the first-floor room of that combination inn and pub; occasionally we get a cut-away shot to one of the rooms or something from outside, but for the most part we’re stuck in that room and things get awfully claustrophobic. The human principals are scientist Arnold Hennessey (Joseph Tomelty, who looks like some odd attempt to cross-breed Sydney Greenstreet and Robert Morley) and his traveling companion, reporter Michael Carter (Hugh McDermott), who drive out to Scotland to investigate a meteor that’s just fallen to Earth but end up seven miles from where it fell. Carter shows up at the inn and immediately falls in love with former model Ellen Prestwick (Hazel Court), who previously had been in a relationship with the designer she was modeling for but broke it off when she found out he was already married (to which I couldn’t help but think, “A dress designer — married — to another woman?”), then fled to Scotland because he wasn’t about to take no for an answer from her and she needed to hide out in as remote a location as possible to keep him from finding her. There’s another star-crossed couple at the bar: Doris (Adrienne Corri, whose most famous credit is as the rape victim Mrs. Alexander in A Clockwork Orange), a barmaid who’s in love with escaped convict Robert Justin (Peter Reynolds), who’s using the name “Albert Simpson” at the pub until reporter Carter recognizes him and figures out who he really is. It seems that Justin was in prison in the first place for murdering his wife, and Doris has forgiven him for that but not for leaving her to marry the wife he killed in the first place. There are also the Jamiesons (John Laurie and Sophie Stewart, the latter in a marvelous busybody performance that proves they didn’t break the mold after they made Una O’Connor), the owners of the Bonnie Charlie; and Tommy (Anthony Richmond), your typically obnoxious and insufferable movie kid. 

The action, such as it is, occurs when Nyah demands that one of the males in this unlikely assemblage accompany her back to Mars and be her stud service — originally she was supposed to arrive in London but she miscalculated her landing trajectory and ended up stuck in the Scottish Highlands instead — and she’s also got an enforcer robot named Chani. The film’s special effects are otherwise quite good, but it loses all credibility when Chani enters and he’s basically just a big box with a head, arms and legs sticking out in the appropriate places, the box being mostly featureless except for four dials stretched across his chest and a few other bits and pieces of holes and protuberances apparently meant to represent controls. Nyah puts a force field around the pub to prevent anybody from communicating with the world outside, and at one point, when Michael volunteers to be her stud but then grabs her ray gun with which she controls the robot, she manages to get it back from him and tells the group at the pub that out of revenge for Michael’s attempted deception, she’s going to kill all of them except for the one who agrees to go with her. Dr. Hennessey gets inside the spacecraft and realizes its power source is a spherical nuclear core, and if someone can get inside the ship and make the core go super-critical, it will blow up the ship and the Devil Girl from Mars as well, though it will also be a suicide mission for whichever Earthling tries it. Eventually Robert Justin agrees to go inside the spaceship because as a convicted murder and escapee from prison, he knows his life is forfeit anyway and he ultimately redeems himself by blowing up the spaceship — represented by a cool little fireball effect that consumes whatever model the production crew was using. 

Devil Girl from Mars is that frustrating sort of movie that’s not good enough to be entertaining on its own merits but not bad enough to work as camp, either; it’s got the usual impeccable acting from the all-British cast (what is it with British actors? Is there some strain in the British DNA that keeps churning out all these beautiful, well-spoken, reliable and always convincing actors?) and a degree of understatement that’s refreshing, especially given the melodramatic overwroughtness with which American filmmakers usually handled plots like this. But it’s also dull, dull, dull, especially when Nyah isn’t on screen showing off that ultra-cool costume designer Cobb made for her — the screening organizer wondered why more recent “cosplayers” at fan conventions haven’t taken up her dress: probably because of the sheer difficulty of taking it on and off and the need to put various excretory functions “on hold” while wearing it.