You have to hand it to Roger Corman, he could not only stretch a dollar but our imaginations as well. In this one he put character actor Paul Birch in a black suit, stark white contact lenses and sunglasses. He's playing a blind man, right? Wrong! He's playing a space alien and if you look at his pupil-less eyes your brain burns right in your skull (could this be where David Cronenberg got the idea for SCANNERS?). Anyway, Birch has come to our world looking for blood. His own planet is worn out due to years of atomic war and only the uncontaminated blood of Earth people can save what is left of his race. Birch's superior intellect has made him extremely arrogant (he refers to Earthlings as "subhuman") yet his unfamiliarity with the simplest things on this world continually attracts attention to himself. He makes no attempt to cover his many killings, leaving bodies where they can easily be discovered. His contempt for Earth and its people mirrors that of THE THING FROM ANOTHER WORLD who brutally knocked Dr. Carrington aside when he dared to compare his feeble Earth brain to that of the alien. Also in the cast are Beverly Garland as the nurse who knows her patient is unusual but does not realise how much. Jonathan Haze as the former petty crook who is his chauffeur (Haze's last line is a classic!). Morgan Jones, the former "Green Hornet" in the 1940 Universal serial, is the cop in love with Garland who labels Birch "a creep"; and Dick Miller is a vacuum cleaner salesman who deserves some sort of award for using the word "purchase" the most times in a single sentence. Oh yes, there is a monster too, sort of. A briefly seen what-is-it designed by Paul Blaisdell that looks like an inverted umbrella. It kills the one person on Earth who knows who and what Birch really is and then (apparently) dies. Talk about thrifty, that isn't blood at the end of that scene, the actor who appears to have his head crushed by the monster just had a mouth full of grape juice and spit it out at the right moment. Roger has remade this film twice (what, will he keep doing it until he gets it right?) but the original is still the most fun.
Review of Not of This Earth
