Not of This Earth (1957)

A rather peculiar fellow going by the - totally not the pseudonym of an alien invader - name of Paul Johnson (Paul Birch) ambles through Southern California. He has a very particular form of blood disease that calls for rather intense blood transfusions, but also the ability to hypnotically convince his doctor to be rather helpful about his medical troubles and his preferred solution to them.

Mr Johnson moves into a nice suburban house, hires himself a former ne'er-do-well as a caretaker and a private nurse (Beverley Garland). Occasionally, he communicates with his alien superiors about experiments meant to save his radioactively irradiated race, and ambles along to kidnap people for some rather radical experimentation which leaves them rather dead.

As a director, I particularly love Roger Corman for his Poe cycle made some years later, but even when he made short and very cheap variations on alien invasion and monster movie models, his films typically had something to recommend them.

In the case of Not of This Earth that something is the very specific type of contemporary Southern California hipness used to fill in the holes in budget and script, like Dick Miller’s short turn as a salesman taking a bad end not unfitting to his profession, the absurd teen patois used in another scene, the general late 50s grooviness of what’s going on, and the immensely quotable dialogue (“If I do not receive blood within four chronoctons of time, I will have no need of emotion”), that feels like the sort of thing Ed Wood was trying to achieve but lacked the sense of humour to reach.

Because of the general scrappiness of the production, this has an often very improvisational feel through scenes that just seem to have popped into the crew’s mind and then directly to camera. Only a couple of years later, this would culminate in little masterpieces of skewed wit like Bucket Full of Blood and Little Shop of Horrors, but even in its embryonic form, Corman the pseudo-beat is a fine thing to remember the man for, among many other achievements.