Nora King , a young woman in Chicago has survived a suicide bid via a barbiturate overdose . Stirring from what would have been her death bed she knocks on her neighbours door and no one replies . She finds no one seems to be in her apartment block . Wandering the eerie deserted streets of the city she is startled to find another survivor called Frank Brooks
Okay you've seen this type of set up before . Protagonist wakes up , thinks " Oh hold on something isn't quite right here " and finds that the entire population has been rendered blind / turned in to zombies / Daleks have invaded the world / insert your own scenario here etc etc . . It's not an original idea but it's a brilliantly effective hook that draws the audience in to the story which is why it's a common occurrence in horror and science fiction . Off the top of our heads we can name a very long list of books , films and TV shows throwing up this scenario
Where this very low budget film works best is during the deserted city scenes . I know everyone quite rightly raves about Boyle's dead London scenes in 28 DAYS LATER but stop to consider how the problems and pressure were eased by the director shooting that film on digital video . With TE let me just repeat this is a very low budget movie and camera technology in 1954 would have been very primitive in comparison to now . Even more astonishingly the trivia section of this site states the production team didn't have permits so did what we would now describe as " guerrilla film making " and shot on location in Los Angeles very early on Sunday mornings . There's not too much in the way of panning long shots but at the same time these location shots are far more convincing than in bigger budget movies such as THE OMEGA MAN where you're constantly aware of cars driving by in the distance . As Nora meets with Frank they wander around Chicago bumping in to other occasional stragglers my attention was held one hundred per cent
As you might guess for a low budget SF B movie the film can't really sustain this . Chicago has been evacuated because an alien invasion has taken place the night before . Even if you ignore the implausible idea that a large city of this kind can be evacuated in such a short period you can't ignore the fact that the film doesn't have the budget to make this invasion from Venus credible in any way and is confined to one robot . Worse than that this robot just happens to look like it was constructed out of cardboard by a group of primary school children and does tend to drag the film down after its effective first third . Likewise from a narrative point of view we have distracting cutaways to a military base where the military reference to the recent invasion and you're painfully aware that these scenes exist only to give away exposition . Might it not have been more efficient having the survivors run in to a military patrol who say something along the lines " Oh you're a handful of survivors we haven't evacuated and therefore you don't know what's going so here's the plot that needs to be explained to the audience etc etc ?
This is a film that this pulp science fiction in its most low brow form and yet some of it works brilliantly , so much so that for the early period you think you're going to be watching some sort of lost classic . Such a pity TE can't sustain its early promise . One can't help thinking that maybe the production team might have gone back to the drawing board and deleted all the rubbish about cardboard robots from Venus and come up with a premise of survivors battling to stay alive in a world where civilisation and the rule of law have been consigned to history , but I guess audiences always flock to stories that have a nice happy ending ? Even if the events leading up to the end are very silly
Okay you've seen this type of set up before . Protagonist wakes up , thinks " Oh hold on something isn't quite right here " and finds that the entire population has been rendered blind / turned in to zombies / Daleks have invaded the world / insert your own scenario here etc etc . . It's not an original idea but it's a brilliantly effective hook that draws the audience in to the story which is why it's a common occurrence in horror and science fiction . Off the top of our heads we can name a very long list of books , films and TV shows throwing up this scenario
Where this very low budget film works best is during the deserted city scenes . I know everyone quite rightly raves about Boyle's dead London scenes in 28 DAYS LATER but stop to consider how the problems and pressure were eased by the director shooting that film on digital video . With TE let me just repeat this is a very low budget movie and camera technology in 1954 would have been very primitive in comparison to now . Even more astonishingly the trivia section of this site states the production team didn't have permits so did what we would now describe as " guerrilla film making " and shot on location in Los Angeles very early on Sunday mornings . There's not too much in the way of panning long shots but at the same time these location shots are far more convincing than in bigger budget movies such as THE OMEGA MAN where you're constantly aware of cars driving by in the distance . As Nora meets with Frank they wander around Chicago bumping in to other occasional stragglers my attention was held one hundred per cent
As you might guess for a low budget SF B movie the film can't really sustain this . Chicago has been evacuated because an alien invasion has taken place the night before . Even if you ignore the implausible idea that a large city of this kind can be evacuated in such a short period you can't ignore the fact that the film doesn't have the budget to make this invasion from Venus credible in any way and is confined to one robot . Worse than that this robot just happens to look like it was constructed out of cardboard by a group of primary school children and does tend to drag the film down after its effective first third . Likewise from a narrative point of view we have distracting cutaways to a military base where the military reference to the recent invasion and you're painfully aware that these scenes exist only to give away exposition . Might it not have been more efficient having the survivors run in to a military patrol who say something along the lines " Oh you're a handful of survivors we haven't evacuated and therefore you don't know what's going so here's the plot that needs to be explained to the audience etc etc ?
This is a film that this pulp science fiction in its most low brow form and yet some of it works brilliantly , so much so that for the early period you think you're going to be watching some sort of lost classic . Such a pity TE can't sustain its early promise . One can't help thinking that maybe the production team might have gone back to the drawing board and deleted all the rubbish about cardboard robots from Venus and come up with a premise of survivors battling to stay alive in a world where civilisation and the rule of law have been consigned to history , but I guess audiences always flock to stories that have a nice happy ending ? Even if the events leading up to the end are very silly