(1961)
Dir - Michael Anderson
Overall: GOOD
Gary Cooper closed out his feature film career with the Hitchcockian-styled thriller The Naked Edge; a stylized affair that makes its point with about twenty or so unnecessary minutes attached. An adaptation of Max Ehrlich's novel First Train to Babylon and a co-production between the US and the UK that was shot and set in London, director Michael Anderson and cinematographers Erwin Hillier and Tony White unveil some flashy, distorted, Orson Welles-inspired camerawork from the get go, which gives the movie a flashy edge that disguises a monotonous plot. Cooper and Deborah Kerr make a typical movie star couple where the man is twenty years older than his Mrs, but they provide the necessary star power to elevate the material, with Kerr in particular being ideally cast as a woman driven to the brink of a psychological meltdown as she doubts her own suspicions. The story wisely withholds all of the answers until the closing moments, making this an exercise in marital paranoia first and foremost that explores how desperately one needs to believe that their spouse could never commit an unforgivable act. Though the conclusion is satisfying in one respect, it is also unintentionally clumsy and fails to tie up a string of loose ends, but at least Peter Cushing makes a cameo, which is always worth its weight in gold.
(1963)
Dir - John Krish
Overall: MEH
Though it is too chatty and sterile in presentation to elevate itself as a low-budget bit of genre fodder, Unearthly Stranger, (Beyond the Stars), has some unsettling intensity in fits and starts. Playing off of the eerie concept that extraterrestrial entities have been living amongst us for some time, it concerns a scientific department that is working on a form of space travel that can be achieved via mind control, which forces the ever-keen eye of alien forces to intervene as to not let mankind venture into the stars. The specifics of such a cockamamie and ludicrous idea are thankfully not dwelt upon as instead, the story plays out as a tale of paranoid domestic takeover, with good friends John Neville and Philip Stone eventually coming to terms with the fact that the former's charming wife is in fact more of a foreigner than they could have ever imagined. Director John Krish plays such a scenario deadly serious, using Dutch-angled, claustrophobic closeups of sweaty and intense actors, plus he makes the most out of the modest budget with the invisible aliens emitting a deafening wind noise as they encroach upon their victims. Hardly anything exciting happens until the last ten or so minutes and the character's banter quickly becomes monotonous, but it delivers some chills despite its minimal amount of characters or action-oriented moments.
(1969)
Dir - Gerry Levy
Overall: WOOF
Though it tries to interject some mild sexiness and brings in George Sanders for some respectability, The Body Stealers, (Invasion of the Body Stealers, Thin Air), is a piss-pour production that arrives painfully dated by late 1960s standards. The second of only two features to be directed by Gerry Levy, he and co-screenwriter Michael St. Clair's script is as talky as they get, made up of incessant banter between military men, bureaucrats, scientists, and Patrick Allen's ladies man air force investigator. This goes on uninterrupted with zero set pieces until the last fifteen or so minutes where only the viewer with enough caffeine in their system will be awake enough to realize that extraterrestrials are at the heart of the inciting incident involving disappearing paratroopers. Such a revelation is hardly jaw-dropping, (despite what the blaring musical cues on the soundtrack would dictate when such a revelation finally arrives), as anyone can judge from the title alone that we are dealing with yet another Invasion of the Body Snatchers clone. The film is boring enough and D-rent enough to fit right in to the drive-in cheapies that were pumped out at an alarming rate a decade earlier, making this a daft and pointless sci-fi installment if ever there was one. On that note, Doctor Who fans may recognize the silver spacecraft as the one belonging to the Daleks in Amicus' Daleks' Invasion Earth 2150 A.D. adaptation from three years prior.
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