Here is a set-up: A mysterious alien in a black business suit with a briefcase comes to Earth to subdue the Earthlings and harvest their blood. A boring Organisation Man, he carries in the briefcase a McKinsey Management Manual and uses it to condemn the hapless Terrans to endless meetings where the blood drains to the sitting position while they try to out-cliché each other with key performance indicators! Everyone’s job to manage something, but no one does anything. Get it? The aliens take over and no one notices.
Good, huh?! The idea is for sale. Every one has a price, and mine is cheap.
‘Not of this Earth’ is a Roger Corman production and surprisingly low key for this auteur. Paul Birch is the man from planet Davanna in a black suit with dark glasses and a stony expression who is lonely in a crowd. Well. no expression at all and a dry as dust delivery.
How does Birch collect blood? Well, don’t knock on his door and then follow him to the basement. Do not accept an invitation to dinner either. Glug, glug. The story is cryptic but it seems more than a dozen victims have littered the streets, unnoticed by the carrion of the press, each drained of blood. The word ‘vampire’ is mentioned once in connection with puncture wounds found on these victims. Ssssh.
That might sound like a big deal, what with a dozen dead young women lying about, but in the cop shop it is business as usual. Much sitting around eating donuts and complaining about the station coffee is done.
Birch does some analysis in the basement with the chem set from the brief case. Glug, glug. Looks like the Davanans can use human blood, so he opens the closest in his bedroom and teleports thirty cubits of blood to Davanna. (Yes, ‘cubits.’ To find out what the length of a forearm has to do with blood ask Roger Corman.) He also tries to teleport a living specimen, but this specimen arrives compressed. That is best left to the imagination. Bones was right not to trust beaming.
Birch himself is none too healthy and visits a doctor early in the going. With telepathy Birch exercises some mental control over the physician. To keep his strength up for blood-collecting Birch hires a nurse to live in his house and administer blood transfusions each night from some identified source of blood. She is Beverly Garland, who had a career in television with hundreds of credits. Can she handle this blood sucker!
Birch goes to libraries and bookstores to research humanity with special reference to matters sanguinary. He is socially inept and cannot drive a car. Odd for a man of his years in that time and place.
Then in a marvellous scene he passes a woman on the street and then stops to look in a shop window.
Alien window shopping for the latest Earth fashions.
She catches up with him and stops next to him, and they stare silently into the window, communicating by telepathy with voice overs. She, it turns out, is another Davannan whom he knows and she has come through the teleport in his closet, without asking permission, so desperate are things getting back home. Her account is cryptic. Some reviewers think she is describing a nuclear war on Davanna. I thought it sounded more like the destruction of a Republican Congress.
That is very like the enigmatic account in ‘Alphaville.’ Lemmy drove his Ford Galaxy across intersidereal space to Alphaville to talk the boss computer to death, while smoking forty a day. We are never quite sure why. Just seemed like the thing to do. Jim Kirk watched this as a lad and got his line in talking computers to death from it.
The situation on Davanna is desperate, and this Davannan woman herself is near death. This grim news and her perilous state drives Birch to act in haste (and repent at leisure). By now his cover is blown. The nurse knows something is up, and she no longer trusts the evasive doctor who seems to be part of it, so she rats them all out to the cops.
Birch realises she is onto him and asks her ever so politely and dryly to stand still while he dispatches her. Yikes! She does not comply.
Loved the scene when she calls the police with a perfectly clear demand for help, and let us remember all of those earlier victims, because the cops seem to have forgotten them, while the male officer on the phone dismisses her as an hysterical woman! So stupid, so annoying, so credible.
Birch has an Achilles ear and Beverly figures out how to deal with him. Stunned, weakened, confused, under a great deal of pressure, and an inexperienced driver, Birch rams his big Buick into a wall and dies.
The end! The end. The end?
Not quite. As the final credits roll, another man in a black suit with a brief case wearing dark glasses and a dead face strides across the grass toward the camera. Nice. Looks like Davanna has sent in Lemmy II.
The film opened with a scene before the credits, a rarity in 1957, in which the stone-faced Birch behind the dark glasses recites his collection of blood. Unusual and ominous.
The film is well paced, and low key. The music score matches the action, which is not always the case in this genre. The direction is deft and the pace is pacy.
Birch is sometimes called the poverty row John Wayne. He is perfect here, though he does not have the flat delivery the Duke could produce. Birch, too, had a long career in television. The rumour mill has it that Birch and Corman had a mighty argument about something, and Birch quit, leaving Corman to hire another actor to fill-in for him in distance shots. Since much the film takes place the dark, he is after all a vampire in all but fangs, who can tell.
When the doctor recovers his wits and tries to report to the police his conclusion that Birch is
‘Not of this Earth,’ Birch conjures a floating octopus that flies through the air and envelopes the doctor’s head like a feral lamp shade. The doctor is no longer of this Earth.
If Birch had flying octopi in reserve why did he not make more use of them? I would.
That creature is utterly gratuitous. Did the marketing department want a creature to feature on the posters and magazine advertisements, and did Corman oblige with this lamp shade which is but a sidebar. It may have also padded the movie when Birch quit or maybe he quit because of it.
On the IMDB is rates a respectable 6.4, though that puts it on the same level as the execrable Adam Sandler movies.
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