IMDb runtime an eternity of 1 hour and 2 minutes, over-rated a generous 6.0 by 1147.
Genre: Sy Fy
The earth does not scream.
Verdict: A quota quickie in every way but fact.
The set-up is a nice opening with a British Rail train, late as usual, ploughing off a bridge because the engineer is dead at the controls. (Union rules mean a dead driver cannot be fired.) Then an airplane does the same with a dead pilot at the controls. (Same union rule.) A bowler-hatted gentleman at a train station, who failed to notice the dead bodies littering the platform, keels over. There follows pan shots of village streets with folks who fell dead in their tracks, the newspaper delivery boy, a lady shopper at a green grocer, a bus driver, and so on.
This is nice and there is no sound to distract. The silence makes it more ominous.
Into such a village of the dead drives Worster in a Land Rover, as he exits the vehicle he takes out an Enfield rifle. Whoa. He helps himself to food at a shop and then a drink in a pub, stepping over and around the littered bodies. As he sips in the pub he is accosted by Dennis Price, whom I could not take seriously as a villain, but villain he is. For a start he is in the company of a lady who is not his wife, but whom he introduces as his wife, and we know she is someone else’s wife! Go figure. On this subject there is more tittle-tattle to follow. Read on.
Later they are joined by a young couple. Thus we have gathered in the village of Otranto the crew. Worster is an American among the Brits. Ok. He claims to be a test pilot with the Vertical Take Off and Landing project, the Harrier Jump Jet as it was later called. That was a nice topical reference, but, hey, Worster is forty-nine (49, for those who cannot read words) and long in the tooth and grey in the hair, and large of the waistline for a flyboy and it shows in his leaden movements. Then we have Dennis without menace. His companion is Old Virginie, and she is forty-five. They are joined by a couple in their late twenties. Thorley Walters and his companion are also there to add the buffoon touch to the gathering.
They make an uneasy alliance and try to infer what has happened. The conclusion is that there was a gas attack and those, like themselves who survived, were sealed up somewhere, the pilot in an airplane, the villain and his moll is sealed room, and so…(I forget what the others said). (This quarantine also figures in the superior ‘The Night of the Comet’ (1984) reviewed elsewhere on this blog.) The gas has now dissipated.
Ah ha! The pilot was in a plane, but one of those was shown in the lead-in…and he was dead at the controls. How come Worster did not cack it, too, chimed the fraternity brothers. Dunno.
The young woman is pregnant and Old Virginie is assigned to look after her because she is a woman and women know about such things. To her credit she denies such knowledge, but the chaps disregard this is the best style of the times. While they are drinking themselves into oblivion in the pub they see strange figures in the streets. The requisite hysterical woman in their number rushes out, and has to run after and after, in her six inch high heels, the Reynolds Wrapped creatures, who are oblivious to her until she grabs one. It is a nice moment when it turns and reveals itself to be … a Republican Congressman and zaps her.
Another Brexit voter exits.
Zap! The others observe this zapology from a distance.
Later in a twist some of the dead rise as white-eyed zombies and there is one nice moment of tension when Old Virginie hides in a wardrobe from one such zombie. Being dead, they have an excuse for their leaden motions. Along the way Thorley also gets zapped, or did he. Can’t remember. Dennis without menace is offed. That leaves the young and old couples, plus the newborn baby.
Later these Reynolds Wrappers move like lead, even slower than Worster, and seem to be deaf, dumb, and blind as well as Republican. If their mission is to finish off the survivors of the gas attack in a search and destroy mission they have failed the KPIs miserably. It turns out they are robots controlled by radio transmission from a conveniently located tower which Worster blows up (because as a test pilot he is also a demolition expert) and that frees the local area of this scourge. Whew!
What next? They will find a plane and fly around to attract the attention of other survivors. Huh? Won’t that attract the attention of other Reynolds Wrappers, too? And the plane we see take off is a four engined Constellation that needs a long hard runway. It will not bob down to pick a few folk standing around an SOS sign.
The end.
Worster and Old Virginie (she being Brit) were married in 1951, more than a decade before they teamed up in this outing and they stayed married until her death in 1992.
It was not a quota quickie, as explained elsewhere on this blog, but it has some of the qualities in the cheap production and gratuitous insertion of an American actor from the C-list, and it was distributed by Lippart, a well-known bottom feeder. The chatter on the inter-web is that Old Virginie went back to England for family reasons and Worster came along and they did this film to pay for the trip.
It fits the Brit practice of Sy Fy in rural settings. Long before Midsomer Murders the English countryside was a strange place where strange thing happened to the strange people who are there. It was also cheaper to film that.
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