IMDb meta-data is runtime of 1 hour and 25 minutes, rated 5.6 by 542 insomniacs.
Genre: Sy Fy, Noir
Verdict: Broken-backed but diverting in both parts.
Carmine Orrico, his cheek bones have never looked sharper, lands in England and young women start disappearing. Meanwhile a cast of reliable British character actors study a glowing soccer ball, and when it goes missing they call in another set of reliable British character actors to track it down. The reliables include Maurice Denham, Patricia Haines, Alfred Burke, John Carson, Aubrey Morris, Warren Mitchell, Marianne Stone, and Barbara French. It is an ensemble piece and better for it.
The first half is Sy Fy as Denham and Carmine track an object from SPACE and find it on the pitch. Well, it is England and they are soccer mad there. But it is one strange soccer ball. Very. Denham decides to commune with it. Did his life insurance include death by soccer ball?
After killing Denham, the soccer ball grew legs, scarpered, stole a car, and set off for Vienna for the second half of the film which is Noir.
More than twenty young girls answering an ad for swimsuit models — at this point the slumbering fraternity brothers gained consciousness — have disappeared. Since they have disappeared, they are not on screen, and the bros lapsed into the usual state of unconsciousness. The police, oh hum, find these disappearances to be routine. Flighty young girls are always disappearing, it seems.
Carmine tries to convince the stodgy British moustaches that the soccer ball is a menace. He is dismissed as a flighty (wo)man. Then he connects the missing girls with a soccer magazine and the chase is on. It goes all zither and Third Man thereafter.
Squeeze tries to talk to the soccer ball, which is very polite, and assures her that the missing girls will come to no harm (but that they will never be seen again on Earth). She does not find that very reassuring, so soccer ball kills her, because she is too smart. That was a surprise. But at least Carmine is safe, as he is not that smart.
Turns out soccer ball is a man with a lobster claw on one arm — which makes lighting a cigarette a chore — and a lump of rubber on his profile but he has mellifluous voice when he is not a soccer ball.
Eventually, Carmine of and with the Yard corners soccer man, and he explains his world — of all places, Ganymede — has had a Republican apocalypse and needs new blood, i.e., breeding stock, in the hope shaking off the lobster claws. Apologia delivered, he blasts off with the hu(wo)man cargo.
Carmine seems to have forgotten that soccer man killed his mentor, Denham, and his squeeze Squeeze, and has alien-napped twenty-one girls against their wills, and that they will be sex slaves. Carmine seems to find that normal. Ahem. Maybe those rumours about his life style choices have a truth in them.
The pace is brisk though the soccer ball is loquacious for a shy alien.
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