Invasion (1965)
Genre: Sci Fi
IMDb meta-data is 1 hour 22 minutes of runtime, rated 5.6/10.0 by 324 cinemtizens.
Verdict: nicely done.
On a quiet country road in the Yorkshire Dales a dazed individual steps out of the mist in front of a car, and gets walloped. (He had to wait a long time for a car to come along that road.) The driver takes Victim to the hospital and talks to the police after salting away his companion paramour. Of whom more later.
Meanwhile, some British National Servicemen are asleep at the switch when a blip occurs on the radar, and continue sleeping when the electric power goes off and on and off. These chaps are the Isles first line of defence if the Cold War got Hot. SSSh, don’t disturb them. These are the same ones in X The Unknown (1956) and it stayed that way as far as they were concerned.
Plod comes to investigate the scene of the accident and finds the now trigger-happy soldiers prowling around. A cast of familiar faces crosses the screen: Barrie Ingham, Glyn Houston, Valerie Gearon, and Lyndon Brook – it began to look like an episode of Z Cars. [Sigh, if only].
The plot thickens when at the hospital Victim who looks Chinese, has no blood, and — most suspicious of all — wears a latex suit straight out of a 1970s exercise video. The Chinese nurse in residence in this rural hospital, after a glance, says he is not Chinese, despite appearances. What will he say about her when he regains consciousness? Well they all look alike and later when an imposter takes this nurse’s place no one else notices the switch. (Not even her since we never see her again. Loose end or what? Wake up the Continuity Editor.)
Square Jaw sweats a lot in the effort to be reasonable. Victim is a talkative alien who says he was taking some prisoners to the galactic slammer when his low-bidder built UFO blew an O-ring and he had to crash-land on the Third Rock. In the subsequent confusion his two charges — two equally bloodless women, who are also not human, but are women, nonetheless (figure that one out) — got away. All this explaining did in the fraternity brothers. Mind you their interest had waned since the reading matter of the radarman was left behind.
Many dark atmospheric shots of figures watching, womanly figures. They scare the car driver to death. Oops. We come in peace, and all that.
Meanwhile, the hospital heats up, and up, and up. Now everyone is sweating including Square Jaw. It seems Victim likes heat and he keeps turning up the thermostat on the central heating. Sure, like an NHS country hospital would have central hearing in 1965, let alone such advanced technology as a thermostat. Victim also wants privacy and the hospital is surrounded by a forcefield. The McKinsey trained hospital manager knows a KPI when he sees one and he sees in this alien publicity, funding, and, let’s not forget, promotion, the keyest of all KPIs. A devotee of Pox News he does not believe in science, still less than anything he cannot see, so he get into his Austin saloon and speeds off … smack into the forcefield. In the days before the Red Queen made everyone buckle up he went right through the windscreen to his final KPI, as in Killed Performing an Indicator.* That sobers everyone up. They came in peace. Now two dead.
Somewhere out in the countryside the National Servicemen smoke cigarettes and look bored, as do viewers at this stage. The light is too poor out there for further reading.
Then the page of the screenplay turns, and the doctors begin to think that Victim may be the villain, and the two others are the police making a terrible job of looking for him. Well, why not, that makes as much sense as anything else.
Two things standout. The hospital switchboard operator gets hysterical and has to be slapped into sense by one of the doctors. The slapping doctor is a she. The hysterical women is a standard feature of this genre but that is the only time I can recall seeing the mandatory slap delivered by a woman in authority. Nice twist. Though the only reason the operator is there is to get slapped. It would have been even better if she had slapped an hysterical man. For that, we are still waiting. Second, Square Jaw saw The Third Man (1949) and is inspired to take to the sewers to evade the forcefield and retrieve his iPhone or something. He slogs back and forth between sceptic tank and well for no discernible reason but an actor has got to do what a director tells him to do.
Victim makes a run for it, and the alien women (the not human ones, probably Kappas, muttered the fraternity brothers) explain they are the Law and he is the Villain. One of the doctors goes all Stockholm Syndrome and follows Victim cum Villain to the downed spacecraft and after he ditches her he boards and fires up. But in the sky his ship is blown up. Was the Law in another ship blasting him, or did he hit another forcefield? Or was the low-bid contractor at it again. We’ll never know.
There is also a faint hint earlier that the inhuman women run the show where Victim comes from, but that is never developed. Still it is intriguing for a while when Victim asks with incredulity ‘She/ does what you tell her?’ when a male doctor directs a nurse to bring water. (Warning: Men, do not try this at home.)
The use of Asian talent is the most obvious distinction of the film: Yoko Tani, Ric Young, and Tsai Chin got a gig out of it. It catches the eye but is not integrated into the plot or character.
The reviews I scanned are condescending, but I rather liked this low key approach. The direction is not Val Guest standard and there is treacle time, especially at the start when many of the actors move as if underwater. The screenplay is not Nigel Kneale level but it has more intellectual bite than most of this ilk. But in the end too much was left unexplained. Why was the driver’s paramour such a zombie? And why was she there at all? Did the cat do it? Who fenced up the forcefield? Why don’t the doctors notice the switch of nurses? Who let the dogs out? If the inhuman women are Law why don’t they go all Dirty Harriettes and get their man? What is the ISO rating of that hospital? Why are the aliens Lysterians? Why not Republicans? What does the title have to do with the story? Best for last: Who cares anyway?
*A biography of the Red Queen is discussed elsewhere on this blog. Get clicking.