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 There are some "monster-like aliens from another planet" that want to take over
Earth. They start with a small town and "inhabit the bodies of prominent
citizens in hopes of having children with earth women." A young woman gets
suspicious after she gets married and becomes scared when she sees her new
husband
transform into a monster. "How the town rises to the threat of conquest by the
aliens makes for suspenseful viewing." 1958, 78 minutes, VHS
Remember the first couple of times you got married and were amazed, simply
amazed to find out that your old lady or old man was not the sweet natured
thing that brought you flowers, paid your bills, or called in to your probation
officer for you? Remember when you first realized that your honey was really
nothing more than some slug that sat around your trailer, eating cereal out of
a bag, filling out his/her stretch pants until it looked like they were trying
to smuggle a small immigrant family in them, and running up your phone bill
calling phone sex lines and/or Cousin Cleo? That's what this movie is about.
Maybe it's not as flashy as what I've described above (after all, the lover who
turns out to be a trash in this movie is just an alien bent on taking over the
planet and not some two time felon with a fetish for having chewing tobacco
spit in his face), but it was the 1950s so they had to maintain some type of
decorum. I Married A Monster From Outer Space is a classic melding of two
genres of flicks. The first genre is the body snatching movie, where a group
of people turn into emotionless automatons that have world domination on their
mind. The second genre is of the course the 1950s sci-fi/horror flick with the
classic drive-in title, a genre populated by such creations as I Was A Teenage Werewolf and Earth vs. The Flying Saucers. Luckily this was a time period in film where a movie could have one of those
wink-nudge titles and still be played straight. This isn't some trash with
Lily Tomlin as The Incredible Shrinking Woman (is there a worse movie out there? Umm, well, what other movies has Lily been
in?). Of
course that movie came from a different era when it was thought that playing
these things for laughs was the way to go (what they failed to realize is that
many of those older films were funny precisely because they weren't played for
laughs). In this case though, I Married A Monster From Outer Space, is played very straight and comes off that way. Slow moving at times, it has
some fairly creepy implications, but is probably in the tier of body snatching
movies somewhere below Invasion Of The Body Snatchers (Original, natch!) Invaders From Mars (Original, natch, too!)
, but above such fare as The Man From Planet X .  How does an alien invasion begin, you ask? At a bachelor party, of course!
Our hero (though once he gets taken over by some aliens with a funny looking
face, he becomes our villain) is named Bill Farrell and he's about to take the
big jump, get hitched to the old ball and chain, one last night of freedom,
blah, blah, blah. He's getting married to Marge in the morning, so he and his
crew are tearing up the town one last time before he takes his solemn vows and
enters a life of involuntary celibacy (you married guys know what I'm getting
at). Since this is 1958 and happens in the very small town of Norrisville, a
rip snorting
good time does not involve going out to a local Indian riverboat casino
(wow - it's just like the riverboat casinos the Blackfoot used to run back in
the 1850s!) gambling away the honeymoon money and getting kicked out of the
"adult's only" section for violations of the "no sex in the champagne room"
rule that
must be some type of ancient tribal law. Nope, Bill and the rest of
Norrisville's biggest partiers are sitting around a table in a bar, slumped
over, greasy hair slightly mussed, in that faux-wasted pose these movies are
prone to use. The conversation is the typical cliched stuff about how awful
marriage will be and when are the other single guys in the group going to get
married and how do the already married guys in the group stand it. So Bill
really ties one on and stumbles out of the bar and down some darkened street
where a bunch of off-screen aliens are camped out. He screams and then this
thick black smoke rolls over him and then it's morning and the nervous bride is
pacing wondering why her man isn't back yet from his bachelor party. His
friends
try to allay her fears by telling her that Bill just got completely obliterated
last night and that he must be having trouble scraping the barf off his tux and
that he should be in about 30 days once his rehab is over. Finally, Bill shows
up, but he's a bit different. It's not the puked-stained shirt, or the fact
that his breath smells like downtown Milwaukee - that we expected. It's that
he's very distant and the only expression he's capable of putting on that
handsome, hung over mug of his is something that you could only call the
"possessed scowl." You know the look. It's this thing where the dude is
obviously under the control of an alien presence since he isn't really smiling
(because aliens are never excited to be inhabiting our inferior forms), but it
isn't a complete frown since the alien doesn't want to draw undue suspicion on
himself by being blatantly crabby. It's something in between and scientists
will tell you it's the "possessed scowl." It's frequently accompanied by the
"vacant stare" if that helps you out.  Bill and Marge get married in a storybook ceremony that we get to skip since we
have a 78 minute running time we need to strictly adhere to. But to make up
for that, we get to go on the honeymoon with them! This is when Marge really
begins to notice the change in her hubby's personality. First he drives around
at night without the headlights on. Then when they get to their honeymoon
destination (I'm guessing some sort of state park - I was never too sure what
Bill did for a living except scheming with the mother ship to take over all of
Norrisville, but then that's probably a full time job in itself) and Bill gets
out of his car and walks off without so much as opening the car door for his
blushing bride. Why, he must be a complete alien to behave in such a manner!
Finally at dinner she complains that she has to do all the small talk and that
he doesn't say much. If I were Bill, I would have told her that I like to do
my talking in the honeymoon suite, if you can catch that wedding bouquet.
Later Bill
and her are out on the balcony of whatever hourly rate flop house place the
mothership put them up at and there's some thunder in the distance and Marge
has to tell Bill what it is since he has no idea. Whoa! I hope she don't have
to explain everything to him that night! Later we see Marge writing a letter
to someone talking about how it's almost been a year since they were married
and that Bill seemed like a completely different person and she's really
unhappy and he leaves the seat up and wah, wah, wah. In an effort to snap Bill
out of his year long alien possession, she goes out and buys him an anniversary
present. She comes home with it and shows him that he is now the proud owner
of a little puppy! Everyone knows though that dogs are really good at
sniffing out aliens just like they are at sniffing out when Timmy is trapped in
an old well somewhere, so this dog immediately starts yapping and snarling and
we're already wondering what Marge is going to do with the little cage she
bought for the dog, once Bill kills it. Marge, I'm thinking that you could
store your knitting supplies in it or something. Later, Bill walks around in
the dark (what a freak!) and down into the basement where he's made Marge tie
the thing up. There he uses his alien powers to choke
the dog with his bare hands. When Marge comes butting in wondering why she
heard what sounded like a little puppy's death rattle in the basement, Bill
shrugs his shoulders and says, "I guess you just put his collar on too tight."
Paging Dr. Phil! Relationship in trouble! Stat! Even though her husband is a cold hearted dog killer, the biggest problem Marge
is having with Bill is that she can't get pregnant. She goes to her doctor who
tells her that he's run all of the tests and that she checks out just fine. In
fact, he says the only thing left for him to do, is just to try her out
himself. Okay, he never said that, but wouldn't it have been funny if he did?
Reminds me of the punchline to my third favorite joke (skip ahead if you've
heard this). The punchline goes something like this: the husband says to the
doctor, "that thing better have numbers on it when you pull it out!" Oh man, I
am cry-ing! Funny stuff. So anyway, the doctor suggests that Bill himself
come in and get checked out, but I think we know how that will go over with the
big guy. Okay, at some point in all this, Marge decides to follow Bill out one
night to see if the reason they can't have children is because he has a habit
of just disappearing at night sometimes (Hint to Marge: If you pull the blinds
in the bedroom and turn out the lights, it's almost like night time. Come on!
Be
adventuresome, it is 1958 after all!). She follows him out to the woods and
right up to the mothership (what's this?). She sees the alien creature exit
Bill's body and disappear. Then she goes up to Bill's body and it pretty much
tips over when she breathes on it. She is horrified to see that her husband is
really just a shell of a man and just to make sure we get the point that Bill
is not alright, they have a big bug run across his face (How'd he get there so
fast?). She freaks out and runs over to his bar (Well, isn't that the first
place you would go if your significant other turned out to be alien trash? I
mean, if his drinking buddies don't know what to do, who does?). She's hooting
and hollering in her nightgown about monsters and husbands and can't his
drinking buddies save the day, so you can imagine how that goes over. It
actually goes over so well that one of the dudes in the bar starts hanging
around her house and when the police arrive he tells them that he's just
hanging around hoping she'll step out again some night. This leads to him
shooting one of the cops, but since the cop is an alien it doesn't hurt him and
he just shoots the stalker. This all took place on Bill and Marge's front lawn
while they were in the bedroom and she was trying to sleep. He tells her it's
just a car backfiring. An odd sequence to be sure, but I guess it's to show you
how omnipresent the alien control was and that they were ruthless. At least
when one of their women where being stalked by horny barflies, that is.  More people get taken over, there's a swimming accident where one of the
monsters dies because he was given oxygen to revive him when everyone knows
that aliens have a methane reservoir they use to breathe when they're on a
foreign planet trying take it over. Bill and Marge have a fairly low key
confrontation where he spills the beans about how all the women on his planet
croaked and that they are working on how to mutate earth women so they can
breed them. He also gets a bit of sympathy because he is learning what love
is, and I thought we were going to have one of those mushy Starman situations
you always fear, but Marge doesn't seem to care whether this guy is getting in
touch with his inner child or not, because she convinces her doctor that the
aliens are here, he rounds up the usual gang of angry villagers and dogs and
they go find the mothership, destroy the aliens, set the humans that have been
held prisoner (Bill's really alive!) for over a year, and save the day. This
is an okay body snatcher movie which is hampered by its minimal amount of
action. I have to say that I liked it even though the idea of taking over a
town and then just waiting around to see if your scientists can figure a way
out to make earth women have babies with you seems a bit like an ass-backwards
way to run an alien invasion. It's an interesting take on the body snatching
genre, because it's done on a more personal level than the other ones and done
from a woman's perspective. A woman trapped in an unhappy marriage,
preoccupied because she can't have children and wondering what happened to the
Prince Charming she married. That's what this movie is really about and why
it's one that rises above the heaps of 1950s sci-fi trash about alien
invasions. It explores all the loathing that many couples probably secretly
harbored against one another when their marriage wasn't the storybook
experience their parents lead them to believe it would be. And yet, because of
the
time period, no one could come out and just say, "you suck, I'm out of here."
Divorce was still a dirty word instead of something to put on your resume and
people actually thought they had a duty to stay married even if they ended up
with fool's gold. It's one of those "beneath the shiny suburban veneer of
post-war America, all was not well" films. They were smart to wrap it all up
in an alien invasion thing, because it added this nasty layer that this woman
was sleeping with someone or something that wasn't her husband and you could
understand the horror she must have felt when she realized that. She didn't
know who she was knocking boots with. This is a movie that film makers
continue to ape today, the most recent example that comes to mind is the Johnny
Depp fiasco The Astronaut's Wife. It's just like in the Japanese film Audition: do you really know who you're going to bed with every night and what their
motivations and intentions are?
Reviews © 2004
MonsterHunter
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