Slumming - Devil Gril from Mars (1954)

“The movie was called “Devil Girl from Mars” and I saw it when I was about twelve years old, and it changed my life.” 

- Octavia Butler, “Devil Girl from Mars”: Why I Write Science Fiction”

It’s difficult to make the case that the Danzigers’ Devil Girl form Mars is a good film. They rarely produced movies that are considered more than middling and some that are just plain bad, as in our current selection. However, I happen to love this movie!

Supposedly a U.K. response to the science fiction works coining out of Hollywood, Devil Girl from Mars boasted special effects a little better than Ed Wood’s Plan 9 from Outer Space, acting by genuine pros from the British stage (and HAZEL COURT!!!) but some of the most preposterous characterizations and completely silly attempt as sci-fi exposition ever committed to screen.

Michael Carter: Mrs. Jamieson, may I introduce your latest guest. Miss Nyah. She comes from Mars.

Mrs. Jamieson: Oh, well, that’ll mean another bed.

Our masterpiece has one element that elevates far above the clunky structure and dialog written by and for those with tin ears. I give you Patricia Laffan. I fell in love with

her when I saw this in my pre-teen years and went out of my way to watch Quo Vadis because she was in it. Here IMDb description is too good and I have to quote it because I can’t surpass it: “A statuesque and striking actress with vaguely reptilian aspects, at once sinister and alluring; a smile never more than a whisker away from a sneer and a commanding, imperious presence…” This is poetry. 

Laffan lived aa long life, passing away at 94 in 2014. A 1954 profile had it that “She lists fast cars and breeding bull terriers as hobbies.” All Movie notes that after retiring from acting, she was “a fasion impresario” and a published author. There’s likely more but I haven’t seen the BBC documentary on her life yet nor read Lisa Cohen’s All We Know in which Laffan figures to some minor degree (the book itself sounds worthwhile as it is; it’s an account of three trailblazing women, one of whom shared a lover with Laffan). 

The performance that Laffan gave is precisely the kind I live for where there’s that one actor that knows just what kind of movie she’s in and she’s going to run with it. Oh, she commits to the role, all right, and frankly, controls the screen in the same way and with the same degree of targeted hamminess that Vincent Price at his best would do. 

When she’s on-screen, you really aren’t sure if she’s going to pull out a flogger and start running house on everyone else on set or what. The PVC outfit she’s wearing screams FETISH and you can’t help but wonder if the filmmakers knew precisely what they were doing.

When she’s not on screen, the film doesn’t flag, but despite its turgid directing and stilted line readings (again, by well-known professionals; I can’t stress how badly a lame script can hobble the best performers), there is something charming about our little movie.

As I was watching this film, I had a series of revelations. The first was that, “Geez I can write a better story than that.” And then I thought, “Gee, anybody can write a better story than that.”

- Octavia Butler, Ibid.

The script - such as it is - focuses on the lives and interplay between the characters that, despite feeling stagebound and static, help give us people to relate to. The scene - and this is a single set movie which only makes the direction feel even more stagey - is a bed and breakfast in rural Scotland where Mr. and Mrs. Jamieson were getting ready to close for the season until their employee Doris’s boyfriend shows up on the lam. He was found guilty of murdering his wife, but we learn that her death was accidental, even if Albert was more or less responsible.

Then there’s the model, Ellen (Hazel Court), who’s just up from the city, escaping yet another relationship gone sour. Rounding out the guests are Professor Clark and Michael Hennessy come to the area to investigate a meteor fallen to earth. Tommy, a young boy, also lives with the Jamiesons and their other employee David (James Edmond who shows up twenty years later in Black Christmas!!!) is on hand briefly before Nyah zaps him into vapor.

in addition to Edmond and Court, other notable thespians on hand are John Laurie, who I think was born middle-aged (he played the crofter in Hitchock’s The 39 Steps twenty years earlier and still looked about the same age here), Adrienne Korri (Doris here, but whose extensive filmography includes Bunny Lake is Missing and yep, A Clockwork Orange - she plays Mrs. Armstrong who is violated by Malcolm McDowell’s Alex..she was also in Quo Vadis), and well, frankly, everyone has either a storied or at least, a decent career and you wonder what made them come to this property. 

It’s not too hard to guess. Britain was still emerging from the ruin of the Second World War, maybe some of the cast had downtime between other commitments, maybe the idea of being in a high-concept (stop laughing!) science fiction film seemed interesting. Who knows? But here we are.

Nyah is fascinating because she’s come to Earth to bring males suitable for mating with Martian women since all the men have died out and they haven’t developed in vitro technology. Now, I know that this might sound inane (okay, it is inane), but hear me out; essentially, Nyah’s attitude is that men are going to be necessary to breed more Martians and that they are basically livestock. Her contempt for everyone in the B and B is glorious. 

She doesn’t seem any more nicely disposed to the women, which is odd, but then, so is so much of this movie. Some have pointed out that there is a pretty progressive feminist text in this and that it presages the concept of FLR (female led relationships) as a possibility. 

However, that may be giving the script by John C. Mather and James Eastwood far more credit than it deserves. When you have a scientist opining that being a man of science, he can only trust what his eyes can see, your credibility as a writer of specutative fiction is severely diminished. This is Mather’s only credit, but Eastwood went on to pen quite a large number of other features and TV shows.

David MacDonald’s direction is, as mentioned, static and pretty damned boring, though credit for having the good sense to keep the spaceship at a distance and at least trust the actors to do the best they could with a crap script. Oh, and there’s quite the fist fight at one point. 

There are so many clunky moments where facepalming is the proper response. Ellen declaring her love for Michael before he attempts to sacrifice himself for the good of mankind (he fails in his subterfuge and endangers everyone else; Nyah’s not having that shit). The professor’s utter lack of understanding what being a scientist entails (“So there is a fourth dimension!”). The repeated prayers to the Deity by our pious innkeepers read as genuine expressions of salt of the earth rural folk and the screenwriters using it to mock the same. 

But through it all and above it all is Laffan. Her Nyah contains multitudes, most of whom when they’re not eyeing the earthlings with utter dismissal bordering on repulsion, she seems genuinely bemused by the thudding stupidity of their attempts to outwit her. Nor is she above cracking a smirk at different points, but mostly, you really do get the feeling she’s put out that her spaceship had to land in this backwater with these particular idiots (seriously, that the professor is her first exposure to humanity’s scientific minds had to be both a let-down and a relief.)

Of course, sad to say, owing to this being the 1950s, any sense of a progressive message or one where a woman comes out on top, even if she is more anti-hero (she’s not, except to me; she really is supposed to be a villain), is wiped out when Albert volunteers to risk his life and take out Nyah’s ship before she can vaporize the inn as punishment for Michael’s earlier attempt at sabotage. 

To be sure, her ship exploding isn’t too badly done. It’s a good bit of compositing. Even the spaceship itself is a B-movie precursor to the big ship in Close Encounters of the Third Kind (though it also looks like a Rubber Maid kitchen tool).

Lastly, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention one last member of the cast; Chani, Nyah’s rebot. Robby the Robot, he most assuredly ain’t. Nope. Chani is a large box with a dude in there somewhere moving with a less than feline grace. It’s a stupid design and I’m not saying that had Chani been more interesting looking that would have bumped the movie up a notch, but I am saying, fellas, at least you could have made some efffort, ya know?

I was charmed by this movie in the same way that I’m charmed when people make a really earnest to make a movie or when school kids mount a show. I would unreservedly recommend it for Laffan’s performance, particularly for how she stands out when juxtaposed against. the normies. Hell, I’d recommend it just as proof that even the British can whiff dramatically. (No, of course, there are plenty of examples, but I’m thinking that when it comes to acting, we tend to think of our British cousins as being consistently excellent; maybe even this doesn’t dispel that since the dialog is so wretched and stupid that Daniel Day Lewis couldn’t salvage anything here.)

I just realize that I’ve referenced some genuinely great films in trying to describe different aspects of Devil Girl from Mars. Close Encounters? Clockwork Orange? Black Christmas? Is this really just an unrecognized classic?

Nope, it’s not. Charming but charm only goes so far.

Humans, Chani. Chani, humans. Now that everyone’s been introduced, shall we get to exterminating?

Nyah is really thinking just how badly she needs a drink while dealing with these dunderheads.