The Movie:

Directed by Terence Fisher for Lippert Films in 1964 during a hiatus for his work with Hammer Films, The Earth Dies Screaming opens up with an ominous scene. Here an American pilot named Jeff Nolan (Willard Parker) returns from his latest adventure to a small English country village, corpses are scattered about the ground. He walks the streets silently, surveying the bodies and noticing the damage: cars having crashes into poles, bodies just lying in the middle of the road. It's a creepy set piece that grabs you right away and makes you, like Nolan, wonder just what exactly is going on here.

Noland winds up taking solace in the local pub where a few other stragglers eventually wind up: Peggy (Virginia Field), Edgar Otis (Thorley Walters), Quinn Taggart (Dennis Price), Violet Courtland (Vanda Goodsell), Mel (David Spenser) and his pregnant wife Lorna (Anna Palk). They talk, for quite a while actually, about what might actually be happening around them. Once that's out of the way with, they spy some men clad in silver outfits wearing helmets prowling about outside. Violet mistakes them for air force men and assumes that they are there to offer assistance, but after she runs out to greet them they knock her down, dead. At least temporarily. Soon enough, she and a few of the other nearby corpses rise and begin to walk about under their own power, their eyes covered in white and their movements jerky and awkward… something has gone horribly wrong here.

Written by Harry Spalding of Witchcraft and The Curse of the Fly fame, this sixty-two minute (yes, that's right… this feature runs sixty-two minutes) actually has some pacing problems. The movie starts off wonderfully. We know from the start that something bad has happened but we don't know exactly what or how widespread the problem might be. Is Nolan the last man on earth? It starts off that way, but no, once he finds the others they just sort of hang out in the pub and bicker a fair bit. It gets too talk for too long, and when your movie runs just over an hour, that's a problem. Thankfully once we get that over and done with, things pick up again. Once the robots appear, we're off and running and any time that they are on screen the movie kicks along nicely. Granted, it's obvious that it's just a few men puttering about in silvery suits with helmets on rather than actual mechanical begins but they're pretty neat looking and once we zoom in on their ‘faces' even a little eerie, especially as they peer in through windows to scope out what our survivors are up to.

As to the cast, Dennis Price's character has the most energy here. You could argue that his character is gay, but that doesn't really wind up affecting the story much at all, it's really just there in some of his mannerisms and characterizations, but Price is at least fun to watch. The newlyweds played by Spenser and Palk are okay. She's cute and he's kind of just constantly cranky, not much fun to be around honestly. Virginia Field is a little vacant in her part and Thorley Walters plays the sort of posh, bumbly type that he would play time and again in other films. These British character actors are all fine, they bring some quirk to the picture. The main problem here is Parker, the guy just doesn't have any real charisma, at least not enough to carry the picture. He looks the part well enough, he's sturdy and tough looking, we have no trouble buying him as a hero or an experienced test pilot based on his appearance. But his acting is flat, it's one note, and it's just not particularly memorable.

Thankfully the movie looks really good. The cinematography, especially in that iconic opening scene, is quite slick and much better than a lot of other low budget genre pictures made around this time. The lighting is nice and the camera angles employed throughout the film are quite effective. The score is also really cool, it gets under your skin a bit and works on a similar level to the library much used in Carnival Of Souls. There's a lot to like about this film if you've got a soft spot for killer robots or walking corpses. It's far from Fisher's best film and certainly not the first title that comes to mind when discussing his work but aside from that plodding middle half, it's entertaining enough.

Video:

The previous DVD release that came out via MGM's Midnite Movies series (where it was paired with Chosen Survivors) looked quite nice but this AVC encoded 1080p high definition transfer framed at 1.66.1 widescreen is a noticeable upgrade. Detail and texture get nice boosts here over the standard definition presentation. You see this not just in close up shots but in medium and long distance shots as well, you can even notice little scuffs on the helmets worn by the robots that didn't stand out before. Contrast looks quite good here and black levels are pretty strong too. There is a bit of minor print damage here and there, really just small white specks rather than large or glaring scatches, but the picture is generally nice and clean. A natural amount of film grain is obvious throughout the movie but never to the point of distraction. The transfer is free of any obvious compression artifacting and there's no evidence at all of any noise reduction or edge enhancement, so expect a good amount of film grain. All in all, this is a pretty solid looking disc, it's nice and film-like.