D: Terence Fisher. S: Henry Cross [Harry Spalding]. P: Robert L. Lippert, Jack Parsons. Cast: Willard Parker, Virginia Field, Dennis Price, Thorley Walters. UK dist (DVD): Final Cut Entertainment.

Here’s a pleasant little oddity: at barely over an hour in length, The Earth Dies Screaming (what a title!) plays very much like the pilot episode of a TV series that never got made, with an amalgam of styles between Village of the Damned (looting John Wyndham’s novel for the opening set-up, and Wolf Rilla’s 1960 film for its plane-crash footage) and The Outer Limits (whose elegant monochrome lensing [by Conrad Hall] is a nice match for the work here by Arthur Lavis). The resultant film is hardly avant-garde, but it delivers the goods as a taut second feature in a double-bill fans can programme in the comfort of their own homes.

It’s brisk, no-nonsense fare right from the word go, as we enter the film in medias res: a fast montage of people dropping down dead and plunging at high speed into walls/buildings/terra firma as their vehicles veer out of control. Then, a montage of silent streets and deserted village roads, decorated by the occasional corpse. In the midst of this eerie tableau, a Land Rover drives into shot. The driver — a rugged, two-fisted type of advanced years — climbs out, carrying a rifle, and looks around purposefully. (“Ah,” you nod sagely, “the imported American star,” and you’d be right: it’s Willard Parker, straight off the Forrest Tucker Replacement assembly-line.) A full reel in, and nary a word of dialogue; it’s quietly gripping stuff.  But the film can’t afford to keep up this strong, silent treatment — Christ, a sixth of the film has rattled through the projector already! We need plot! Characters! Action!

And we get ’em. The Earth Dies Screaming develops quickly into a pretty standard Group Jeopardy scenario, with hunky Willard Parker joined by a bunch of testy-yet-demographically-rich Brits: haughty cad Dennis Price, flaky pisshead Thorley Walters, and a few others to keep up the numbers (young rebel kicking – rather politely – against the establishment; his pregnant girlfriend; Dependable Earth Mother-type, and so on). And what’s the nature of the jeopardy, you wonder? Quick, duck down behind the window — there they are outside, clunking along in the street…faceless, space-suited Alien Robots who can kill with a touch of their outstretched hand! (It’s worth  noting here that Doctor Who producers must have seen and  enjoyed Screaming a good deal, as they plundered its trappings for two separate serials: the Pertwee-era “Ambassadors of Death”, featuring  faceless space-suited invaders who can kill with a touch, and  Tom Baker’s “The Android Invasion” in which faceless  space-suited androids…well, you get the idea.)

It seems anybody who wasn’t sealed inside some kind of airtight chamber when the aliens attacked has been killed outright by toxic gas, which (luckily for the survivors) disperses almost immediately. Now England — and perhaps, the rest of the world — is at the mercy of the invaders’ killer robots, who patrol the streets mopping up resistance. All radio and TV signals are being jammed by a strange alien wavelength — could this be the signal which powers the robots, too? If only they can find a way to locate the source of the transmission and knock it out… But they’ll have to look smart, ’cause their problems have just got much worse: the aliens, you see, also have the power to reanimate the dead…

With lots going on and no time to get bored, The Earth Dies Screaming is British genre filmmaking on near-top form. Hugely atmospheric, with the unexpectedly classy benefit of an Elizabeth Lutyens score, the film makes fine use of its Surrey locations and rattles along at a fair lick. Handling the first of three science fiction thrillers – he followed this 1964 Lippert show with Island of Terror (1966) and Night of the Big Heat (1967), both for the short-lived Planet Film Productions – director Terence Fisher proves himself equally at home in a pacey modern idiom as in Hammer’s more measured Gothic horrors. It’s not perfect: demerits are (very) poor visual effects for the robot-touch-of-death and a howlingly-bad stuffed manikin being run down by Willard Parker’s car, but in all other respects the film succeeds in disguising its low, low budget fairly well. The zombie angle is chillingly effective, planting the film somewhere between Plan 9 From Outer Space (minus the mirth) and Night of the Living Dead (minus the guts). Unusually, the film ends on a cliffhanger: we never find out exactly who is behind the invasion, and the credits roll as our heroes race to the airport for Willard to fly them to foreign climes, in search of other survivors. (Bizarrely, his choice dictated presumably by stock-footage availability, Willard opts to fly his party of five to safety in a Boeing jet airliner.)

The Earth Dies Screaming belongs to a tradition that plays on the deep-rooted British fear of change, of disruption to comfortable, age-old routines: the campfire tales of Middle England, where the familiar trappings of English life (hotel snugs, cosy hostelries, crackling hearths and open countryside) are turned on their heads and become suddenly, inexplicably threatening. Its chief proponents on the page are (of course) John Wyndham, John Christopher and (at the more outré end of the spectrum) J.G. Ballard; while on film and TV, the trope has been intermittently popular in the likes of Devil Girl From Mars (1954), Fisher’s aforementioned Island of Terror and Night of the Big Heat, and every other episode of Doctor Who, where sleepy villages have been the testing-ground for innumerable alien invasions (especially during the mid-Sixties to late Seventies, times of turbulent socio-economic change). It may lack the scale of Triffids, or the psychosexual strangeness of Ballard, but The Earth Dies Screaming is a modestly-impressive addition to the cycle that should keep apocalypse fans more than happy.