A.k.a. Night Caller From Outer Space, Blood Beast From Outer Space
D: John Gilling. S: Jim O’Connolly. Novel: Frank Crisp. P: Ronald Liles. Cast: John Saxon, Patricia Haines,Maurice Denham, Alfred Burke, John Carson, Aubrey Morris, Jack Watson, Warren Mitchell. UK dist (DVD): Renown Productions Ltd.
Fortysomething genre fans will likely drool at the prospect of a night in with a British SF thriller from the mid-1960s, rightly expecting – and deserving – a rollicking good time. By the close of this effort, they may have cause to revise those expectations. The Night Caller begins and ends atrociously, though what happens in between is not wholly without interest. On the face of it, it’s a natural winner: shot in no-nonsense black-and-white, with a Global Threat, Concerned Scientists and a Thing-On-The-Loose. What’s not to like? Well, quite a bit, unfortunately, but we’ll get to that.
We open on a static three-shot of boffins Maurice Denham, John Saxon and Patricia Haines all gathered round a TV monitor, earnestly describing to each other what they’re watching: a large asteroid-like object approaching the Earth at high speed, and apparently landing somewhere nearby. (The audience is permitted to see none of this, and must be content with a leaden audio description.) After this electrifying opening, The Night Caller launches into a jaw-dropping title song crooning all about, you guessed it, The Night Caller.* By this stage, the fortysomething genre fan has begun grimly to reconsider his choices. But then, quite unexpectedly, The Night Caller bucks up its ideas and starts actually showing us what’s happening, instead of just telling us about it. Boffins and Army rush to the site where the object landed and are surprised to find that (a) it’s much smaller than predicted (about the size of a football), (b) its radiation levels are perfectly safe (meaning everyone can squat down around it and ponder without their skin peeling off) and (c) it’s freezing cold. Oh, and (d): there’s no impact crater, meaning the thing was guided to earth by an outside intelligence. Hmm.
They convey the alien meteoroid to the research lab, where almost at once things start to go wrong. Ann (Haines) is left alone in the lab to finish her typing, with the artefact in a store-room next door. Suddenly it begins to pulsate with light, sending blinding waves of pain through her head. She staggers to the store-room door – but a Monstrous Alien Claw tries to grab her from inside! The plucky lass hits the alarm bell, bringing everyone running; by the time they get there, there’s no sign of the creature. Sexist Army Captain John Carson tries to convince her the whole thing was a nightmare brought on by a migraine, but Ann’s having none of it. Dr Morley (Denham) decides to approach the matter scientifically, i.e. by recklessly endangering his life in the interests of curiosity. He locks himself away with the asteroid and waits for it to activate again – which it does, with tragic consequences. When the others respond to his agonised cries, they find him dead in his chair – and a Monstrous Alien Claw-print on the pavement outside. An alien thing is loose in the camp; and the first thing it does is nick somebody’s Jag and tear off into the night, running down poor Captain Carson in the process.
Clunk, grind. That’s the sound of the story switching gears: for now we turn our attention to the investigations of Police Superintendent Hartley (Alfred Burke, soon to become a household name with his role as private eye Frank Marker in TV’s long-running Public Eye), on the trail of a sinister abductor of young ladies. Fifteen have vanished so far, apparently after answering an ad in the back pages of “Bikini Girl” magazine. Viewers intimately familiar with tawdry crap will have immediately surmised that the “alien on the loose” and “missing girl” threads are linked: yes, it turns out that the clawed thing is an emissary from Ganymede (Jupiter’s third moon), beamed to earth by matter transmitter (the meteoroid) and looking for solid breeding stock to repopulate his dying world, ravaged by atomic war generations ago. (One half of The Night Caller’s face is “normal” – well, in an Oddbod Junior sort of way – while the other half looks like Ken Dodd after a firework mishap.) Plucky Ann decides to go undercover by responding to one of the kidnapper’s ads…but again, tragedy strikes. The alien has rumbled her ploy, and – in a genuinely shocking moment, presumably patterned after Psycho – kills Ann by slashing her bloodily across the face and throttling her.
It’s a bold move, but it also kills the film. The decision to end on a bleak and cynical downer leaves a sour taste, plus a gaping void in place of an ending. After stealing our tottie, killing the heroine and sundry other victims, The Night Caller simply goes home (presumably to get down to some serious shagging), leaving useless “hero” John Saxon gaping in astonishment – not unlike audiences in 1965, one imagines. Saxon’s character, incidentally, is entirely surplus to requirements, contributing nothing whatever to the forward momentum of the plot; he’s required merely to stand around, act concerned and be American. Thanks to combined indifference in writing and performance, he appears to treat Ann’s death as a tiresome inconvenience (as if someone had burned a piece of toast he’d been quite looking forward to) – this failure of humanity, topped by a corny Klaatu-ish lecture about atomic proliferation, leaves the viewer (this one, at least) impatient and annoyed. Pity, since The Night Caller boasts some worthy character vignettes from the likes of Aubrey Morris (as an oily smut peddler of indeterminate persuasion), Ballard Berkeley (Fawlty Towers’ Major Gowen), Jack Watson (as another shouty Army Sarge) and, most memorably, Warren Mitchell and Marianne Stone (as the concerned parents of one of the abducted girls; filling in each others’ sentences, mildly bickering, theirs is a quietly endearing portrait of married life). These are clearly what interests Gilling, not the rapist-from-outer-space stuff. With a little more effort at the writing stage, The Night Caller might have emerged as something rather more than a wasted opportunity.
*At least, it does on the US version presented on Renown’s region 2 DVD. The original UK release used an instrumental cue, “Image”, by Alan Haven; sadly, this (superior) track is not included as an extra. Renown’s disc is bare-bones, unless you consider a poorly-colourised version of the main feature as a “bonus”.