I Married a B Movie

Last night, after sitting through the star-studded, bloated, literal circus melodrama of Cecil B. DeMille epic The Greatest Show on Earth (1952), I decided to cleanse my cinematic palette with something low-budget and decided on the titillatingly titled I Married a Monster from Outer Space (1958). Greatest Show may have won Best Picture, but for my money, IMMFOS was more fun to watch.

IMMFOS was originally created by Paramount to be the top-billed flick in a horror double-feature with The Blob. Color film and a new actor named Steve McQueen quickly flipped that billing, and IMMFOS would wind-up on the historical backend of drive-in theater fare. But there are some intriguing touches that elevate this B movie to at least a B+.

IMMFOS uses the post-Invasion of the Body Snatchers red scare device where alien invaders don't make a big show of their arrival with giant flying saucers and death rays. Instead, they take over the bodies of our friends and neighbors and plot a takeover from within.

Whereas Body Snatchers' pod people were indiscriminate in the sex of who they took over, IMMFOS gives the genre a gender-twist. Only the men of bucolic Norrisville are victims of the alien body switch. This leaves women in the position of having to discover the intergalactic plot- well, one woman anyway.

Marge (the wide-eyed Gloria Talbott) is confused why her betrothed Bill (the luscious Tom Tryon) is late to the altar. It's just not like him. The awkward way he navigates the honeymoon night might have set-off alarm bells too, but Bill is hot, so it's assumed Marge overlooked it.

A year later, though, she's concerned about how Tom has stopped drinking, sets off dogs whenever he comes near, and there is no bun in her oven. The answer that he's been taken over by a race of aliens doesn't occur to her until she follows him into the woods one night and watches him get a methane recharge.

At this point the film plays with the trope that Female Gothic Films have well-trod: a woman is trapped in a marriage with a husband she doesn't know and has to fight society's stigma that she is crazy for thinking that marriage is not all that it's cracked up to be. Women's issues are an area that sci-fi/horror films didn't often cover with notable exceptions like Attack of the 50 Foot Woman (which came out the same year), so it's intriguing to see it handled so blatantly here.

Marriage is made fun of by all the men as a freedom-killer, and for women, marriage is a danger not only to them- but to the world. Even the fact that it's an all-male alien invasion force hints at a pre-Stonewall society of dudes who don't need dames except for species survival purposes. Fun stuff for 1958!

The movie looks like it's shot on the backlots of TV studios (because it was), but the effects work of John P. Fulton (of Hitchcock and Ten Commandments fame) is really a hoot!

Talbott is appropriately terrified (she excelled playing a bitch of a daughter in All That Heaven Allows) and Tom Tryon is eye-catching (yes, he was a big ol' mo who would wind-up dating a cast member from A Chorus Line and a porn star.)

Tab Hunter competitor Ty Hardin appears handsomely under the name Ty Hungerford (which is a step-up from his birth name, Orison Whipple Hungerford, Jr.). "God he was everywhere on TV and in the movies in the Fifties and Sixties" actor Ken Lynch gives the town doctor his distinctive brand of earnest go-getter-ness. And even pugilist, turned actor, turned restauranteur "Slapsie" Maxie has a couple scenes.

So go marry a space monster. It's better than being in a circus.