I Married a Monster from Outer Space made its debut in a double feature with The Blob. Now, my cell phone ringtone is the very bouncy theme from The Blob, and I’ll cheerfully concede that film has some great images and one of the most endearing bits of awkward dialogue in cinema (“It doesn’t sound like a house. It sounds like a dog!”). But this is a case where the B-side is stronger and more thoughtful.
Gene Fowler Jr. was an accomplished editor—he worked with Fritz Lang, Samuel Fuller, and John Cassavetes—and while his directorial work is less heralded, having both this and I Was a Teenage Werewolf on his filmography means he deserves to be a star in some minor horror constellation. This is a smart, unsettling film that is at almost every point better than it technically needs to be.
Bill (Tom Tryon1) is having a boozy bachelor party the night before his wedding to Marge (Gloria Talbott), and though all his friends are bitching and moaning about the misogynist but heterosexual necessity of, ew, spending time and even marrying women in order to sleep with them—all telling Bill he’s locking himself in for a lifetime of misery—the film suggests that Bill actually likes Marge. He’s even ducking out of the He-Man Woman-Haters Club to see her tonight. It’s bad luck to see the bride right before the wedding, of course, so Bill is Good Samaritan-trapped, abducted, and replaced by an alien lookalike. This happens to all good single men, or so I’ve heard.
The new Bill marries Marge, but it doesn’t take her long to notice that he’s different now. There’s a strange distance between them. He pauses too long in conversations, like he has to dig up basic facts about himself. And he kills a puppy in their basement, so there are little signs like that as well.
Talbott does a good job evoking Marge’s nervy suspicions, easily carrying her into wide-eyed, Invaders of the Body Snatchers-style justified paranoia and then—in a more surprising move—into iron-willed refusal to care about the science fiction when this is, to her, only a horror story. It’s the last move that makes her more memorable than simply a well-evoked type: one of the most powerful and surprising things a female character can do in certain stories is not care. She will not rescue the new Bill. She does not give a shit that he’s come to have feelings for her. She’s not moved by his people’s suffering. She refuses, and in refusing so consistently, she forces the narrative to resolve into a horror movie’s happy ending.
Tryon, on the other hand, is playing the science fiction side of things. His side is equally gendered, but in a more unusual way: one of the bleak, bitter “jokes” here, and it’s a joke on everyone, is that you could argue the aliens make better husbands. They give up drinking. They don’t whine about hating their wives. They can be solicitous. They’re even good in bed.
The last can’t be on-screen—it was 1958—but even with that caveat, this is a horny movie, one that’s frank about sex to the point of cynicism. It dabbles a little in the idea that men want sex, and women yield to it, but we see multiple cases where that idea feels like deliberate “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” playacting, where it’s heavily implied the women are looking for a good time too and are just socially obligated to periodically demur.2 The aliens—all men, all seeking to reproduce due to a Mars Needs Women situation—are, to go with the Cold War overtones, like undercover KGB agents discovering they kind of like it in the West, actually. One of them—taking over the body of one of Bill’s friends and instantly making him propose to his long-term girlfriend—is positively gleeful about it. Sex is fun, and they can do it as often as they want.
But they can’t father children, at least not yet, which means Bill and Marge have been together for a year without stabilizing into a nuclear family. A little suspicious, don’t you think? A little un-American. This is so on the nose that the doctor who finally helps Marge rounds up a posse where each man is the newly expectant father of, to borrow from Scrubs, “yet another soldier in the fight against Communism.” Their guns will not avail them against the aliens, but their dogs can bite the aliens’ face-dicks off. You can’t go around having enjoyable marital sex without it going anywhere, guys. Not on this town’s watch!
This is the world the impostor-Bill exists in—conspiratorial, fraught, empowered but hidden. Tryon plays him with a spooky reserve of power, making both his indifference and his intensity inspire a certain kind of awe. He doesn’t argue with Marge calling him a monster, rewriting him as only horror, but he doesn’t exist only on those terms. He reaches out to her, tells her stories about himself, tries to communicate. He wants her to understand, as he’s come to, that there are alternate ways of being. When he’s dying—a magnificently, chunkily gooey process, and this is as good a place as any to note that the special effects here are quite effective in their low-key way—he tells her not to look, because he wants to believe she doesn’t want to, not really. He wants to believe it would matter to her to see him finally as a victim of horror, not a perpetrator of it.
There’s a tragic, warped love there, for all the good it does him, and it complicates the otherwise triumphant final moments. Everything is okay and normal again for Our People. We decided not to care about the others, and they’re leaving now. We have the men back. Everything is normal, and isn’t normal fine?
I Married a Monster from Outer Space is streaming on Kanopy.
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Lauren James
Lauren James is a writer who wears many different hats (and pen names). She lives in Connecticut with her wife and two cats.
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Streaming Shuffle
"There go those two unaccountable freaks."
Anthologized
Just imagine "Funeral March of a Marionette" playing for this wrap-up post of a somewhat uneven season.
Department of
Conversation
What did we watch?
Justified, Season Five, Episode Eight, “Whistle Past The Graveyard”
“You want me to parade around in front of your ex-wife?”
This show is the closest I’ve seen to any other show doing what Monster did, where they introduce characters long before explaining how they intersect with the main plot, which makes me inclined to think you guys would get it even if you, like me, would think it goes a bit far in this aspect.
Anyway, this was another good one for seeing Raylan be a smartass around dumb, overconfident crooks. He barely did anything this episode, which is so funny to me! Basically breaks up a fight. Seeing him try to reach out to Kendell is cute, though as Kendell keeps trying to tell him, he’s the worst guy to be trying that. At no point has Kendell ever respected him, and nothing good will come of that money.
Biggest Art Laugh: N/A
Biggest Non-Art Laugh: “We’re stealin’ a car now?” / “That wasn’t clear to you?”
Top Ownage: “You know what your deal is? You’re born to lose. Lose well for once. You might earn some respect.” Classic Raylan.
The kid playing Kendall is good as a certain kind of traumatized, world-weary teen utterly fed up with the adults around him, and not in a cute or precocious way (which is rare for TV and movies).
Yeah, it takes a lot of restraint to not make him likeable – like, he’s sympathetic even outside being a kid in a shitty situation, but he’s also kind of a dick.
Johnny O’Clock – Dick Powell is the title character, the manager of the sort of illegal gambling joint the cops leave alone as long as no one crosses any lines. But when a detective the owner of the club uses for dirty jobs goes too far, more-or-less honest cop Lee J, Cobb starts to poke around. And before long Johnny’s time is up. Robert Rossen wrote and directed this entertaining if occasionally clunky crime film, carried by the solid cast and a good script. But the relatively happy ending makes me say it isn’t entirely noir, as much as it wants to be.
Elementary, “Possibility Two” – A mogul has a (fictional) degenerative disease that is always hereditary, and is sure someone altered his body so he would get it. This is the first foray into pseudo-science fiction mysteries, with solutions that rely on things that might be possible, or might not be, and we will get this from time to time. Hardly the only contemporary mystery show that does that, and it doesn’t bother me, but also doesn’t do much for me. The entertainment here comes from Holmes showing his ability to think about just about anything, and working with Watson more closely as she adapts to being his apprentice. Dennis Boutsikaris plays the mogul.
I feel like Holmes adaptations and pastiches tend to veer into borderline SFF more than most classic detective updates, maybe because of his famous impossible/improbable line, which makes writers want to push at the realms of probability. But that leads to lessening one of the big pleasures of mysteries, which is getting at a logical, recognizably real solution, so if the story can’t compensate with a big enough sense of wonder or horror, it just sort of falls apart.
One of the things I liked about the first RDJ Holmes movie is that it spent a lot of its run time setting up an impossible (fantastical) mystery only to then show us that Holmes was onto the truth the whole time, and that it was merely improbable (if ahead of its time scientifically). Not how i would do a Holmes pastiche, but close enough.
Agatha Christie’s Seven Dials – I kinda forgot I still had one more episode of this to watch, which basically sums up my feelings about it. I’ve seen worse Christie adaptations but this one just feels extremely inessential. There are some simple crime-solvin’ pleasures to be found and the cast is fairly solid but it just kinda plods towards a conclusion without any real fireworks.
The Chair Company, S1E4 – My most acclaimed/popular poem* is probably the one I created out of spam messages I kept getting, so I felt a certain chill run down my spine when Ron receives the “survey” asking him (by name!) if he’s giving up. A flashback/present day episode that works, emphasizing how Ron’s obsessive tendencies aren’t anything new to his family and may affect them and his new pet interest. A sweet and sad balance found here of Ron being a flawed but supportive, loving husband and dad while also continually letting his obsessions get in the way of that happiness. The show also nails the very 2020’s energy of going down internet rabbit holes and finding possibly real, possibly not conspiracies. (The Epstein emails for instance emphasize that elite, wealthy people are very actively conspiring to change the world for the worse, but in tossed off, informal ways such as casual email inquiries about monetizing Call of Duty.)
*as in it got nominated for a famous prize a lot of poems get, to the extent that an article argued the nom doesn’t matter.
Crimewave – Filling a long overdue blind spot. There are so many footprints from this leading to other Raimi and Coen films. There is no real dramatic three-act structure; it’s all surface parody, a cartoonish film noir. It does show Raimi can direct, edit and juggle the balls that come with big budget Marvel fare, films where he does show more cohesive three act structure of conflict, sacrifice, resolution. For the Coens it’s a well they keep dipping in. The goofy naive hero – H.I., Norville Barnes, Everett and many more – start here with Vic Ajax. There is the cheating businessman, two killers, familiar names and situations. It’s all very raw before being sophisticated later on. Hudsucker feels kind of like a rewrite of this in someways. This was a slog but leads to a brighter future for the Coens and Raimi.
I’m really not sure why I haven’t seen this. I should see this!
I’ve been meaning to see it ever since I read King’s Danse Macabre back in high school, since it gets a reasonably positive review there, so I was happy to spot it on Kanopy. Obviously it paid off for me! I realize now that I left out one of my favorite quotes, which shows off that horror/SF split again in a good way, where Tryon’s character is talking about worldbuilding and Talbott’s is hearing about body horror and cuckoos in the nest:
“Eventually we’ll have children with you.”
“What kind of children?”
“Our kind.”
Woof, that’s creepy.
Excellent write-up, I remember this from Danse Macabre as well and it sounds quite unsettling. And a suggestion for an alternate ringtone (in particular that ominously bouncing bassline):
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Ag8hU1PTnUo&pp=0gcJCVACo7VqN5tD
Thank you! And oh, great choice. I should somehow set my ringtone up to switch partway through the day to make a double-feature out of it.
Haha, this is the sort of thing that makes me understand what people mean when they say straight culture is so fucked up. I mean, I never got it, but I actually like women. It’s a bunch of Enos Frys browbeaten into submission.