Saturday, April 25, 2009

I Married a Monster from Outer Space!

More nice weather means more brief posting. However, TCM are airing the fun 1950s B-scifi movie I Married a Monster From Outer Space at 5:00 PM ET today. The title is actually accurate: a woman (Gloria Talbott) gets married to a man (Tom Tryon) and then finds that her new husband is acting much more strangely than when he was her fiancé. One night, she follows him, and discovers that he's walking to an alien spaceship hidden away in the woods outside of town! Apparently, he, and several other of the town's men, have been taken over by space aliens.

If that's not bad enough, it gets more fun: the aliens are from a dying world that has lost all its women, so the men are looking for a new species whom they can make fertile. The only thing is, they haven't been able to work out a way to impregnate human females yet. So, the men end up sexless (another reason Talbott suspects something is wrong with her husband) and generally unpleasant to be around. But, God knows the men are working on solving the problem, and that if they do, there will be dire consequences for the people of Earth! Worse, Talbott isn't quite sure whom she can trust. After all, the aliens have taken over human bodies and, like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, look indistinguishable from humans on the outside.

This sort of story mandates that human ingenuity wins out in the end, but I won't give away the ending by mentioning exactly how it happens. Suffice it to say that I Married a Monster From Outer Space is one of those movies that's so lousy it's a lot of fun. The acting is uniformly wooden, and the plot ludicrous. But so what? It's still highly entertaining, as long as you're not expecting any masterpiece. I Married a Monster From Outer Space was released on DVD several years ago, but is listed as being out of print.

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