With a title this corny, I was expecting a lot of laughs, a fun B-movie with Ed Wood-style film-making. Well, I got them, but that mostly in the beginning. The bulk of the film is quite serious and holds up pretty well, even today.
The best lines, in the opening segments, come from "Marge" (Gloria Talbott), the one I quoted for the subject head. She said that on her wedding night at the restaurant, since her new husband seemed to be ignoring her. You see, her hubby had already been taken over by an extra-terrestrial being the night before. He just wasn't himself after that.....but who knew? Unfortunately, nobody for quite awhile in this story, which made life rough for poor "Marge Ferrell."
The lines in this film weren't just corny. Some of them were downright funny. At the guy's bachelor party, which began the show, the men had some humorous lines about marriage and freedom, and later in the show there are a couple of funny scenes. Later one of Marge friends acts goofy and remarks, "I just love to rehearse for weddings, especially when they are my own!" However, the story begins to get serious after the first 10-15 minutes and gets more and more so after Marge follows her husband one night and sees her odd-acting husband is not the man she thought she married. Laser beams and a spaceship will do that to you! From that point, it becomes a very familiar story for fans of sci-fi: something we've seen in a lot of films the past 50 years - aliens transform into humans and one that hasn't gets burned by family and friends she trusts because she doesn't realize they, too, have also turned into aliens.
In other words, this has a lot of "Invasion Of The Body Snatchers" type of paranoia story, just without the pods. "Invasion" was released two years earlier than this in 1956. Hollywood, lacking imaginative writers the past few decades, continues to make films with the same storyline as you see here., but this one can be excused because it was still fairly early in the genre.
Thanks to the actors here, and a few different twists, the movie keeps your attention. The only frustration is to see a person telling the truth and not being believed. Talbott, to me, was a familiar face because she acted in many television shows in the 1960s while Tyron, who got some hype for starring in "The Cardinal," a big-name film that bombed at the box office, wound up being a better writer than an actor. But when it comes to '50s sci-fi films, great acting isn't a requirement anyway, and most of us don't watch it for that.
Overall, this is pretty good, nothing super but certainly worth a look now that there is a good DVD transfer of it available. Yes, it is far better than the stupid title but still: don't take it too seriously - just have fun with it.
Note: the police captain was played by John Eldredge, a regular guest on "The Adventures Of Superman," in which he almost always played a villain. Also ex-boxer Maxie Rosenbloom is his normal entertaining self in here, playing, as usual, a bartender.
