Damn, you simply have got to love these glorious paranoiac Sci-Fi/horror productions of the 60's. Not only because they have the most appealing sounding titles in cinema, but also because they don't ever waste a single moment of playtime and come straight to the confronting point. "The Earth Dies Screaming" opens with a frightening series of disastrous accidents, like a train crash, multiple car crashes, a plane crash and ordinary people dropping dead in the streets. I know we have seen this before in other movies (like "Day of the Triffids" or "Village of the Damned"), but it remains thrilling to observe. Hundreds, thousands, millions of casualties and not a single word of dialog has even been spoken yet! I realize it's an often abused expression but
they really don't make movies like these anymore nowadays! On with the story, a small group of survivors painfully come to realize alien robots targeted the entire earth's population for extermination, and nearly succeeded as well. The menace of prowling aliens is constant and needless to say the stressful situation also causes conflicts and hatred between the few remaining survivors. The concept loses quite a bit of its fantastic impact once the enemy has been identified and declared invincible, but the escalating interactions between the protagonists sustain the tension more than enough to keep you close to the screen. The always-reliable director Terence Fisher adds even more flair to an already astonishing film and never once loses his grip on the subject matter. "The Earth Dies Screaming" isn't the most startling Sci-Fi slash Horror highlight of that period, but it's undoubtedly a masterful achievement and one of the films that helped to define a cinematic era.
