I gave this a 7, mainly because it was my favorite movie at seven years old. I was a fifties movie nut and we lived a couple blocks away from two theatres in my small Wisconsin hometown. My dad was gone most of the week away in Madison and I guess I would hound my mom to let me go to movies all the time, probably starting around six. She would relent but only if I would be home by nine. My friends and I liked to check out all the cool movie posters in front and in the nooks of the entrance ways of the theatres. We would spend hours spinning stories about the sci fi and horror and westerns and war movies especially but all really. It's just that those were the majority of flicks playing there. I was the only one who invariably got to check out the veracity of our storytelling. Oh, and double features were the name of the game at both the Time and The Palace. One standout duo of posters for us was NOTE and Attack of the Crab Monsters. Now most times I would miss much of the B feature (second, that is), creating obsessions for life. This time I just rebelled and stayed for both, probably getting a good spanking that Friday night when my dad got home from Madison. Man was it worth it. These two flicks are still personal favorites and I have no reservations recommending them if you can put aside modern ironic cynicism and try to imagine what a kid living in the 1950's would have experienced. Unless you are like me, an aging dreamer and can still separate yourself from this, let's say, less than scintillating time, although I'm still having fun, that may be pretty hard to do. In that case think of NOTE as a kind of surreal day=mare or a minimalist cinema haiku. I'm rambling and not being direct but I hate plot spoiling and this one is a humdinger. Plus it's got the coolest Beverly Garland performance and she was the underrated queen of fifties B cinema. And Jonathan Haze is hys-ter-ical!!! Paul Birch is chilling, and for some reason, I must have had friends who fenagled their way to this one because they nicknamed the movie white eyes and I think that was pretty clever and apt of us. Succinct. The legendary Paul Blaisdell, while lambasted by some, once again, if you can suspend a little disbelief and just embrace it as an alien created instant improv monster (just add water, like one astronaut said to the other holding the powdered water packet), it is ******* awesome. Put your 50's flashback glasses on and you will enjoy. Roger had nothing to be ashamed of, even if Paul Birch was replaced by a noticeable substitute in some scenes. Now where's the biopic about the making of this oddly obscure gem? The worst part of moving when I was eight was losing those two theatres down the street, at least, second worst, after all my many friends in that small Wisconsin town.
Review of Not of This Earth
