If you sucked all the grandeur and excitement and great acting out of "The Day The Earth Stood Still", you'd essentially end up with "Devil Girl From Mars", are you with me? (Or just take out the big budget and you'd have the "Quatermass" serials...still really good.)
Now, take "Devil Girl" (or Quatermass) and remove the special effects, the cool costumes, the sense of menace, and the action scenes. Throw in Patricia O'Neal, but make sure she sleepwalks though her part. Potentially fairly awful, but someone like Theodore Sturgeon could still do something very interesting with it.
Now carefully stage each and every scene and exchange of dialog so that it drags on endlessly. Dose the results with Dramamine, and you've got something like this movie, a talky, static, dull little set piece that thinks it's being classy and cerebral, but really just marches in place without doing anything of interest.
I realize that even in British cinema, they can't all be gems...but it always surprises me when a Brit film studio releases something like this.
Now, take "Devil Girl" (or Quatermass) and remove the special effects, the cool costumes, the sense of menace, and the action scenes. Throw in Patricia O'Neal, but make sure she sleepwalks though her part. Potentially fairly awful, but someone like Theodore Sturgeon could still do something very interesting with it.
Now carefully stage each and every scene and exchange of dialog so that it drags on endlessly. Dose the results with Dramamine, and you've got something like this movie, a talky, static, dull little set piece that thinks it's being classy and cerebral, but really just marches in place without doing anything of interest.
I realize that even in British cinema, they can't all be gems...but it always surprises me when a Brit film studio releases something like this.