I Married a Monster from Outer Space on DVD

The title tells you a lot about what's in this movie, but doesn’t hint at just how good it is. In fact, while the title IMAMFOS makes this appear to be yet another schlocky 1950’s sci-fi outings, the movie is actually an intelligent and very entertaining sci-fi outing.

Gloria Talbott stars with Tom Tryon in this “body snatching” story about a woman whose new husband suddenly starts acting strangely distant, setting off alarm bells in her mind that lead to her ferreting out the truth. Hubby won’t perform his “husbandly duty,” he takes off on her, and animals are freaked out by him just getting near.

Sounds like life in my house, except for the “husbandly duty part,” but in this case hubby isn’t just a deadbeat: he’s been taken over by a race of invading aliens, representatives of whom are slipping unnoticed into American society, kidnapping male citizens and using mannequins that look just like them to take their victims’ places.

You see, all the females from the aliens’ planet have died as a result of radiation emitted by their planet’s star, which means their race is in danger of dying out. The remaining male aliens, or at least as many as have been sent to Earth, want to impregnate human women after changing them so they’ll give birth to purely alien babies rather than the hybrids one would expect from such a union.

Marge (Talbott) also begins to notice that her hubby isn’t the only male to start acting strangely (no slight meant about their thespian skills!), not merely because after she witnesses her “husband” abandoning his shell and revealing his truly monstrous true self, she tries to sound the alarm and is treated like a silly, delusional woman. Even when she tries to convince someone who hasn’t been co-opted by the Monsters from Outer Space she’s treated like a silly, delusional woman – but one whose story should at least be checked out.

This leads to the inevitable conflict between the humans and the aliens, and we won’t spoil the fun by telling you how it works out.

This is really a neat movie. The characters are believable (even the aliens, kind of) and the writing is far more intelligent than you’d expect from the lurid title. It takes its subject matter seriously, yet has a sense of humor as well. And the script does a very nice job of getting inside Marge’s mind, clearly showing us how unsettling it is for Marge when her “alienized” husband starts coming on to her in the same way she expected and wanted her real husband to do – except that now can’t stand the thought of this facsimile even touching her, for obvious reasons.

This movie deserves to be remembered with the better of the 1950’s sci-fi/horror movies such as “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” “Them!” and “Invaders from Mars.”

The DVD is sparse so far as extras are concerned (there are none), but as a DVD it gives us a very nice presentation of the movie. The black and white picture is presented in anamorphic widescreen (16x9 TV compatible) and for the most part the picture is nice and sharp and detailed. There are several shots that are so grainy they stick out like a sore thumb, but they’re the exception rather than the rule.

Audio is unremarkable, which isn’t surprising. It’s strictly mono and I found it a tad low, but it’s okay.

It’s too bad they stuck such a “low class” title on this movie, because it really deserves to be taken seriously. At least you can now own it for yourself and give it the place of prominence it deserves in your video library.

I Married a Monster from Outer Space, from Paramount Home Entertainment
77 min. anamorphic widescreen (1.85:1, 16x9 TV compatible), Dolby Digital mono
Starring Gloria Talbott, Tom Tryon, Peter Baldwin, Robert Ivers
Produced by Gene Fowler, Jr.
Written by Louis Vittes, directed by Gene Fowler, Jr.

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