Devil Girl From Mars

The men of Mars are subjugated. Crunched in the war of the sexes, they are under the thumb, emasculated and impotent. Now the women of Mars need new men who can get it up. Nyah (Patricia Laffan) travels to Earth, specifically 1950s London, to rectify the situation. If she had made it there, Devil Girl From Mars would have carried on to be a bawdy British sex comedy. Hey boy, you're cute, wanna come to Mars, escape bombed out London, rationing and your dad's PTSD? All you have to do is shag some sexy Martian women. She doesn't make it. Her flying saucer has to make a emergency landing somewhere west of Aberfoyle.

This is where the film begins, a quiet guest house one signpost away from Loch Dhu. It is a somewhat cliched setup for the time, a group of disparate people stuck together in one location grating on each others emotions. There are the guest house owners (John Laurie and Sophie Stewart), a professor (Joseph Tomelty), a fashion model (Hazel Court), a barmaid (Adrienne Corri), her escaped convict boyfriend (Peter Reynolds), and an alcoholic journalist (Hugh McDermott). In addition there is a kid (Anthony Richmond) sleeping upstairs, and a creepy handyman (James Edmond). The machinations of these characters could have filled a whole film or stage play. But just as the journalist is about to expose the convicted murderer: crash, blinding light.

Nyah strides out, not just from her flying saucer, but from the pages of John Willie's Bizarre. As the PVC clad dominatrix, Laffan takes control of every scene. The stagey acting and techniques of the day, crosses straight, curved, downstage, upstage are all overpowered by Laffan's presence. Her costume draws the eye away from anything mundane. Her performance is flat and matter of fact with the occasional sneer: sexual, cruel, subtler than the sly sensual sadism of Poppaea in Quo Vadis. Toned down as it is, it still dominates.

Most stories have a beginning, a middle and an end. Not Devil Girl From Mars. There is a gap where the middle should be. There is dialogue, characters move around the guest house's bar, but the narrative is mostly non-existent. There are other problems but they are often counterpointed in this mixed bag of a film. From the point of view of sets and props Nyah's robot looks ridiculous, but her flying saucer looks good. Shots of it's interior pretty definitely make it into the Star Wars trilogy as does her proto-Vader costume. Some of the special effects look ropy but others, like the final explosion, look really good. Sometimes the lighting and cinematography are pedestrian, other times they are brilliant.

Part of the charm of Devil Girl From Mars is how seriously the movie takes itself. It doesn't play for laughs or for campness. It has camp value now but that would not work if it had been played that way back then. It isn't without humour. When the pervy handyman is vapourised all that is left behind is a pair of smoking spectacles. Any attempt to make a smutty farce will be met with extreme violence.

What makes Devil Girl From Mars different from other alien invasion movies of the period is the fears that it is addressing. For some, like The Thing From Another World, it was the fear of Communism. For others, like The Day The Earth Stood Still, it was nuclear holocaust. In Devil Girl From Mars it's the loss of male status post World War Two. During the World Wars huge numbers of men were sent to the front. Women then had to do their jobs. Women were gaining wealth, assets, skills and political power. Men were being killed. Many of those who came back from the front came back crippled both physically and, like the alcoholic journalist, mentally. It's the fear of social change.