I Married A Monster From Outer Space Review

I Married A Monster From Outer Space
Bill Farrell is waylaid and replaced by an alien who assumes his form and turns up at his wedding. Marge, Bill’s new bride, begins to suspect her husband isn’t the man he used to be. A small group of shapeshifting aliens are on Earth to mate with human wo

by Kim Newman |
Published on
Release Date:

01 Oct 1958

Running Time:

78 minutes

Certificate:

U

Original Title:

I Married A Monster From Outer Space

This has a classic tabloid headline title, but is a quieter, creepier picture than its lurid poster suggests. It’s mostly a portrait of a severely troubled marriage, with Gloria Talbott wondering why her blankly handsome husband (Tom Tryon, deliberately playing a stiff) no longer responds to her, even as the alien duplicate tries to overcome unexpected emotions he has picked up along with human form. It plays the Invasion of the Body Snatchers game as aliens take over a town, by replacing the Sheriff, the telephone operator and other authority figures, but is unusually interested in the problems the aliens have on Earth.

       An amusing, almost-melancholy sub-plot finds the disappointed replacement husbands, none of whom are having any luck impregnating Earth women, sneaking out of their homes to commiserate in a bar, though they show themselves up as inhuman by not touching their drinks. Director Gene Fowler Jr, who made the similarly-titled I Was a Teenage Werewolf, has a knack for staging noirish, unsettling scenes – the biggest scare in the movie is a simple, unexpected bit of business as Tryon is staring out of the window at a storm when a lightning-strike shocks him into briefly showing his true (remarkably alien) form before recovering his crewcut all-American composure. Despite their perfidies (which include killing cats and a puppy), the aliens eventually seem surprisingly sympathetic, which gives the final attack by the townsfolk on their flying saucer something of a lynch mob feel.

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