THE JOHN SAXON BLOGATHON: Night Caller from Outer Space (John Gilling, 1965) [for 6th to 8th December, 2024]

Look, I'm just fashionably late, as per, okay?

So there I was peeking in at Xitter after having taken a long hiatus both from social media and quite frankly the world, when I espied amidst my many notifications (actually, cards on the table, there were fewer missed notifications than I expected; I was clearly not as missed as I'd liked to imagine.  Boy, is my ego bruised) a Tweet - or Xeet or whatever they're called now - putting out the word that another Blogathon was underway care of Barry from Barry Cinematic and Gill from Weemidgetreviews and that the subject of this one was none other than the late great and legendary John Saxon.

Having participated in the Blogathons in the past - my contribution to the Vincent Price one a while back, 1958's The Fly, can be found here - I thought I'd quite like to get involved; the down side being that coming to it a bit late meant that the more obvious options would have already been nabbed: stuff like Black Christmas, A Nightmare on Elm Street and Enter the Dragon will have been long gone.  Somebody had probably already bid for My Mom's a Werewolf and Blood Beach as well.  I've no idea if From Dusk Till Dawn would count, but putting a bid in for that one would have been a laugh, even if his small cameo may have gone against the spirit of the thing.  Can't be going against the spirits: that would be like Rush going against the spirit of radio.  Spirits are for drinking.  This is why optics are important - they're where the spirits come out of.

Anyway...

The artist known to the world as John Saxon was born Carmine Orrico in Brooklyn in August 1936, scion of a New Yorker father of Italian descent and a Calabrian mother and raised in a household where Italian was the primary spoken language.  Signed to a contract with Universal Studios in 1954 at the tender age of 17, the newly-Christened John Saxon (it being the style of the time for studios and managers to give young stars Hollywood-style names, hence Roy Scherer Jr becoming Rock Hudson, Norman Rambeau transformed into Dack Rambo, Francis McCown gaining the moniker of Rory Calhoun and Arthur Kelm being reinvented as Tab Hunter - all given their new identities, like Saxon, by agent Henry Willson) went on to gain teen idol status starring alongside such luminaries as Mamie Van Doren and Sandra Dee (who was not actually "lousy with virginity", despite what Grease tells us) throughout the '50s.  After expanding into the genres of neo-noir, Westerns and war movies, Saxon got his first taste of the horror genre when, after travelling to Italy in 1962 to make the drama Agostino for director Mauro Bolognini, friend Leticia Roman asked him if he would like to co-star with her in what he thought she he had described as an "art film".  Presumably expecting to be working with Fellini or Visconti, Saxon discovered that he had misunderstood Roman's accented way of saying "horror film" and that he'd signed up for the pioneering giallo movie The Girl Who Knew Too Much (La ragazza che sapeva troppo) for genre auteur Mario Bava - possibly a more prestigious name than Federico or Luchino for us fans of the macabre.

After taking the lead role in 1964 adventure The Cavern for director Edgar G. Ulmer, the man behind such classics as 1934's The Black Cat and 1944's Bluebeard, and completing Filipino-filmed war picture The Ravagers under Eddie Romero of Mad Doctor of Blood Island exploitation infamy Saxon's next assignment would take him to merry old England to make the subject of our discussion.  Released variously as The Night Caller (its original title, not to be confused with the recent Channel 5 Sean Pertwee and Robert Glenister drama of the same name), the slightly more explicit and less elliptical Night Caller from Outer Space and its more ostentatious U.S. distribution title of Blood Beast from Outer Space.  The film was directed by John Gilling, a veteran who had already overseen genre fare such as 1956's Anglo-American co-pro The Gamma People and the 1960 Burke and Hare-inspired The Flesh and the Fiends as well as many works for the illustrious Hammer Studios like the 1961 chiller Shadow of the Cat and 1962 adventure romp The Pirates of Blood River - and would go on in future to helm Hammer horrors The Plague of the Zombies and The Reptile (shot back-to-back in 1966) and The Mummy's Shroud (1967) before ending his career on high horror note with 1975's Iberian iteration The Devil's Cross (El cruz de diablo), an unofficial fifth entry in the Blind Knights Templar series initiated by Amando de Ossorio (further unofficial follow-ups exist, such as this) with a script by El Hombre Lobo himself Jacinto Molina  - such a shame that he had also made the low point of Bela Lugosi's career (yes, even more of a nadir than his work with Ed Wood), 1952's Old Mother Riley meets the Vampire, which I can only gesture towards explaining to modern audiences as Mrs Brown's Boys with a slumming Dracula in it.  Only that sounds fun, and it really isn't.

We begin with our intrepid team of boffin Dr Morley (Maurice Denham, who for all his solid career will forever best be known to me as renegade Time Lord Azmael in Colin Baker's sadly execrable debut 'The Twin Dilemma') and his assistants Dr Jack Costain (our man Saxon, fulfilling the role of the American import a la Brian Donlevy or Dean Jagger in this Quatermass-like - or maybe Quatermass-lite, if that's not throwing shade - scenario) and Ann Barlow (Patricia Haines. ex-Mrs Michael Caine [not a lot of people know that... they probably do] and stalwart of '60s and '70s TV such as Danger Man, The Avengers, Department S and Randall and Hopkirk, who sadly departed this harsh realm all too young aged 45 from lung cancer) as they are tracking what appears to be a meteorite entering Earth orbit, a la Quatermass II or Doctor Who's 'Spearhead from Space', before which we launch into the title sequence which - at least in the version I watched - features a crooning Mark Richardson rather than the original Alan Haven instrumental track.  The team go out on location to the site of the space object's landing, where they encounter a military team comprised of John Carson from Taste the Blood of Dracula as the Major, with the posh slur of James Mason, and Jack Watson as one of his sergeants; Saxon adrift in a sea of recognisable British faces of the small and silver screens - possibly moderating his accent to fit in?  He at least seems to be toning it down a little, even if he's not attempting a 'British accent' (whatever that is).

The object in question turns out to be a small football-sized sphere comprised of some type of carbon, which - after being cleared that the radiation being picked up by the Geiger counters is merely negligible stuff picked up as the orb passed through the Van Allen belt - they take back to their home base of Falsley Park (not, unfortunately, Paisley Park; much as the late His Purpleness Prince Rogers Nelson may well have been an alien) for study.  After Ann stays behind late to finish up her report and is menaced by a malevolent presence that appears in the lab after the globe glows a bit, resulting in a clawed reptilian-looking hand reaching for her around the door, Morley concludes that the object is a receptacle for a matter transmitter: what Mr Spock would call a transporter and Brundlefly might call a telepod.  Morley maintains that he should go on there alone and try to make contact, all miked up by the army men and insisting that no-one come in to attempt to rescue him no matter what they might hear, much to Costain's chagrin, and shortly comes a cropper at the taloned hands of the unseen invader who disappears into the night.

With Morley's Reginald Tate-flavoured Quatermass deceased, Costain steps up to the mark as his Donlevy/Jagger replacement.  Teaming up with Scotland Yard's Superintendent Hartley (another familiar 1969s British face, the Public Eye himself Alfred Burke), who swiftly becomes his Watson-cum-Lestrade, the pair are investigating some twenty-odd cases (yes, I should have taken more extensive notes whilst watching) of missing young women - obviously we've had a bit of a time jump in the narrative, and our alien boy has been busy - all connected to replying to an advertisement for modelling work in Bikini Girl magazine.  Seriously, we've gone from Quatermass sci-fi horror to Her Private Hell sexploitation sleaze.  I do approve. 

Following up on these ads placed by the mysterious Mr Medra (Robert Crewdson, dubbed with the voice of Robert Rietty - whose vocal talents grace many a film including being the original voice of Ernst Stavro Blofeld in From Russia with Love and Thunderball), who has traveled all the way across space to lurk around Soho taking pictures of girls: 'From Ganymede with Lust'?, Costain and Hartley are ably assisted by Hartley's compatriot Detective Grant (Stanley Meadows).  Allowing Ann to go undercover as a prospective model to infiltrate Medra's operation, via his seedy associate Thorburn (Aubrey Morris, another seemingly omnipresent UK genre face who's been in everything from Blood from the Mummy's Tomb to The Wicker Man to Babylon 5) our heroes and imperiled heroine discover that Medra's plan is to repopulate his war-torn world - or moon, if we're been finicky - with human females as they're running rather low on the ladies.  Ganymede wants women as much as Mars does, it seems.  All of this leads to a rather unexpectedly but rather refreshingly downbeat ending; Ann is dead, clawed and strangled by the angered xenomorph, and the victorious Medra, his mission completed, beams away back to his home leaving our awestruck protagonists dumbfounded in the ashes.

A grim finale to an interesting collision of science fiction with gritty (or maybe grotty) British cinema of the 1950s and '60s - an auspicious start the John Saxon's science fiction resume which would soon see him fighting the vampiric Martian Queen of Blood and taking part in a Battle Beyond the Stars.