I Watch Films: Night Of The Big Heat

 

Night Of The Big Heat

Angela Roberts arrives on the island of Fara, somewhere off the coast of England. She’s there to be the secretary of Jeff Callum, a novelist, who is also the landlord of the Swan Inn with his wife Frankie. However it turns out that Angela is the former lover of Jeff, who left the mainland to try and avoid her, though Frankie doesn’t know any of this.

The island is experiencing a localised heat wave, despite it being in the middle of winter. The mysterious Godfrey Hanson (Christopher Lee) is running experiments in his room in the Swan and traveling around the island taking readings. The heat continues to rise; beer bottles explode, a tramp is burned to death and a local farmer’s sheep all die. The doctor (Peter Cushing) is baffled when one of the pub regulars attacks Angela, is fought off and runs away, and then dies burned.

Eventually Hanson gets the evidence he needs; aliens have landed on Fara. They like high temperatures – their own heat burning people who encounter them. They’re heating up the island in preparation for heating the whole planet and taking over. The heat has overwhelmed the telephones to the mainland so they try to get to the radar station on the other side of the island to communicate the danger. Getting there they discover and alien has destroyed it so they resort to desperate measures to counterattack.

This uses the limitations of effects and budget by avoiding showing us the aliens, instead just where they’ve been – fire and burning. The Angela-as-stalker subplot that drives a lot of the first half kind of fizzles out as they all have to work together against the aliens. A little more clever and cleverly made than some science fiction thrillers of the period.

Watch This: Old school alien invasion with some twists and turns
Don’t Watch This: You’ve seen enough 60s British science fiction