Gene Fowler Jr was first an editor (for Fritz Lang and Samuel Fuller) and became an interesting B director in the 50's. He met the screenwriter Louis Vittes and worked together on several movies, Fowler thinking of the shooting and Vittes of the best dialogues for special stories. They first did a crime movie and a western for young Charles Bronson with some detailed psychology.Then, they go on with "I Married A Monster With Outer Space", much more adult than the previous fantastic Fowler's "I was A Teenage Werewolf". Fowler created the monsters and thought of the weakness that would destroy them : he imagined these tube-arteries that linked the face to the chest and let the dogs hang on to these and pull them off. Only two alien costumes were created which served for several aliens.Like the humanized doctor in "I Was A Teenage Werewolf", Fowler and Vittes also humanized the aliens of "I Married ...". Gene Fowler Jr : "The aliens were very sad people. After their women died, they travelled through the galaxy to find other women to perpetuate their race.They were desperate. What they were doing was honest and useful." (Filmfax N°10). The aliens theme invading the Earth for getting human appearance and couple to human women was an outrageous subject. The audience was also surprised by some very uncommon visual scenes with the aliens. Just forget the spaceship, because of a 125000 dollars budget for a 8 days shooting. The audience loved the movie which was scheduled with "The Blob", while Fowler wanted to play it with another movie he wanted to direct but complete mystery about it.Fowler's last movie is the western "The Oregon Trail", produced by Greek Spyro Skouras (Billie Wilder : "the only Greek tragedy I know is Spyro Skouras."), a terrible nightmare. We'll never know the best project with Vittes, "The Day The Adults Died", describing the world without adults. Fowler continued to direct for television, then returned to editing. When his close friend Fritz Lang was dying, Fowler stayed with him for his last days. When the Master died, Fowler called their old friends and drank to his memory.With some more budget, Gene Fowler Jr and his friend Louis Vittes could have been as great as Jack Arnold.

"Invasion of the Body Snatchers" gets a pleasant enough rehash in this entertaining schlock picture. It stars actor turned author Tom Tryon ("The Cardinal") as Bill Farrell, a newlywed insurance agent who's the first of many small town citizens to have their bodies taken over by aliens. His wife Marge (Gloria Talbott, "The Cyclops") notices that he and other locals have begun to act strangely. Marge soon wonders if there is anybody in the town that she can trust.The aliens are treated with a fairly even hand. They're never portrayed as out and out monsters (invasion doesn't really seem to be their goal), but they still have no compunction about killing. The movie, produced & directed by low budget genre specialist Gene Fowler, Jr. ("I Was a Teenage Werewolf") is certainly not without substance, exploring some of the same themes - like paranoia, and the appearance / imitation of humanity - as "Body Snatchers" did so well two years previously. It's also not without its cheesy charms, as could be expected. The special effects may look awfully crude to some modern viewers, but they're damn entertaining to watch, and the monsters in their natural guise thankfully don't look quite like anything else that this viewer has seen in this genre.The supporting cast features a couple of familiar faces, like Ty Hardin ('Bronco'), Ken Lynch ("Anatomy of a Murder"), John Eldredge ("High Sierra"), James Anderson ("To Kill a Mockingbird"), and boxer turned actor Maxie Rosenbloom ("The Boogie Man Will Get You"). The actors all do a decent enough job, with the very pretty and appealing Talbott making for a compelling heroine. You can't help but feel bad for her, and you do root for her.The idea of "what it means to be human" is common enough in this sort of entertainment, and that also comes into play. The movie has a reasonably fun action climax and an effective forward pace.Seven out of 10.

In Norrisville, Bill Farrell (Tom Tryon) leaves his bachelor party on the eve of his marriage with Marge Bradley (Gloria Talbott). He is abducted by an alien that takes his shape and marries Marge on the next day. Marge feels something strange with Bill and one year later she realizes that he is a totally different man. One day, Marge follows Bill and he goes to the woods; she finds that he is an alien and sees his spacecraft. She tries to tell to Washington and to the FBI, but the aliens have dominated key people in town that do not allow any sort of communication with the exterior world. What is the intention of the alien invasion?"I Married a Monster from Outer Space" is a great sci-fi movie from the 50's. The storyline is a rip-off of "Invasion of the Body Snatchers", with aliens switching places with humans in a small town with the purpose of breeding. But the plot is well-constructed and supported by good performances. My vote is seven.Title (Brazil): "I Married a Monster from Outer Space"

Aliens come to earth in a flying saucer in search of human mates. The women are dying on their planet. The aliens look like hell. They're roughly human in shape. Well, they HAVE to be, since they're really men walking around in aluminum foil suits. But their heads are an insult. No necks at all. The head seems to be planted halfway down into the transverse plane of the shoulders. And their faces, such as they are, lose bilateral symmetry, with ugly fleshy ridges criss-crossing this way and that. No wonder their women died.One by one they take over the male figures in a small California town. The human is engulfed in smoke, then replaced by a alien, with the human bodies being removed to the space ship and kept comatose. They take over the police force. When innocent Gloria Talbott, the bride of a replicant that looks like Tom Tryon, tries to reach outside agencies, she finds that all the telephone lines are busy and the dispatcher throws away her telegram to the FBI.One of the first and most effective of these plots was "It Came From Outer Space," which made evocative use of its desert settings and some of the dialog of which had qualities of folk philosophy. Then came a modest masterpiece, "The Invasion of the Body Snatchers," and all the pod people.This one came a little late in the series and lacks the originality of the earlier examples of the genre. And not just that. The acting is mostly wooden. The best performance comes from Valerie Allen as a hooker who has about four minutes of screen time.Gloria Talbott has no more than a modest talent, but at least she's pretty. Her face is full of good bone structure and she wears pointy 1950s brassieres. Tom Tryon, on the other hand, doesn't even strike me as particularly handsome. He has the tall, narrow, broad-shouldered, skinny build of a guy who would be good at hurling a poisoned spear at a giraffe twenty yards away. But his head, from certain angles, resembles a cinder block. I like him anyway because he was a little unusual as a human being. Not just that he was gay but that he went on to a successful career as a novelist, and I've always admired people with enough talent for two disparate fields. Lots of actors write biographies, or have them written for them, but a successful novel is a different order of thing. Meg Tilly did it too. Goethe was more proud of his work in the philosophy of science than in literature ("Faust").The special effects are of the period and even more crude than those in "It Came From Outer Space." The plodding direction by Gene Fowler, Jr., isn't much help. It's all done by the numbers. Talbott is sitting at her desk writing a letter to her Mom. We see the pen write her sad story: "It's been a terrible year since I married Sam. He's not the man I fell in love with. It's like living with a stranger...." The camera cuts to her thoughtful face staring into the air during a longish pause. Now, I ask you, the seasoned viewer of movies, is she going to rip up the note and throw it in the trash or not? Of course she will. Why? Because that's what everybody does in the movies. There isn't any JUICE to the plot or direction, no vatic moment, like Klaatu's visit to Professor Bernhard in "The Day The Earth Stood Still." Nobody says or does anything UNIQUE.It's too bad because stories like this have real potential. Imagine, an alien in human form. Some things Tryon remembers, like how to drive a car, and some he doesn't, like turning on the car lights at night. He doesn't recognize thunder for what it is. There are all sorts of possibilities in this arrangement and though this film has some interesting stuff going on -- Tryon slowly begins to love his wife -- most of the possibilities are thrown away in a typical commercial gesture.