Review: Not of This Earth (1988)

This remake of Roger Corman's 1956 low-budget cult classic has virtually the same plot as the original and an even lower budget. So why remake it at all? Why, to do what Corman couldn't in 1956: Show lots and lots of naked chicks. And director Jim Wynorski does exactly that. But does that qualify as an improvement? Not really.

Traci Lords takes over Beverly Garland's role from the original as Nadine, a nurse working in a clinic for a doctor (Ace Mask--think that's his real name?) who receives a most unusual patient: Mr. Johnson (Arthur Roberts, who looks a bit like Harvey Keitel), a man in a suit and sunglasses who claims to be dying and needs a transfusion immediately, but who refuses to take a blood test beforehand. Why? Because he's really a blood-sucking alien with shiny eyes--if he takes off the sunglasses, you die.

Mr. Johnson exerts his will on the doc and gets the transfusion, then hires Nadine to come to his house and take care of him. Since the money's good, Nadine goes for it and moves into Johnson's house. Johnson already has an ex-con chauffeur (Lenny Juliano) who starts hitting on Nadine immediately, even though she has a cop for a boyfriend (Roger Lodge), and checks her naked frame out in a mirror after she gets out of the shower.

The chauffeur may be a jerkwad, but he's not a complete idiot. He knows something weird is going on in Mr. Johnson's house. As he very eloquently tells Nadine, "It's like a roach motel. Roaches check in, but they don't check out." Said "roaches" include a vacuum cleaner salesman, three hookers (who, of course, strip before getting zapped by Mr. Johnson's eyes) and a strip-o-gram girl who gets beamed back to Johnson's home planet. Will Nadine be next? Do you care?

There's not much reason to care about Not of This Earth. Wynorski's direction is amateur hour, with some continuity glitches that would have made Ed Wood proud, like day and night scenes mixed together and a car going off a bridge that magically becomes a truck before crashing to the bottom in flames. Much of the acting is straight-to-cable quality, though I have to admire Roberts who, as Mr. Johnson, manages to keep a straight face throughout.

And then there's Traci Lords. She's the best thing about the movie--and no, not just because she has two nude scenes, the only two of her post-porno acting career, or because she has a poolside scene in a bikini that looks like it must have been painted on. Traci Lords actually handles her lines pretty well and gets to play a character who isn't just a blonde bimbo, but who smells something wrong as soon as she comes into Johnson's house and spends most of the movie unraveling the mystery. She plays Nadine smart and sexy and does it well. It's a shame Traci's respectable performance isn't enough to save the rest of the movie, though--it sucks serious ass.

When Wynorski approached Corman about remaking Not of This Earth, Roger should have just walked away. Quickly. At least Traci Lords went on to bigger and better roles in bigger and better movies and a brief career as a techno diva. Wynorski went on to make Vampirella, which was so bad that it went straight to video. Maybe Jim should just stay away from movies about alien vampires...