ill Farrell (Tryon) spends his last night before getting married out on the town with the boys. They seem like dull drunks. They just sit at a table in a bar as well lit as any hospital cafeteria and politely grouse about women.
On the long drive home, Bill encounters a mysterious body lying in the road. Unable to brake in time to avoid it, he screeches to a stop and exits the car, only to find the body gone, its usefulness as bait now expired. He screams as a mysterious black fog envelops his body.
Somebody resembling Bill shows up for the wedding ceremony the next day, but his adoring young bride, Marge (Talbott), senses something wrong at once. He's joyless and distant. He doesn't look at her when she's talking. He seems cold. And he lingers on the balcony before joining her in the honeymoon suite. She doesn't get to see the flash of lightning that illuminates his face and reveals twisted alien features superimposed over his own.
A year passes. Marge gamely persists with her marriage to a man she has come to consider a stranger. She wonders why she has not gotten pregnant yet. Sympathetic Dr. Wayne (Lynch) assures her that the problem is not hers, and asks to see Bill. But Bill suspiciously resists the idea of a checkup.
As the slow-motion alien invasion proceeds, taking over no more than a dozen locals in the course of its first year, there are even more indications of trouble. A cute little dog Marge buys her husband as an anniversary gift hates him on first sight. A friend who falls out of a boat seems likely to recover, but dies when Dr. Wayne gives him oxygen. Marge's efforts to contact the world outside are stymied when the operator refuses to put through a long-distance call, the telegraph operator crumples and throws away her message, and the local cops block off the only road out of town.
The most sinister indication that all these duplicated men are no longer human? Noted, at various times, by Marge, Bill's friends and an irate bartender (the irresistibly named Max "Slapsie Maxie" Rosenboom): These guys all used to down booze by the pint ... and they don't drink anymore!
Since the alien imposters have not yet gotten the hang of impregnating human women, it all comes down to Dr. Wayne marching into the waiting room of the local maternity ward and emerging with a small army of expectant fathers willing to risk one last battle for humanity. The bad news is that the aliens shrug off bullet holes. The good news is that they're vulnerable to German shepherds.
Bad acting of the good kind
I Married a Monster From Outer Space belongs next to the much better-known Invasion of the Body Snatchers on the roster of terribly titled science-fiction movies of the '50s that, when watched, turn out to be significantly better than anyone would have guessed.
It's flawed, of course. The embarrassingly low budget is obvious even in moments that don't require great special effects. The wedding seems to have only eight guests. Scenes filmed in daytime, but meant to take place at night, use a technique common at the time, "day-for-night," which is often less than convincing even in epics that could afford to do it right, and is here so poor that audiences will need to depend on context to attribute darkness to a scene clearly filmed during a very bright afternoon. (Marge doesn't make things much better by commenting on her husband's ability to see in the dark.) A scene of an insect crawling on an immobile alien's face is clearly accomplished by projecting an image of the bug on a photograph. And the interior of the spaceship looks like it was constructed of plywood by a criminally unimaginative prop department.
The logic is also questionable. Genre fans who like to make fun of the unlikelihood of the method used to defeat the aliens of Independence Day would be beside themselves at the pair of heroic German shepherds who prove too much for the invading aliens of this film. It's also hard to take the plot twist that has the kindly doctor not only believing Marge's tales of alien shape-changers, with little or no evidence, but also successfully recruiting a vigilante team of alien hunters from the maternity ward waiting room. (How likely is that? "Excuse me, congratulations on your firstborn, but though I have no proof, you have to come with me, right now, to the edge of town to kill some bug-eyed monsters." I mean, really.)
The dated elements are even more risible. Marge and the film actually find sinister resonance in the observation that Bill and his fellow disguised aliens are no longer heavy drinkers. And the timidity of the era allows the filmmakers to completely underplay the story's ickiest, and potentially most effective, aspect—that by the time Marge is reunited with her real husband, she has been married to, and trying to have a baby with, his alien doppelganger for more than a year. The implications are chilling enough, I suppose, in shots of Alien Bill joining Marge on their honeymoon night, or at home slowly following Marge upstairs ... but once Marge knows the truth, there's little indication that the realization makes her feel at all physically skeevy. (Or that her extended, if unintentional, extraterrestrial adultery could be an uncomfortable lingering issue between her and the real Bill after the fadeout.)
With all that said, the film works far better than it should. Honestly. The awful special effects are mixed with a few quite effective ones, including the way the aliens flash their true faces during electrical storms, the black smoke they use to take over their victims, and the way the aliens turn into something resembling oatmeal when they die. There are also a couple of horrific ray-gun disintegrations. And the tone is dead-on. The script, which is far better than the era norm, places its emphasis not on the mechanics of the invasion but on the growing discomfort of a woman who sees how much her husband has changed since the wedding night. The scenes involving her efforts to get word out, despite the aliens controlling the phone lines and the only route out of town, give off a genuine paranoid zing. There's some nice '50s satire involving Bill and his friends, who before the invasion drink too much and grumble, ineffectively, about the awfulness of being tied down by marriage—only to be replaced by aliens who make more attentive (if creepier) hubbies. And there's the lead performance by Gloria Talbott, who really does capture her character's growing desperation quite well.
Then there's Tryon. The paradox that sometimes makes second- or third-rate actors first-rate in parts that exploit their weaknesses (usually, in cases where their behavior is not meant to ring true) works to his extreme benefit here. His stiff and mannered line readings, his ungainly physicality and his failure to convey any real emotion (even when the alien husband tries to tell Marge he's come to love her) may have given him an exceedingly short shelf life as a star but are chillingly effective when used to convey the discomfort of a creature who never quite gets the hang of acting like the human being he's supposed to be. There's no question why he gives poor Marge the creeps by the time he comes to bed that first honeymoon night. He's seriously off.
The most remarkable thing about this particular second-rate actor is that he knew his Hollywood career was going nowhere and walked away from it, turning his talents to writing instead. And it turned out to be an inspired choice. The first of his several novels, The Other, was a major best-seller and a successful film, a horror milestone of the years immediately before that genre welcomed the arrival of Stephen King. It established Tryon in a career that he found more satisfying by far (and, not incidentally, much more lucrative) than his time as a minor leading man. After his first book, he never went back.
