Monday, November 24, 2008

Devil Girl from Mars

Devil Girl from Mars is a 1954 science fiction movie starring Adrienne Corri. The aliens have perfected a perpetual motion machine in this one, though it's just a throw-away with no impact on the plot.

GoogleVideo has it online:


1000 Misspent Hours says that "Despite the illusion of class conferred upon it by all those distinguished-sounding English accents, this is a very silly film at bottom". They complain that "There is way too much talk in this flick, and what little action it contains is far too enclosed for the movie’s good." But they enjoyed it anyway because of the robot.

Octavia Butler credits this film with inspiring her to write science fiction:
It's impossible to begin to talk about myself and the media without going back to how I wound up writing science fiction and that is by watching a terrible movie. (Laughter) The movie was called, "Devil Girl from Mars," and I saw it when I was about l2 years old, and it changed my life. (Laughter) It was one of those old 1950s movies in which the beautiful Martian woman arrives on earth to announce that all the Martian men have died off and there are a bunch of man-hungry women up there. And the earth-men don't want to go. As I was watching this film, I had a series of revelations. The first was that "Geez, I can write a better story than that." And then I thought, "Gee, anybody can write a better story than that." (Laughter/Applause) And my third thought was the clincher: "Somebody got paid for writing that awful story." (Applause) So I was off and writing, and a year later I was busy submitting terrible pieces of fiction to innocent magazines.

2 comments:

  1. Very cool find! And Butler was right - she could indeed write much better science fiction than that.

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  2. I got a kick out of the Butler quote. You're right! She could write _much_ better than that.

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