Teringer
An Exercise In Nonsense
ShangLuda
Admirable film.
FirstWitch
A movie that not only functions as a solid scarefest but a razor-sharp satire.
Leofwine_draca
Excellent! This is one of those "so bad they're good" films. These aliens are deadly, frying people as soon as they're close to them. Zap! The screen turns white and the victim lies dead. The aliens also look like plastic bags full of marmalade. Normally, I would give this film a very low rating, but it is miraculously saved by having extremely bad special effects, and a cast including Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing, Kenneth Cope, and Patrick Allen.Lee looks and acts just like a '60s version of Fox Mulder from THE X-FILES - his room's full of scientific equipment, he wears a shirt and tie, and he's hunting aliens. Cushing has only a small, cameo role but as usual his acting is excellent. Kenneth Cope gets to be a baddie when he goes mad, and Patrick Allen is stolid as always.The men in the cast have ever-increasing sweat stains on their shirts, which look sprayed on, while the women get to gradually strip. I guess the producers were pretty desperate for this film to be a success. People overact as they die, which I love. TVs are subjected to a bad '60s animation of what is supposed to be static, and explode, as do beer bottles (I swear I could see the string as someone was yanking the bottles out of their crate). The aliens appear for all of two minutes before a hasty ending. Sure, the film is relatively actionless, but it's just so cheesy you have to love it.
vancleef1980
Despite having a title that makes it sound like a soft core porno film Night of the Big heat is a major disappointment. Fisher not quite the director genius he is now made out to be shows that sci-fi was definitely not his sort of thing. Christopher Lee gives yet another shouty and stiff performance typical of this particular period. Just before The Devil Rides Out and just after Rasputin the Mad Monk he barely gave a decent performance, from the lamentable Fu Manchu films, through euro tripe such as Theatre of Death and Circus of Blood and finally this, it was probably his worst period in his long 60 going on for 70 year career. Many would say the part of Hanson is underwritten and Lee can do very little with it, but look at similar underwritten and poor roles Peter Cushing and Vincent Price were given during their career and they always gave it their best shot, so its no excuse really. Cushing's scenes are limited but he does the best with his small role, even refusing to remove his jacket so he looked different from Lee and Patrick Allen. The real star of this film comes in the shapely form of the sultry Jane Merrow, she simply sparkles with wanton sexuality in this film, pity she never became a bigger star she had what it took for sure.
Alex da Silva
Something strange is occurring on the island of Faro in the British Isles. Whilst temperatures on the mainland are cold, the temperature on this island is mysteriously increasing to an unbearably hot level.Pub owner and novelist Patrick Allen (Jeff Callum) holds court to the cast that includes his pub landlady wife Sarah Lawson (Frankie), new secretary Jane Merrow (Angela), doctor Peter Cushing (Vernon Stone), scientist Christopher Lee (Hanson), villagers William Lucas (Ken), Kenneth Cope (Tinker) and Thomas Heathcote (Bob) and a few others.There is a body count that piles up as people become incinerated after hearing a high pitched sound. The script-writers wisely kill off a comedy tramp figure early on in the film but it's then a lottery as to who is next.The film's interest comes from the love triangle between Allen, Lawson and Merrow and contains, apart from hilariously frank dialogue (see summary), quite a gripping dramatic moment between Lawson and Merrow. Another moment that sticks out in the film is when Allen confronts Lee about his anti-social behaviour. Once again, we get some 'no-holds-barred' dialogue that progresses the plot and swings the audience to Christopher Lee's favour (previous to this point, he seems like a dick). We now want to see Allen and Lee working together.It's a shame but the film's finale plays out like a below-par 'B' movie with no suspense and an ending that just happens. It could have been so much better. If you are frightened by pace-less fried-egg jellyfish, then you won't be disappointed. It's a better drama than it is a horror.
sol
***SPOILERS*** As the air heats up on the little off shore British island of Fara things start to really heat up between novelist Jeff Callum, Patrick Allen, and his former lover Anela Roberts, Jane Merrow, who shows up unexpectedly as his new and sexy secretary.The brutal heat wave together with the hot and heavy relationship between Callum and Angela brings the temperature on the island to over 110 degrees driving everyone there almost insane as well as causing beer bottles at the Swan Pub, that Callum owns, to pop. At the Swan Pub and hotel there's this creepy and secretive guy staying there Godfrey Hanson, Christopher Lee, who knows just whats causing, besides Cullum & Angela, all this unusual temperature inversion and it has to do with an alien invasion form outer space.Hanson has discovered that an advance scouting patrol of aliens are casing out the planet earth to take it over. These aliens are turning the island of Fara into a hot house in order to create the atmosphere that they need to survive and at the same time frying alive the people who live there. Callum who besides trying to get the information of this strange alien invasion of earth to the mainland is also trying to calm down his wife Frankie, Sara Lawson, from getting all rilled up at him for having a affair with Angela. She's a slut and I fell only for her body but it's you that I'm really in love with Callum tells a distraught Frankie.The unseen aliens cause havoc by sucking out all the energy of car batteries and power units, like TV sets boilers and radiators, as they slowly raise the heat driving persons like Tinker Mason,Kenneth Cope, to go insane. Getting all heated up both in the head and in his pants Tinker attempts to rape Angela only to end end up, when the island residents came to her rescue, in his garage and roasted alive by the aliens who were there sucking out the energy of one of Tinkers gas cylinders. Dr. Stone, Peter Cushing, one of the Swan Pubs best customers, probably because for him the drinks were on the house, attempts to get to the islands radar station only to get ambushed by the aliens and burned to a crisp. It turns out that even if Dr. Stone made it to the radar station it would have all been in vain since the aliens got there earlier doing in the radar operator Barry Halliday by turning him into a mound of ash.It's at the very end of the movie that the unseen aliens make themselves visible, looking like illuminated turtle shells, and it's then that all hell breaks loose on Fara but the joke, or hell, is on the aliens not the people who live there. You see the aliens didn't take into consideration the fact that the'll have to deal with not only the human race but something far more dangerous to them then anything that the earthlings can ever come up with: Mother Nature. It's Mother Nature who unexpectedly comes to the rescue by cooling off the island and the aliens, thus killing them, in a way that they never expected; with a midwinter monsoon.
