Night of the Big Heat
Temperatures are rising on the island of Fara, the expected winter weather countered by an inexplicable heatwave and novelist Jeff Callum, who runs the Swan inn and guest house with his wife Frankie, greeted by his new secretary, manipulative and conniving Angela Roberts with whom he previously had an illicit affair, while surly and brusque lodger Godfrey Hanson prowls the forest, setting up experiments he refuses to discuss.
Ice melting as fast as it is placed in the bucket, beer bottles exploding in the rising pressure, sheep found dead in the fields, incinerated, the electrical interference making telephones useless and communication with the mainland impossible, soon the human residents are targeted, burned beyond recognition, Hanson eventually confessing that he believes Fara to be the bridgehead of an alien invasion.
Based on the 1959 novel by the prolific thriller writer John Lymington of the same name, Night of the Big Heat had already been adapted by Ronald Liles as a television production the year after publication as part of the ITV Play of the week, now lost, that screenplay now given “additional scenes and dialogue” by Pip and Jane Baker, science fiction writers from the low end of the spectrum telling of “high frequency heat more intense than anything we can produce here on Earth,” requiring instead “the fermentation of cosmic gases.”
Starring Christopher Lee as Hanson, Peter Cushing as local physician Doctor Vernon Stone, real husband and wife team Patrick Allen and Sarah Lawson as Jeff and Frankie and Jane Merrow as Angela it is largely a film of people stood around in rooms sweating and bickering, terribly stuffy and scientifically illiterate, dull, unbelievable and failing to hold the attention, the only surprise being when Kenneth Cope’s Tinker Mason gets a bit rapey.
Lawson a fine performer, as evidenced by The Devil Rides Out and her layered recurring role in the final season of Callan, here she is nothing more than the wounded wife, while Merrow’s “other woman” is dismissed as a “common slut” and “selfish bitch,” rare scorn in the genteel cinema of 1967 but rightly earned, while the presumption the aliens came to Earth via radio waves to absorb the energy of the population one by one makes no sense, the energy expended outweighing any gain.
Hammer regular Terence Fisher unable to make the conclusion anything other than a damp anti-climax, the invaders destroyed by a predictably British downpour of rain, the presence or absence of the inhabitants of the island irrelevant to the outcome, despite support of an interview with Merrow and an audio commentary by film journalist David Flint the restored Blu-ray of Night of the Big Heat is one for insomniacs or Lee and Cushing completists only.
Night of the Big Heat is available on Blu-ray from 88 Films
