June 1: Junesploitation’s topic of the day — as suggested by F This Movie— is Roger Corman Tribute! We’re excited to tackle a different genre every day, so check back and see what’s next.

At 67 minutes, this movie was made to be shown with Attack of the Crab Monsters. Its stars Paul Birch as Mr. Johnson, a man quite literally not of this Earth because he’s an alien from Davanna with blank eyes that can burn right into your brain. If you start to like him, remember that he starts the movie by removing the blood of a teenage girl with some tubes that he keeps in his attache case.

Davanna is dying from the end of a nuclear war which has turned everyone’s blood to dust. Now, as he waits in Los Angeles, Mr. Johnson is attempting to solve the issues with his peoples’ blood. He has a houseboy named Jeremy (Jonathan Haze) and hires away nurse Nadine Storey (Beverly Garland) from a man he has hypnotized, Dr. F.W. Rochelle (William Roerick).

The police are wondering who the vampire killer is, but Mr. Johnson is just trying to stay alive. And look out anyone — like Dick Miller as a vacuum salesman — who comes to his home. Soon, another alien (Anna Lee Carroll) shows up but her blood becomes laced with rabies. She’s not the last as even though Johnson perishes in a car crash — a police siren is too much for his alien hearing — another alien that looks just like him shows up at his grave.

Director Roger Corman and Charles B. Griffith (who wrote the screenplay with Mark Hanna) worked together quite a lot. Griffith said of the story, “It started all this X-ray eye business. Most of Roger’s themes got established right in the beginning. Whatever worked, he’d come and take again, and a lot of things got used over and over. During the production of Not of This Earth, I was married to a nurse, and she helped me do a lot of medical research. I remember how we cured cancer in that script. Somehow the film was a mess when it was finished.”

Birch had no fun making this, as he had to wear the painful contacts all day as Corman wanted to shoot whenever with no prep. The actor was so upset he left before filming was done, so in some shots, that’s not him. Luckily, he has on a hat and sunglasses often, so he was easy to fake Shemp in this by Lyle Latell. Before he left the set, he said, “”I am an actor, and I don’t need this stuff… To hell with it all! Goodbye!”

This has been remade twice, once by Jim Wynorski with Traci Lords as Nadine in 1988 — Wynorski made Roger Corman a bet that he could remake the 1957 film with the same budget and schedule thirty years later — and in 1995, directed by Terence H. Winkless and part of the Roger Corman Presents series.

If you watched this on TV in the 1960s (or any time), there are three more minutes that were added by Herbert L. Strock right after the credits. A voice intones “You are about to adventure into the dimension of The Impossible! To enter this realm you must set your mind free from earthly fetters that bind it! If the events you are about to witness are unbelievable, it is only because your imagination is chained! Sit back, relax and believe.. so that you may cross the brink of time and space.. into that land you sometimes visit in your dreams!” If you’re wondering if a scene or two are repeated, they are so that the movie fit into TV schedules. There were also three scenes that were extended in some theatrical prints: the scene in which Johnson speaks with the courier, him chasing Nadine and when Harry chases him.

You can watch this on YouTube.