Night of the Big Heat – Review
Introduction
After quite some time, today we’re once again dealing with some fine horror from the island across the English Channel. Ever since my review of Frankenstein Created Woman, it should have been clear that I’m quite fond of British genre cinema. This time, however, I didn’t pick a typical representative. Instead of Gothic horror, castles, thunderstorms, fog, and vampires, we’re confronted—rather inappropriately for the season—with an overwhelming heatwave. And this time it’s not from Hammer or Amicus, but from the somewhat dubious Planet Film Productions, who only released a handful of genre films in the 1960s.
Of those productions, Island of Terror (already aptly reviewed by Doc on Badmovies) is probably the best-known—and I like it quite a bit myself. The lesser-known counterpart to Island of Terror is also Planet Films’ final production. Apparently, not only money but also creativity was running low, because the story was simply “reheated” (quite literally): once again, mysterious events occur on an island where dog-sized blobs of slime have it out for humanity. But instead of taking place during the colder months as in Island of Terror, this time everything unfolds under inhumanly high temperatures.
Well then—off we go to the island of terror… now turned into an oven.
Plot
A large radio antenna against a cloudy sky. The camera zooms in on a rotating radar screen: tension reigns among the scientists, who frantically fiddle with various devices that soon start smoking and eventually explode. The title Night of the Big Heat appears.
A car drives along a country road, a young woman behind the wheel. Meanwhile, a heavily sweating Christopher Lee—wearing thick, horn-rimmed glasses as Godfrey Hanson—wanders through the forest, retrieving a camera from a tripod he planted in the ground. The woman continues driving as Hanson readjusts the camera, snaps a branch from a bush, and examines the soil. He then sets up a motion sensor and a mirror, rolls out a cable, and secures it to a shrub before leaving the area. Moments later, a homeless man emerges from behind a tree, finds a newspaper lying on the ground, and then also leaves the scene.
The young woman’s car has broken down—the engine has overheated. Another vehicle stops, and the gentleman inside immediately offers his help. The heatwave is to blame, he says (what impressive powers of deduction!), though there’s not much he can do. He learns that she’s heading to “The Swan,” a pub on the island—just like he observed. He drives ahead, and while she follows, she checks herself in the mirror. At the same time, a strange humming sound fills the oppressive air.
Meanwhile, the tramp returns to his shelter—a small cave. He uses the newspaper to start a fire (for reasons unknown). Once again, the mysterious humming grows louder and closer. He looks outside, grimaces, and stumbles backward. As he writhes on the ground in agony, the image turns red, then blue, and finally a blinding white.
Back in the car, the BBC reports freezing temperatures across the country—except on the island of Fara, where the thermometer has climbed to a cozy 36 degrees Celsius.
Cut to the local pub: Peter Cushing, here playing village doctor Dr. Stone, sits comfortably at the bar—wearing a thick suit despite the heat (the man clearly had stamina). The young woman enters (and is promptly ogled by the men) and introduces herself as the new secretary of writer Jeff Callum, who also runs the pub. While she freshens up upstairs, Hanson returns to his rented room and asks whether his package has arrived. When told it hasn’t, he retreats back to his room. Dr. Stone naturally finds him rather unpleasant, and Frankie, Callum’s wife, explains that Hanson locks himself in his room for hours every afternoon. Stone jokes that this would make great material for a novel—just before things really start to escalate.
Review
This all sounds promising: something mysterious is going on, an innocent victim is killed right at the beginning, and on top of that we get both Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing. Anyone familiar with Island of Terror will recognize the procedure immediately, since the premise is virtually identical. It should therefore come as no surprise what the killer creatures look like (as already mentioned in the introduction), nor that the story ultimately leads to a kind of siege scenario—though not quite as extreme as in Island of Terror. Genre-savvy viewers will have a pretty good idea of what will happen and how.
Both films were relatively unsuccessful, faded into obscurity, and rank fairly low within the overall filmographies of Cushing and Lee in terms of popularity. The same applies to director Terence Fisher—yes, Hammer’s house director—whose involvement here is often overlooked. Unjustly so, in my opinion. In fact, I’d even go so far as to say that I like Night of the Big Heat a little better than its island-bound predecessor with the mutated crab creatures.
There are several reasons for this. Despite its many similarities, Night of the Big Heat is structured differently from Island of Terror. The latter offers more spectacle, featuring nicely shriveled corpses and full-blown battles with the monsters. Night of the Big Heat has none of that. The monsters are only shown right at the very end, there’s no real brutality anywhere (hence the lower age rating), and instead of decomposed bodies we mostly get piles of ash. As a result, the film initially feels more like a horror thriller than a monster movie.
The script (written by three people, none of whom I was familiar with) places considerable emphasis on the love triangle between writer Jeff, his wife Frankie, and his affair Angela—who sneaks back into his life under the guise of being his secretary. The roles are clearly defined: Angela is the femme fatale aggressively pursuing the somewhat abrasive Jeff, while Frankie is the good-natured wife who eventually forgives him after he assures her that he doesn’t truly love his mistress.
Somewhere in the middle of all this stands Christopher Lee, who—surprisingly—is not the villain this time, despite what the contemporary poster might suggest. That poster shows his face bathed in red, reaching toward a woman, which is rather misleading. The choice is understandable from a marketing standpoint—after all, what else could you advertise here?—but Lee ultimately turns out to be the explanatory scientist. He reveals that extraterrestrials are using the island as a base for an invasion, raising the temperature so they can survive. They arrived via interplanetary radio waves (?) and consist of high-frequency energy, allowing them to spread via television signals (which reminded me somewhat of Invasion of the Body Snatchers).
How Hanson knows all this, or how he even ended up on the island, is never explained. He’s not a government agent, either—the authorities dismissed him as a madman and dumped him there. Which also raises the question of why no one from the government ever bothers to check in on the island at all. Peter Cushing, meanwhile, doesn’t get much screen time (he’s only billed as a guest star), but he does get a nice moment toward the end.
Monster fans may be disappointed. The death scenes all play out the same way: the humming sound, pain, color distortion, and finally the victim turning to ash. Even the finale isn’t particularly spectacular—we only see one of the creatures crawling around, not several as in Island of Terror. The design has been slightly upgraded, though: this time the creatures even glow from within. Objectively, this restrained approach is probably for the best, as the special effects weren’t exactly groundbreaking even back then.
On the other hand, I didn’t mind the lack of the (charmingly trashy) spectacle found in Island of Terror all that much. The story itself is fairly engaging thanks to the intriguing premise of mysterious heat, and the atmosphere is handled quite well. You really do believe that it’s unbearably hot—everyone is constantly drenched in sweat. Ironically, the film was shot during winter, and the actors were apparently freezing rather than overheating.
The strange deaths are more than enough to build suspense, even though we don’t see their cause for a long time. The alien invasion angle also gives the film a distinctly 1950s sci-fi feel. In the end, though, it doesn’t really matter what exactly the creatures are—aliens, mutated cells, or something else entirely—as long as they’re killing people. It’s also a refreshing change of pace from the Gothic horror Britain was known for at the time.
Terence Fisher directs the film with his usual professionalism, though the pacing occasionally falters, and the finale could have been tightened up a bit. At the same time, the ending also felt somewhat abrupt to me—once again, as in H.G. Wells, nature itself becomes humanity’s savior, as rain destroys the invaders. If these creatures were so intelligent, why didn’t they plan for that? Some moments also could have benefited from more buildup, such as the first appearance of the monster.
The camera doesn’t move particularly often, and a few continuity errors likely slipped in due to a tight shooting schedule—for example, abrupt shifts between dusk and pitch-black night. That said, the cast is quite solid. Lee is excellent as always, and Cushing adds his usual likability whenever he appears. Patrick Allen, a familiar face in British cinema (also seen in Hammer’s Cash on Demand), may not play the most sympathetic protagonist, but he does a respectable job. Sarah Lawson (also in Hammer’s The Devil Rides Out) is convincing enough as the troubled wife, and Jane Merrow (whom I mainly know from Horror at 37,000 Feet, though she also appeared in Hammer’s The Phantom of the Opera) works well as a tragic character.
I own the film as a nice two-disc mediabook release from Koch Films. Picture and sound quality are solid. There’s also a worthwhile interview with Lee included as a bonus, though it’s not film-specific—he doesn’t mention Night of the Big Heat at all during the twenty minutes, focusing instead on his overall career, in which this film played a very minor role.
Conclusion
All in all, I found Night of the Big Heat surprisingly effective—and even a bit better than Island of Terror. It’s quite suspenseful, features strong actors, and has a distinctive atmosphere that feels uniquely British. I’d definitely recommend it, even if the monster action is a bit sparse. Seven beers on the scale!
