The Hideous Sun Demon

Truth to tell, this is a great little film: immensely droll, very sophisticated, excellently photographed. It’s constructed on a main theme of alcoholism and impotence, which in itself sustains the film’s structure, and overall the science-fiction side introduces the basic sense of a scientist’s postwar sense of guilt. The script works this up until it becomes a very objective dilemma resolved in a finale borrowed from Raoul Walsh’s White Heat, but characteristically inventive and stupendously well-composed.