There are some fantasy, science fiction, and horror films that not every fan has caught. Not every film ever made has been seen by the audience that lives for such fare. Some of these deserve another look, because sometimes not every film should remain obscure.
Sometimes, you uncover the victims of the Law of Diminishing Returns…
Terror in the Midnight Sun (aka Rymdinvasion i Lappland) / Invasion of the Animal People (1959 / 1962)
Distributed by: Legend Films / A.D.P. Pictures
Directed by: Virgil W. Vogel / Virgil W. Vogel and Jerry Warren
The first big lesson everyone gets is, life isn’t fair.
There’s no grand reason why things happen or not, it’s all just the culmination of many small decisions leading up to that point. Sometimes you get lucky, but you’re not guaranteed that anything good will happen to you. Some poor souls will get dealt a worse hand than you got, and deserve at least your sympathy.
Case in point, poor Diane Wilson and her warped multi-picture arc…
Played by Barbara Wilson (yep, same last name…), this character gets treated far worse than any comparable female lead in sci-fi alien-monster-menace pictures made at the time. Unlike a lot of female lead characters, she was given a two(-ish) picture arc for her story.
That, and not much else…
Diane’s traumatic tale is first given to us in this film:
The film opens cold in Lapland (no, that’s not a pun…) as some of the locals watch a glowing sphere travel horizontally. A casual observer could assume from the sound it makes the light it emits that this is a spaceship, which sets up shop inside the mountain the craft burrowed into.
We then watch under the credits a skier making his way to a telegraph hut to let everyone know about the incident. This report draws the attention of Drs. Frederick Wilson (Robert Burton), Walter Ullman (Gösta Prüzelius) and Henry Henrik (Åke Grönberg), who based on what was reported are casual enough observers to know this might not be any old rock from the heavens, and are setting up an expedition to examine the site.
Ullman tells Wilson that he’s not going, but that Dr. Erik Engström (Sten Gester) will be joining the party instead. We get some sense of his character when we’re told he’s late for that meeting, then see him get driven into the scene by the woman he’d spent last night with, then take a brief stop to get familiar with Ullman’s secretary before the party makes its way to Riksjnarvi.
Which shouldn’t be a surprise, as this film is set in Sweden because it’s a co-production between companies set up in both countries. We don’t get as racy here as I Am Curious (Yellow) does, but it’s not going to behave itself that much just because there’s American money involved…
Ironically, Riksjnarvi is also where Diane Wilson, Dr. Wilson’s niece, happens to be. An Olympian who’s taking a break up north, she’s apparently been in country long enough to pick up the local vibe, which means she’s just as much looking for a connection with Erik as he wants with her som svenskarna gör. They don’t have enough time to try and connect beyond sassy dialog between them, some ski stealing while abandoning the other up on the slopes, and the like, once the army discovers the mutilated corpses of caribou and tracks for some alien giant.
Diane isn’t going to let dead caribou and giant aliens deter her, though, and decides to stow away on the plane the expedition takes to examine the meteor, wanting to keep things going. Which in any 1950s SF monster film, even those made in Sweden, is usually a bad idea, especially after this party finds their alien spacecraft just as the aliens’ pet giant causes trouble after it finds extras in the cast to injure.
At one point, after the creature damages the radio, Erik and Diane have to ski into the nearest town to call for help. When Diane injures herself doing this, she holes up in a skier’s shelter while Eric keeps going.
Which, again, this being a 1950s SF monster film, well…
It gets worse for Diane: Forced to run out into the cold, she collapses, and the monster scoops her up and brings her to the aliens, who then…
Well, your guess is as good as mine…
The monster and its alien handlers, though, were far less of a threat to her than Vogel and screenwriter Arthur C. Pierce were. Diane starts the film off as a slightly more interesting female lead than you’d find in your usual B-grade SF monster film, surrounded by characters and a plot that didn’t have a lot to distinguish them by. As the movie progresses, her character loses dimensions and depth faster than she would have, had the giant stomped her into the snow.
Original Swedish theatrical poster
If Wilson’s character hadn’t suffered such indignities, it might have been easier to appreciate some of the aspects of the film not found in other B-grade productions. Shot on location in the uppermost part of Sweden in the late spring, when the sun barely goes below the horizon, each exterior shot at least has some interesting scenery to look at. If nothing else, the realization that one’s watching one of the first genre films from Sweden shot with a big budget (at least for Sweden the budget was) gives the film some sense of importance.
UK theatrical poster
Don’t worry if you’re not impressed with this film being from Sweden, though, as the domestic critics at the time of its release were not kind to the film. With more strikes against the production than for it, it failed to catch on in Europe. This was probably one of the main reasons the film’s co-producer, Gustaf Unger, cut the first deal he could get when he shopped the film in the States, wanting to make a sale, let all else be damned.
One of the damned being poor Diane Wilson…
The version for release in the US, now titled Invasion of the Animal People, came out three years later, radically re-cut and replacing some shots with new material. We see this right from the start when we open cold to John Carradine lecturing us about not assuming we know everything.
Maybe to try and soften us up for what happens next…
Once Carradine finishes his excessive prattle, we find ourselves in the suburbs of Los Angeles, and in Diane Wilson’s bedroom. She awakes with a start to the sound of a passing UFO, which so disorients her that she runs out into the street in just her pajamas and bathrobe, where the police pick her up. She says nothing, while Carradine prattles on narrates what we’re seeing.
A few newspaper mock-ups later, we get a nearly ten-minute-long scene where three specialists (or so they claim they are) discuss Diane’s case, and tie it in with three other off-screen-and-never-mentioned-again-after-this-scene similar cases of young women being driven mad by UFOs that only they could hear. Which has who-the-hell-knows-what bearing on what we’re seeing, or about to see…
Because after this, we get sixty-six minutes of the original film (out of a seventy-six-minute run time) which after the eighteen (!) minutes of padding and countless exposition we’d had takes on a much different tenor. In the original, Diane Wilson is a spunky troublemaker, which is better than what she ends up being here, a sad mental case whose victimhood defines her over and above everything else she is capable of. It’s not helped much that every so often in the original film, we get John Carradine butting in and muddying things up for the story and Diane.
Invasion of the Animal People is one of the worst re-cuts of a repackaged film ever perpetrated, making some of the more outrageous Roger Corman recuts of old Soviet films seem like a BFI-led restoration project. Warren’s additions to Vogel’s work (with what looks like no effort by Vogel to protect Terror in the Midnight Sun) actually degrades the first film, especially the character of Diane Wilson.
In some ways, what happened to Barbara Wilson mirrored what happened to her character Diane. When Terror in the Midnight Sun was released, Wilson was surprised to find out that a body double of her was brought in to film a shower scene which even the Swedes might have thought was a little over the line. Seeing this added scene as a breach of her contract, she sued the producers for damages, but ended up dropping the suit.
After Invasion of the Animal People, her last acting role would be in 1964’s The Flesh Eaters, after which she left the business. Compared with some actresses who left the business, the end of Wilson’s career was refreshingly mundane. She married, had a daughter, and quietly got on with her life out of the limelight. She left behind a few performances of note, more work in television than films, and one and a half movies shot in Sweden.
Life may not be fair, but sometimes you don’t get that bad a hand in the end, and after all the degradation your manage to earn some sympathy…
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