This film is a remake of the movie with the same title made in 1957. It follows the original film very closely with a few alterations thrown in. As in the original film, an alien from another world, who goes by the name of "Mr. Johnson" (Arthur Roberts), has come to Earth because his race needs blood. But prior to invading Earth and subjugating the human race, the aliens need more data from him on whether human blood can sustain them and for how long. His mission then is to stay alive long enough to collect this information and in order to do that he needs blood as well. After acquiring some from a nearby clinic, he hires a nurse named "Nadine Storey" (Traci Lords) to administer blood to him on a daily basis and to keep him healthy for as much time as possible. In the meantime, he continues to kill people and send their blood through a portal to his home world of "Devana". Again, it's the same story only remade with some modifications. Now, some of these changes are improvements. But some are weaknesses which, in my opinion, end up hurting the film more than helping it. Some of the improvements include the fact that this particular movie is filmed in color versus the poor quality black and white version of the original. Likewise, the fact that this was made 31 years later gives it a more modern quality. It adds more humor as well. But most importantly, the role of "Nadine Storey" is played by Traci Lords who is much more sexy than Beverly Garland was in the previous movie. On the minus side, I thought that the overall acting wasn't nearly as good. Further, the director (Jim Wynorski) chose to go with more nudity which tended to give this film a rather cheap and trashy feel since there weren't any scenes that necessarily required it. Even so, this film was intended to highlight Traci Lords and I thought this decision was a good one for the most part. That said, while she was definitely alluring, I must also state that she seemed a bit too snippy and overbearing at times which resulted in a slightly uneven performance. So, in the original film the story focuses on the acting of the attractive Beverly Garland. In this film the focus is on the sex appeal of Traci Lords. And because nobody else in this film stepped up to give any performances worth mentioning, I have to say that the original version was the better of the two. In short, the bad points seemed to weigh this film down a bit too much and because of that I feel it is somewhat below average.
Review of Not of This Earth
