It isn’t exactly the most inspiring title for a science fiction film.
I suppose that’s why I’ve never quite got around to watching this one, even though a few people have mentioned it as one of the more interesting TV movies of the era.
Nor is it exactly inspiring that it was produced by Aaron Spelling, who is perhaps best remember for producing Evening Soap Operas like Dynasty and Melrose Place. However, in the late-Sixties and early Seventies, he produced an impressive number of TV movies, including one of the best science fiction TV films of the era, A Cold Night’s Death (1973).
If you had any doubts about it, let’s set the record straight: they didn’t spend a lot of money on this film. In fact, it looks dead cheap and we only have a few minor process effects, like laser blasts and disintegrations.
Mind you, they aren’t as impressive as those words suggest.
What you do have, though, is two major TV stars in the lead, Lloyd Bridges and Angie Dickinson. While we have a handful of other players in minor parts (including a very young Daniel J. Travanti, who is actually billed as “Dan Travanty”) this is really their film, and most of it involves the budding relationship between an alien soldier, and the woman he meets and is falling in love with, even though he is supposed to be an unemotional cog in the system.
The background here is suspiciously familiar, particularly if you’ve read Fredric Brown’s classic short story, “Arena.”
Or saw the original Star Trek episode of the same title. Or The Outer Limits episode “Fun and Games.”
Two alien races want to take control of the Earth, and in their enlightened system, rather than go to war, they handle such claims by sending teams of soldiers to a designated zone to fight each other. They’ve been through the stage of development where they fought nuclear wars (and are all now horribly mutated) and think that this rather cold-blooded gladiatorial conflict is infinitely superior. The players in this game have been disguised to look like ordinary human beings and can only see each other as they really are by looking through special glasses. They must somehow identify each other among the crowds if they hope to enter the final conflict with a tactical advantage. In the end, the winner takes all and no one has to get nuked.
Although the enemy keeps cheating, and you know that single combat as a substitute for war has only ever worked when you could count on the enemy to respect the terms of the conflict. So excuse me if I think their system isn’t going to work much longer.
The real reason to watch this one is for the by-play between the two leads who are both, as we would expect, quite good. The film itself is moderately suspenseful and takes itself seriously enough that it never seems silly.
It’s not a great film. These sorts of productions were made on a tight schedule, without as many reshoots or rehearsals as a movie production. But it was an era that turned out a lot of these entertaining minor efforts, and while not one of the better ones, it is a reasonably good midnight movie.
Even if that title is just awful.
rivets on the poster 