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AKA Fantastic Invasion of Planet Earth
DIRECTED BY: Arch Oboler
FEATURING: Michael Cole, Deborah Walley, Johnny Desmond
PLOT: When a storm, and his passenger’s birth pangs, force a charter pilot flying a pregnant woman and her husband to make a sudden landing during a storm, the travelers find themselves trapped in a strange community.
COMMENTS: Another brainchild of Arch Oboler, The Bubble is an odd little curiosity. Oboler had a surprise hit with the first American 3-D picture, Bwana Devil, in 1952. Fourteen years later, he tried to replicate this success, despite the subsequent boom and bust of the 3-D fad. Not only do The Bubble‘s technical gimmicks hearken back to the 50s, its plot derives heavily from another cheap sci-fi horror flick made ten years previously, Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956). But while Body Snatchers would earn a place in the American psyche, and become subject to numerous remakes (along with Night of the Living Dead, the zombie film these earlier efforts anticipate), The Bubble never gained quite the same degree of cultural cachet.
The Bubble begins in the heart of the action. A young married couple, Mark and Cathy, plan a brief stay in a remote mountain cabin before she gives birth to their first child. They hire a charter pilot, Tony Herric, to fly them to their destination but their plans go awry when they encounter unexpected bad weather and Cathy goes into labor. After losing radio contact, Tony makes a sudden descent onto what he thinks is a landing strip, but turns out to be a deserted stretch of road flanked by street lamps. Having no idea where they are, the trio seem to experience amazing luck when a cab pulls up out of nowhere.
“Cab, mister?” asks the driver.
Mark and Tony hurriedly explain how they need to get Cathy to a hospital ASAP.
“Cab, mister?” replies the driver, as though he hasn’t heard a word they’ve just said.
They manage to make it to the hospital, but since the baby is a month premature, the doctor insists on keeping him in a incubator for at least a week. While Cathy recovers in the hospital, Mark wanders empty streets, trying to find a working telephone. Having no luck, he finally runs into Tony at a bar that looks suspiciously like a saloon from a Western movie set. Here they encounter more odd behavior from the bartender. Like the cab driver, he’s a one trick pony. He polishes glasses and repeats the phrase, “What’ll it be, gents?,” but that’s it.
The 3-D action heats up a little when a cabaret dancer performs, her fishnet-stockinged legs projecting off the stage into the audience, which includes the very appreciative Tony. He then offers her a drink, and in an otherwise unexplained moment, the tray of beer bottles and glasses floats off the counter and flies across the room—
perhaps because he intoned the magic words, “Coming right up,” or perhaps it’s just another opportunity to send random objects flying towards the camera.
As their week progresses, Mark runs into more and more strange behavior. Everyone he encounters has only one line, and no one can tell him the name of the town. None of the phones work, and when they try to return to Tony’s plane, they discover it has disappeared.
The town starts to seem like it is in fact some kind of movie set, and Tony hypothesizes that a Hollywood studio must be behind it. This seems like a plausible theory, until they come across a large fake rock with a dark interior and a single chair in its center. Tony sits in the chair and experiences an ego-annihilating trip, in the film’s one psychedelic sequence. To Mark it looks like he just received a dose of electroshock therapy, and this gives him greater misgivings about the town.
The zombie-like behavior of the residents is all the more unsettling because they go about their repetitive tasks while completely ignoring the strangers in their midst. The only time they cease their compulsive actions occurs when the sky suddenly grows dark in the middle of the day. Everyone freezes and looks upwards, staring open-mouthed until the light returns. The doctor at the hospital repeatedly tells Mark to “go to the station” without ever explaining exactly what he means, but never compels Mark to obey this suggestion. The narrative introduces a few plot threads like this, hinting at sinister goings on, but then leaves them hanging.
When the characters discover the “bubble”—a transparent barrier walling off the community from the rest of the world—the 3-D briefly enhances the narrative. Whenever the director positions the camera outside the barrier, the dialogue goes silent. When Tony hurls a large rock at it, it doesn’t make a sound, nor does the glass get scratched, let alone break. There’s something much more dramatic in seeing the characters’ plight in this way, as their hands reach out for escape, only to bump against the mysterious enclosure.
As critics at the time noted, the slow pacing and repetitive sequences inserted just for their 3-D effect (a ladder being carried toward the screen, a broom being jabbed toward the screen, and a guy with tweezers poking at the screen) get pretty boring pretty quickly. Oboler cut down the original runtime to 91 minutes in reaction to this feedback, so The Bubble now exists in two edits. Audiences who caught the re-release in 1976 may recall the ending as rushed. The original 112 minute version draws out the conclusion without adding any compelling footage. Nevertheless, The Bubble has its fans; it entertains as low-budget sci-fi with a dose of cosmic horror, but ultimately this film about a weird little town doesn’t quite manage to become a weird movie. Recommended for 3-D completists, but I’d go for the shorter edit.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY: