Sci-Fi Double Feature: ‘Unearthly Stranger’ And ‘Soylent Green’

It’s the 4th of July at the time of writing and I don’t know if you’ve heard, but it’s a big one. America’s turning 2-5-0. That’s a lot of birthday candles and, given the high temperatures, a lot of melted frosting. 

For reasons we could get into, celebrating America might not be the natural inclination people are feeling right now. It’s also Eva Marie Saint’s 102nd birthday, so one could try telling themselves the fireworks being set off are for her, but there tend to be a lot of Twilight Zone marathons on July 4th and, this year more than most, sci-fi seems like the right genre to be watching.

Which brings us to this double feature. Coming out on Blu-ray and 4K from Arrow Films later this month, Richard Fleisher‘s Soylent Green has the bigger name cast. It’s also particularly eerie to watch in 2026 because it’s meant to be set in 2022. That means this is a ’70s conception of what the future would look like and it’s not as off base as one might like — especially since the future being depicted isn’t a hoverboard like Back to the Future, but a fairly dystopian vision of an overpopulated and polluted New York City. Charlton Heston stars as Thorn, a detective who’s been brought in to investigate the murder of a well-to-do businessman played by Joseph Cotton. This is not a rose-colored-glasses depiction of the police. Thorn treats the crime scene as his personal candy shop and doesn’t make any effort to disguise his thievery or pass it off as something legal. It’s just allowed or understood he can get away with this behavior.

Law enforcement is law enforcement, but there are also roles that are new to this society. Edward G. Robinson’s Sol, for example, is a Book. As film historians Michael Brooke and Johnny Mains bring up in their commentary, the one thing this film gets egregiously wrong about 2022 is its lack of internet. Instead, cops are paired with human Books who carry out research for them. There are also women called Furniture who are treated just like that — furniture that’s included with the home and can be used or discarded at the owner’s discretion. Leigh Taylor-Young plays the Furniture who was attached to Cotton’s apartment. Interestingly, this idea of people becoming furniture also crops up in the 1969 post-apocalyptic film The Bed-Sitting Room, except in that film it’s atomic age sci-fi, so radiation is literally turning humans into dressers and the like.

In her booklet essay, film historian Alexandra Heller-Nicholas writes about how capitalism dehumanizes people and it’s these new job titles — if you can even call them jobs (there’s no indication that Taylor-Young has a choice in the matter) — that provide the most food for thought. Later, the film illustrates how the police treat protestors and while the film underestimates the protection the police will be wearing in 2022 (all Thorn has on is a football helmet), the expectation that they’ll use bulldozers to scoop people up doesn’t feel farfetched.

Another powerful sequence involves Thorn sharing his bounty from Cotton’s house with Sol and how they react to tasting certain foods for the first time (or again, in Sol’s case). Soylent Green would be Robinson’s final movie. He was already fighting cancer during filming and passed away before its release. In his booklet essay, film historian Frank Collins writes about what it was like for Robinson behind the scenes. He also writes about Harry Harrison‘s involvement in the production, which was based on his book Make Room! Make Room! and the differences between the source material and Stanley R. Greenberg’s adapted screenplay.

Soylent Green is an unnerving sci-fi movie with the wisdom to cast chronically underappreciated actors like Brock Peters (The L-Shaped Room), Paula Kelly (Jo Jo Dancer, Your Life is Calling), and Chuck Connors (The Big Country). Whether it’s one I’m going to be revisiting anytime soon, though, is less guaranteed. In addition to the bonus features already mentioned, Arrow carried over a commentary recorded by Fleischer and Taylor-Young in 2003, some archival featurettes, and two BFI interviews (one with Fleisher on camera and the other with Heston that’s audio-only).

The second sci-fi film I want to bring up is much more under the radar. It’s British, so there’s a very good chance American viewers aren’t going to know any of the cast members by name. Yet, if you’re a fan of films like Invasion of the Body Snatchers or TV shows like The Outer Limits, John Krish‘s Unearthly Stranger is an amazing find. It begins dramatically enough with a scientist running — dying even — and the rest of the film is him recording the story of how he wound up in this sorry state. It concerns the research he’s been working on involving travel to other planets using one’s mind. What that means is anyone’s guess, and doesn’t matter. The important part: scientists are winding up dead and then there’s our scientist, Mark (John Neville), whose recent quick trip to the altar has his bosses concerned and wanting to meet his new wife (Gabriella Licudi).

To say anymore would ruin the surprises, but this is a film with a lot of long conversations in offices — two men talking in one room followed by a scene of two men talking in another room — yet it works because the characterizations and dynamics are so rich. And there’s a lot of Cold War paranoia. If you like TV series like For All Mankind and enjoy the arguments between suit types and the scientists who are in it for the research, not the politics, this is the film for you. Kino Lorber’s Blu-ray comes with two commentaries. The first is with film historian Gary Gerani, who considers other films and TV shows with similar starcrossed love stories, and the second is with entertainment journalists Bryan Reesman and Max Evry who try to uncover what little production history is known about the film thanks to an article from The Dark Side Magazine and provide plenty of background on the actors.

Unearthly Stranger is available on Blu-ray now from Kino Lorber and is worth gambling on if you’re on the fence. Soylent Green will be available on 4K and Blu-ray starting July 28th from Arrow Films.