1965’s The Eye Creatures/Attack of the the Eye Creatures was the first of these misbegotten films, and it is in many respects simultaneously the worst and most entertaining of the bunch.
Just how big a mess is this movie, you ask? Well, there's the flying space yo-yo setting down on the far side of a ridge in a shot cribbed directly from Invaders from Mars, a rather forlorn so-called military base, and a staggering typo in the reissue prints’ main title display. But those, impossible though it may seem, are only the beginning. The day-for-night cinematography is probably the worst in all of history— it isn’t just that the toggling between “day” and “night” with every change of shot from soundstage to location footage and back again is glaringly obvious, but that the day-for-night shots themselves are so poorly done that it looks like somebody just stuck a pair of sunglasses in front of the camera lens. This also serves to draw the maximum possible attention to the corners Buchanan cut in creating the monster costumes. To begin with, only a few of them have the multitudinous eyes that we see on the first alien— not a trivial concern in a movie called The Eye Creatures. But worse still, the majority of the extras portraying the monsters are outfitted only with the headpieces of their costumes! From the shoulders down, they’re just wearing black tights and fucking tennis shoes!!!! You can tell from the way he uses these half-costumed extras that Buchanan thought he could get away with this cost-cutting measure by keeping the guys in the tights mostly concealed behind foliage, and that strategy might even have worked were it not for two things. First, Buchanan seems not to have conveyed his intentions to all the monster-suit extras, and a couple of the heads-only monsters keep jumping out into the center of the frame. Second, by filming all the outdoor shots at high noon, he ensured that it would be perfectly easy to see his extras’ black leotards between the branches of the supposedly concealing shrubbery! And as the final kick in the ass, the sound quality is horrible, and the color film stock for which so much else had been sacrificed turned out so washed out and grainy that a number of scenes almost look like they were filmed in black and white anyway.
But there’s still more wrong with The Eye Creatures. The acting here is among the worst in the world, and at no point is it ever possible to believe that any of the people on the screen are who or what we’re supposed to believe them to be. This is especially true of John Ashley, who faces the further handicap of being some fifteen years older than the character he plays. Despite having been made in 1965, its handling of most of the characters is exactly the same as that in Invasion of the Saucer Men, made in 1957. The military is very much a 50’s military, the hypothetically smooth-talking drifters are another outdated archetype, and most glaringly, Stan, Susan, and the other “teenagers” seem to have been frozen somehow in time, right down to their dorky little suits and gravity-defying hairdos.
Zontar, the Thing from Venus is Buchanan’s take on It Conquered the World, and its plot is literally exactly the same as the Corman picture’s. Rocket scientist Curt Taylor (John Agar, from Women of the Prehistoric Planet and Revenge of the Creature) is overseeing the launch of his lab’s new laser communications satellite when he receives an unexpected visit from a friend and colleague, Dr. Keith Ritchie (Tony Huston, of Mars Needs Women and The Eye Creatures). Ritchie has a reputation as a crackpot genius, for despite his vast engineering prowess, he is loath to see any of his projects get off the ground; he believes the inhabitants of the other planets have instituted a quarantine of the Earth, and can be counted upon to destroy any man-made object that reaches beyond the atmosphere. Apparently this laser satellite is something extra-special, too, for Ritchie contends that its successful launch will leave the extraterrestrial coalition no choice but to invade and, potentially, to destroy us. Nobody listens, though, and the launch proceeds as scheduled.Three months later, Ritchie interrupts a dinner party over at his house to inform Taylor that he is now in contact with one of those aliens he warned the other scientist about. The creature’s name is Zontar, it lives on the planet Venus, and it has been in communication with Ritchie since shortly after the satellite launch over what looks like the swankest home stereo rig that money could buy in 1966. Just like his nameless alter-ego did ten years earlier, Zontar begins his Earth-conquering efforts by halting the flow of energy to everything in the Jackson area that is not owned and operated by Dr. Ritchie. Then he generates eight “injectopods,” small, flying creatures that look rather like lobsters with wings where their claws should be, each of which carries a parasitic bioelectric device that, when implanted in a human’s spinal cord, will place that human under the alien’s control.
Look, Zontar, the Thing from Venus is a dreadful movie, okay? And truth be told, It Conquered the World isn’t much better. But the funny thing about Zontar is that, alone among the Buchanan retreads, it has just enough of the right things going for it not only to make one pay very close attention to it, but to make one inclined to reexamine and reevaluate its model as well. In marked contrast to the stunningly and comprehensively wretched The Eye Creatures, Zontar improves on its source in several significant ways, even as it also botches just about everything that had worked in the earlier film. To begin with the superficial, the creature in It Conquered the World could scarcely have been sillier; Zontar, on the other hand, is easily Buchanan’s best monster suit ever, and the horrible, authentically alien injectopods are a comparable step up from their predecessors. Dr. Taylor’s laboratory is much better equipped than that of Dr. Paul Nelson (as the character was called in Corman’s telling), the stock footage of the launch site and monitoring installation (which would resurface to similar effect in Mars Needs Women) is very well chosen, and Dr. Ritchie’s Venus hotline rig, rather than repeating the failed futurism of its counterpart from ten years before, looks exactly like something that a deranged genius would build out of off-the-shelf audio electronics (probably because it really was built out of off-the-shelf audio electronics). Agar’s performance, although inferior on the whole to that of Peter Graves in It Conquered the World, draws some much-needed attention to the strain that Ritchie’s bizarre obsessions have placed on the friendship between him and Taylor, even before it comes out that Keith has been conspiring against his species. The only area in which a comparison between It Conquered the World and Zontar, the Thing from Venus is the expected total shut-out for Buchanan concerns the wife of the misguided scientist. Beverly Garland was one of the very few 1950’s B-movie actresses who always brought more to the table than a huge, blonde coif and gargantuan, conical bosoms (although she was certainly no slouch in either one of those departments). Bjurman, however, is a waste of perfectly good oxygen.
In an opening gambit that might really have worked if Buchanan had any talent whatsoever, or had hired people who did, Dr. Simon Trent (Jeff Alexander, from Twisted Brain and Zontar, the Thing From Venus) stands beside a coffin-like glass enclosure filled with opaque white vapor, exhorting whatever is concealed by that vapor to "Live! Breathe!" A grayish, clawed hand with webbed fingers rises slowly out of the mist, but suddenly goes limp and sinks out of sight. Trent then carries a shrouded, humanoid form out to the backyard, where he drops it into what is obviously a swimming pool (he walks out onto the fucking diving board, for Christ's sake!), but which "artful" use of stock footage attempts to convince us is really a murky pond full of hungry alligators.
Whereas most of your mad scientists live alone, Trent has quite an entourage over at his place. In addition to Tom, his laboratory assistant (Tony Hutton, another familiar face from The Eye Creatures and Mars Needs Women), Trent employs several men from the nearby village of voodoo-practicing black marsh-dwellers. One of these, Valjean, serves as a generalized right-hand-man to the doctor, running the show around his compound while Trent himself is busy making monsters in the basement. Another, Tracker, has what might be an even more important job in the long run— keeping watch over Trent's wife, Pat (Francine York, of Space Probe Taurus and Mutiny in Outer Space). Pat would very much like to leave her husband and return to the real world, but the doctor will have none of that, especially once he learns that Pat has figured out what he’s been doing down in the cellar.
As bad as it was in every other respect, Voodoo Woman at least featured a considerable quotient of monster action. Buchanan’s Swamp Creature, on the other hand, keeps dying before it gets a chance even to leave the tank, and never shows up as anything more than a webbed hand emerging from a cloud of dry-ice fog until the movie is practically over. The impossibly pathetic makeup goes some small way toward making up for this, but that compensation is in turn counterbalanced by the fact that the monster scarcely does anything once it comes to life successfully. Its role in the story is limited to shambling out of Trent’s basement laboratory, offing the doctor, and then standing around by the side of the swimming pool/alligator pit for a few moments while Pat tries to convince it to commit suicide. All this takes maybe five minutes. The other 75 or so move so slowly and are so laboriously talky that not even the fantastic and conspicuous cheapness of the production or Larry Buchanan’s famous technical ineptitude can liven them up. That’s an awful lot of crap to suffer through, and what limited payoff the creature’s eventual revelation offers frankly isn’t worth it.
In 1964, American International Pictures released a movie called Pajama Party. The first of the inexcusably numerous 60’s beach party musical comedies to dispense with usual star Frankie Avalon, its borderline-psychotic plot involved, among other things, a Martian agent who had been sent to Earth to study the planet’s teenagers, for reasons I don’t recall having been very well explained. Three years later, elsewhere in the studio’s corporate structure, Larry Buchanan had just about run out of 50’s-vintage AIP films that could plausibly be remade on less than half of their original budgets for the company’s TV department, but Nicholson and Arkoff wanted still more movies out of him. In true Buchanan fashion, old Larry did just about the strangest thing imaginable in response to his bosses’ directives. He took the Martian plot thread from Pajama Party— which, remember, was at least nominally a comedy— and expanded it into a completely serious 50’s-style alien invasion flick with one of the greatest exploitation titles of all time: Mars Needs Women. And just to make sure you couldn’t miss the new film’s derivation from a movie the studio had put out for theatrical release only three years before, Buchanan cast Tommy Kirk, the talentless young actor who had played Gogo the Martian in Pajama Party, in the role of the alien leader.Like most self-respecting shitty old movies about alien invasions, Mars Needs Women begins with stock footage— of humongous radio dishes out in the arid Texas countryside, specifically. These devices, as we shall soon learn, have been picking up the same coded message from some unknown transmitter over and over again for the past three days. It sounds crazy, but the crypto guys have “checked and double-checked,” and there’s no question but that the message reads: “Mars needs women.” And sure enough, we are soon treated to a trio of budget-conscious alien abduction scenes, in which attractive young women vanish between frames while going about their day-to-day business— going out to dinner, say, or taking a shower. (What? You seriously thought Buchanan would let slip a chance to throw in as much skin as the FCC would allow? You obviously don’t understand the sort of man we’re dealing with here...)
Looking back from the turn of the 21st century, its hard to believe a movie this dauntingly bad would have been considered acceptable for release, even in the made-for-TV market. Sure, TV movies are fucking terrible even today, but at least their producers hold them to certain minimum standards of technical quality. They Nest and Silent Predators probably aren’t actually any smarter than Mars Needs Women in the final assessment, but these days not even the worst TV actor would be allowed to get away with a performance like Byron Lord’s as Colonel Page. Seriously, this guy even makes the cast of Reptilicus look good, and the amazing thing is that, of his fellow players in Mars Needs Women, only Yvonne Craig is all that much better. Even top-billed Tommy Kirk would be booed off the stage of your average high school drama club production.
Beyond the performances, Mars Needs Women also suffers from the same fault that plagues all of Buchanan’s movies. With only $30-40,000 in the budget, Buchanan always had to heed well the maxim that talk is cheap, while action costs money. Mars Needs Women is ludicrously padded— the industry standard is for a page of script to translate into about a minute of screen-time, but I’m fairly certain Buchanan was stretching his pages out to three or four minutes apiece. Scenes are prolonged to inexcusable lengths by such measures as having the characters slowly mix themselves drinks or walk around the room for a while, trying to look busy even long after those scenes’ purpose in the plot has already been served. The pity of it is that this ends up costing the movie dearly in terms of entertainment value, even from a so-bad-it’s-good perspective. Much of the potential fun of Mars Needs Women is scuttled by the sheer listlessness of the proceedings; it’s an absolute riot whenever anything happens, but entirely too much of the film spools endlessly by with nothing at all going on. Still, anybody with an abiding interest in movies from the left tail of the cinematic bell curve probably ought to make themselves sit through Mars Needs Women at least once.
As cheesy as the monster suit in The Day the World Ended was, it’s got nothing on In the Year 2889’s interpretation. The sabre-toothed mutant in this movie looks like nothing so much as a cross between AIP’s Teenage Frankenstein monster from the1950’s and early American political philosopher and constitutional mastermind James Madison. In the end, it is ultimately destroyed when a cloudburst of non-contaminated rain dissolves its otherwise invulnerable flesh.
The crazy thing is, there are a couple of respects in which In the Year 2889 actually improves upon its predecessor. The explicit acknowledgement of Mutant Madison’s secret identity works rather better than the oblique treatment the subject received in 1955, and the creature’s earlier appearance in the film helps a lot. Granted, the monster still doesn’t do anything until the movie is well-nigh over, but by establishing its presence in the valley less than a third of the way in, Buchanan lessens the temptation to give up before the first hour has passed.
This is still a Larry Buchanan production, though, so the balance tips strongly in the other direction. The first thing you’ll notice is that, the title aside, there is absolutely nothing about In the Year 2889 to indicate that it is set so far in the future. The clothes and the hairstyles are all defiantly mid-60’s, there’s nothing remotely futuristic about the sets representing the Ramsey house, and at one point, Steve even goes up against Mutant Madison armed with a World War II-era Luger 9mm! For that matter, the interaction between characters suggests a society exactly like 1960’s America, which is hardly what any reasonably thoughtful person in those days would have expected from 1979, let alone 2889. I guess AIP-TV’s marketing department just thought Next Week left a bit to be desired as the title of a post-apocalyptic monster movie.
Then, of course, you’re going to spot all the usual Buchananisms. The day-for-night cinematography is marginally better than what one usually gets from Larry, in that most of the time it is at least possible to tell from looking at the screen whether the sun is supposed to be shining, but there are still a few lapses. The editing, the sound editing especially, is atrocious, and the post-looped dialogue is almost never in synch with the actors’ mouth movements. There is the inevitable obvious substitution of a man-made swimming pool for what the script identifies as a naturally occurring body of water (who the hell ever heard of a hot spring with chlorinated water and perfectly regular concrete banks?) and the similarly inevitable failure to adjust dialogue to the realities of casting. But I think my favorite part of In the Year 2889 concerns another sort of disconnect between the dialogue and what we see on the screen. You will rapidly lose count of the times when what the actors are saying is flatly incompatible with what they’re doing. It begins with John Ramsey’s repeated meek acceptance of Joanna’s insistence upon letting ever more refugees into the house (he never actually argues with her, yet he gives the same no-entry speech to each and every person who arrives on his doorstep), and reaches its climax when Ramsey follows Tim over the crest of the protective hills even as he admonishes the rancher that to do so is certain death. You’re entirely too curmudgeonly for your own good if stuff like that doesn’t bring a smile to your face. (1000 Misspent Hours)
Using Edward L. Cahn’s THE SHE CREATURE as source material, CREATURE OF DESTRUCTION is an exceedingly inept remake, whose only saving grace is a number of unintentionally hilarious scenes. While CREATURE OF DESTRUCTION is an incredibly bad film and a trial to watch, it does have several inadvertently comical moments that raise it above the typical trash cinema moniker, albeit slightly. First and foremost the title creature, which resembles a discarded Sleestak from the “Land of the Lost” television series, is anything but terror inducing. Obviously molded to capitalize on the familiarity of THE CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON, made a decade earlier, the monster is comprised of a rubber suit with a fish head mask upon which two ping pong balls have been affixed as eyes. Clumsy and bulky, the creature looks ridiculous, yet it is just such faults that give it its charm. The same creature suit can be found in Buchanan’s IT’S ALIVE. Equally laughable is a dance party scene, which appears to be populated by a gathering of stroke survivors. The party features singer Scotty McKay, who croons a bastardization of the "Batman" theme while a small crowd of middle aged teeny boppers attempt to gyrate back and forth without swallowing their tongues. (Jason McElreath, DVD Drive-In)
We begin with an asshole and his wife on a cross-country drive. The asshole is Norman Sterns (Corveth Ousterhouse), the wife is named Leila (Shirley Bonne), and the cross-country drive is meant to take them from their home in New York all the way to Los Angeles and back while spending as little time on the interstate highway system as possible. When we join the Sternses, they have just hit the Ozark Plateau, and Leila is excitedly insisting that they take a quick detour to check out the life-sized fiberglass dinosaurs at the Spider Creek Camp, which can just be seen from the road. Norman indulges her, but he grumbles all the while. What’s more, when the Sternses stop to ask for directions from a man who turns out to be paleontologist Wayne Thomas (Tommy Kirk, from Village of the Giants and Mars Needs Women, playing an age-appropriate role for once), they discover that they must have left their planned route without realizing it at some point, and that they are therefore entirely lost.
At Wayne’s suggestion, the Sternses pull in at the nearest dwelling, the home of a middle-aged man called Greavey (Bill Thurman, of Zontar, the Thing from Venus and Creature from Black Lake). To Norman’s dismay, Greavey has neither gasoline to spare nor a telephone over which arrangements to purchase gas in the nearest population center could be made. However, Greavey says he expects the truck which supplies his fuel (evidently all the electricity at his place comes from an on-site generator) to arrive fairly soon; if Norman and Leila don’t mind waiting, they can fill up their car when it comes around. If they’re getting bored and antsy, maybe they’d like to step out back and have a look at the “zoo” he used to run as a roadside attraction back in pre-interstate days. And if his guests don’t mind extending the tour a little longer, Greavey has something really impressive down in the caves below his property.
Norman and Leila may not have known what to expect down in the cavern, but it’s probably safe to say they hadn’t bargained on being locked in a cage with Wayne Thomas in anticipation of getting fed to some sort of monster. You see, when Greavey discovered the caves that riddle his land, he also learned that they were not uninhabited. Living in a hot spring at the bottom of one of the deepest chambers was a fierce reptilian creature about the size of a large man, evidently a freak holdover from the Mesozoic Era, and the lizard-loving Greavey took to feeding it, perhaps with an eye to incorporating it into his zoo someday. In any case, the thing in the cave was content to eat the sheep and cattle and wild game which Greavey brought it, but it never seemed quite satisfied until the day when it ate the traveling salesman. Knowing at last what his pet monster really wanted, Greavey set about making sure the thing got it.
Greavey’s captives think he’s just a nut at first, but they get the hint when the monster climbs out of its pool and chows down on Norman.
Well… Surprisingly enough, it seems that not even Larry Buchanan is entirely hopeless when given a sufficiently good (and sufficiently small-scale) story to work with. With no alien invasions or top-secret military operations or nuclear holocausts to worry about, the budget (and talent) overreach that plagued the rest of Buchanan’s output is much less of a problem, while the prosaic setting saves the cast from having to be convincing as anything other than the ordinary folks that most of them were.
But let’s not get carried away here— an unusually effective Larry Buchanan movie is still a Larry Buchanan movie. As usual, that means ludicrously inept day-for-night cinematography, awkward and uneven pacing, glaringly obvious cost-cutting measures, a monster suit that aggressively defies belief. When you consider that Buchanan liked this monster suit enough to use it twice, the mind simply boggles. And nowhere are the effects of the movie’s cramped shooting schedule more apparent than in the creature’s scenes; all of the monster footage was obviously shot in one go and the suit returned immediately to the closet where it had spent the two years since Creature of Destruction, because never once does the dinosaur man appear in the frame with any of its supposed victims.
(1000 Misspent Hours)
Buchanan's autobiography is entitled It Came from Hunger: Tales of a Cinema
Schlockmeister.
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