2/5 Here's $57 and a movie camera! Go make us some magic!
  by Craig Edwards (By the sea in NC)
It's Alive (1968) American International Pictures moved into television in the mid 1960's with a package of their black and white 1950's movies, which local stations would purchase and then show during their movie programs . But the value of the package would be more if AIP could include more color films with the black and white ones, so the ever clever heads of AIP, Sam Arkoff and Jim Nicholson, came up with a plan: give somebody a tiny amount of money, some color 16mm film, and access to the scripts of those earlier movies and let that someone produce some color remakes with new titles they could include in their movie package to boost its value. The someone in question was Texas filmmaker Larry Buchanan, and for about the cost of one of AIP's color Poe films, Buchanan produced eight (!) movies for AIP! This particular movie was not a remake, but a second movie to re-use a monster suit Buchanan had previously featured in Creature of Destruction, one of the AIP remakes. This time out a guy named Greely (Bill Thurman) out in the boonies around the Ozark mountains supplements his failing exotic animal roadside attraction with a real humdinger: a prehistoric creature in a cave behind his house. The problem is, once you go into the cave to look at the beastie, the completely insane Greely locks you in for feeding time. Guess what the monster gets for dinner? Former Disney star Tommy Kirk (The Shaggy Dog) serves time in this filmic purgatory as a forest ranger captured by Thurman along with a married couple who had the bad luck to run out of gas right outside Greely's house. Lots of talk ensues. Then, finally the creature pops up very briefly well into the running time to claim the young husband, and good ol' Buchanan doesn't even try to camouflage how sketchy it looks with some smoke or weird camera angles. No, he shoots it straight on, giving the audience a good look at a man in an extremely ratty rubber body suit topped off by a dime store monster mask with ping pong ball eyes. -sigh- After this wonderful moment, the creature goes back into the depths of the cave and the movie somehow manages to slow down further by having Greely's long suffering housekeeper Bella start hanging out near the prisoners so she can relate how she came to be in Greely's clutches in a loooooong flashback obviously added to get this thing up to feature length. From there, the creature returns for his second and final appearance as we amble into a climax of a sort and the movie comes to an end, or at least to a stop. To sum this one up: it's pretty sad to see poor ol' Tommy here, sliding down several notches below Disney and even a few from the beach movies he'd made for AIP the previous couple of years; on the other hand, Thurman is actually pretty good as the nutjob, the story idea is not bad, and before it stretches out far too long Bella's flashback is pretty grim and creepy. But these elements are lost in a talky flick that doesn't even give the viewer regular monster breaks but tries to make do with those two paltry creature cameos. I can only recommend this one to Tommy Kirk completists.

4/5 Manos Meets Psycho
  by Robert I. Hedges
As a longtime fan of cheesemaster Larry Buchanan, I was eager to see these two movies. While I view "Zontar, The Thing From Venus" as the touchstone for Buchanan, this cheesy duo stands on their own peculiar merits.

"It's Alive," from 1969, is the weaker of the two offerings in every sense, so I recommend watching it first. The premise is that a young couple (Tommy Kirk and Shirley Bonne) on a driving holiday run out of gas at Billy Thurman's roadside circus of freaks. Thurman has an involuntarily detained housekeeper who narrates much of the film in a traditional Buchanan collection of flashbacks, and quickly detains the couple as well. The film sort of plays as a weird combination of "Manos, The Hands of Fate" and "Psycho" only without the nuance or character detail of either. Thurman is a sadistic creep who has wildcats and rattlesnakes among other things in his zoo, but his prize possession is the leftover costume from Buchanan's 1967 picture "Creature of Destruction." This monster dwells in a cave under Thurman's house, and while the script assures us it is a huge aquatic lizard, the DVD box refers to it as a "pet dinosaur-man," a premise that is discussed in some hilarious detail in the film. Thurman fairs reasonably as an actor here, but the rest of the cast appears to have never read their lines before.

"It's Alive" is very plodding and suffers from extremely low production values (even by Buchanan's chintzy standards.) The plot is fairly predictable, and borrows a lot of things from other films (in addition to the costume, note the recycled music from "Zontar," etc.) The film really does have a lot of structural similarities to "Manos" especially in the beginning when the couple is lost on their drive. I was amused that in true Manosesque style the final title card read "The End?" In other ways the film borrows heavily from "Zontar" particularly the cave location and conceptual ending of the film. The other amusing similarity I noted (and I can't imagine this was anything but coincidence) was Thurman's resemblance to Ernest Hemingway only without all the character flaws: he looks like him, is an antisocial narcissistic menace, and even his house looks like Hemingway's Key West home. As amusing as they are to contemplate, I seriously doubt any of these choices were made consciously by Buchanan (except perhaps for the "Zontar" parallels.) In sum, "It's Alive" isn't one of Buchanan's best movies, but it's worth seeing for a good dose of cheese.

"Year 2889" is a dour post-nuclear annihilation movie where a group of dissimilar people survive in a big house in a secluded valley, and have to figure out who is going to repopulate the earth. This cast is fronted by former Mouseketeer Paul Petersen and the lovely Quinn O'Hara along with Buchanan regular Neil Fletcher ("Zontar" and "Creature of Destruction") as Captain John Ramsey, the leader of the motley crew. The film is straightforward and bleak, but more exciting and interesting than "It's Alive" for a few reasons. The film has essentially endless discussion of the chances of rain, and when the meteorology angle gets boring, has various subplots running hither and yon involving a psychopathic misogynist, a hilarious monkey-monster with long gray hair, mange, and a fear of water, girls in bikinis swimming in a pool (yes, it's truly a struggle to survive...), and the least sexy dance number in film history.

The lines of conflict are pretty clear and it's no surprise how the film will end: I loved the final shot of a couple holding hands and a title card reading "The Beginning." Nice touch.

The DVD also has a short interview with Paul Petersen outlining his career and discussing some issues related with life in Hollywood and making these films.

This is a great and inexpensive salute to cheese: it isn't Buchanan's best (or worst) work, but it's a fun diversion from the big-budget Hollywood pictures of today.

1/5 Cheesealicious.
  by Robert P. Beveridge (Cleveland, OH)
It's Alive (Larry Buchanan, 1969)

First things first: let's not get this made-for-TV monstrosity confused with the cult classic 1974 Larry Cohen film of the same name. They are far different beasts. That one's a bona fide classic guilty pleasure; after watching this one, you just feel guilty.

This one deals with a psychotic backwoods farmer type named Greely (the late Billy Thurman, these days probably best remembered for Close Encounters of the Third Kind) who makes a habit of collecting animals. He keeps one of them in a system of caverns on his property, and when it gets hungry, he feeds it passing people who got lost and wandered down the road. How often this happens we can't rightly say, but in the timeframe of the film, we get a couple from New York, Norman (Corverth Ousterhouse in his only screen appearance) and Leila (Shirley Bonne, a character actress on the verge of retirement at the time) Sterns, and the helpful paleontologist who directed them to the farm, Wayne Thomas (Tommy Kirk of Mars Needs Women, the only one in the bunch still working). Once everyone's trapped in the cave, Greely spends some time taunting them, while his live-in maid Bella (Deadly Blessing's Annabelle Weenick) tries to find small ways to help them. When they ask her why, then, oh my, the flashback appears.

It's not really a terrible film until the flashback. It's a bad one, yes, but it doesn't really hit the depths until the distorted camera, the lack of sound, the endless narration, all of which, it is painfully obvious to the viewer, were added because the thing was too short and they needed an extra half-hour of screen time to make sure they got enough deodorant commercials in. I can forgive everything else about this movie, including some of the worst monster special effects I've ever seen (and prepare yourself for the big climax, during which you will laugh yourself silly at the incredulity of it all), but that extended flashback is just painful. To be fair, Buchanan (who also provides some really terrible narration at the beginning of the movie) knew he wasn't a great director, and relished comparisons between his work and that of Edward D. Wood, Jr.; this is definitely a movie that shows why such comparisons were made. *


4/5 "In The Year 2889" - Funny
  by Kathy Hendrix (Dallas, Georgia USA)
This is a really bad old sci-fi/horror movie from the late 1960s about a father (looks more like her grandpa) and daughter holed-up in the Appalachians trying to survive a world-wide nuclear holocaust while being stalked by some sort of laughable man-ape-mutant in the surrounding woods. Other characters show up at their door, which grandpa tries to turn away, but daughter only has to say, "No dad!" and he lets almost any raving lunatic, conniving loser or alcoholic hillbilly into the house. He explains that the house is situated on three sides by mountains with large lead deposits that repel nuclear fallout and that a nearby lake heated from underneath creates an updraft that carries away any radiation that might enter the valley.

A one point dad says he's been preparing for this for years, too bad he wasn't preparing his acting abilities. The same goes for the rest of the crew. But still this movie is entertaining, but not in the way that was intended.

Oh my god its so bad its hilarious. Heres a few examples:

-At one point a man that has been exposed to nuclear radiation is leaving the house acting like a lunatic, saying he needs "meat, raw meat!" After he departs from the house grandpa turns toward another character and says, "I think he's dangerous." LOL, ya think?

-Another good one is when grandpa follows the drunken hillbilly over a hill into a patch of fog imbued with nuclear fallout, all the while yelling, "Dont go into that fog! Youll be killed sure!" And to top it all off he breaks his ankle.

-Another good one is after the mutant makes a snack of a rabbit, grandpa and another character come across some bones. I swear it looks like someone dumped some leftovers from KFC on the ground, you can even see where it was battered.

Plenty of other things make no sense. How the mutant ends up getting killed from rain I have no idea. Grandpa should shoot half the characters in this movie who threaten to overturn everyone's apple cart, but he doesn't. Also at one point he says he found a pool from a natural spring that should be free from radiation, it ends up being a swimming pool out in the middle of nowhere, clear as day and lined with bricks. Huh?

You can see it as just a bad movie or you can laugh, there's no other options.

2/5 It's Alive "or did it really happen"
  by bernie (Arlington, Texas)
A gold digger Greely (Bill Truman) is disinvested of his gold but in the process discovers a new friend. His friend (also Thurman) has a nasty overbite and has a voracious apatite for people that have stilted and contrived dialog. Like the proverbial spider he invites people with no outside ties such as Leila and Norman Sterns (Shirley Bonne, Corveth Ousterhouse) into his home and introduces them to his friend. Looks like a nosy paleontologist (Tommy Kirk of "Mars Needs Women" fame) is approaching and must also be disposed.

Can the paleontologist convince Greely to display his friend?
Will the only cute female Leila chose the odd smiling Greely over his friend?
Will the sarcastic, uncaring, and snotty Norman get free or become the appetizer?

Stay toned and do not fall asleep or you may be next.