Friends of the blog are a pair of film-savvy, smart-mouthed stoners who specialize in dissecting movies so bad they can actually piss off a stoner. (They’re also the creators of my favorite non-Simon Pegg, 6-minute zombie flick: Surprise.)
Season 2 of their movie review show launched with a vivisection by video of The Vampire Bat (in which they were kind enough to cite as an influence or an irritant) and they’ve just posted their second episode, which takes on Larry Buchanan’s masterpiece-of-shit, It’s Alive, starring Tommy Kirk.
MST3K fans will fondly recall Buchanan’s The Attack of the the [sic] Eye Creatures, which, along with It’s Alive, was one of eight made-for-TV quickies the director cranked out down in Texas in the Sixties, most of them remakes of only slightly-less-cheap monster and sci-fi films that were cranked out in California in the Fifties. These included Zontar, the Thing from Venus, a retread of the Peter Graves/Beverly Garland anti-classic It Conquered the World, and Mars Needs Women, also starring Tommy Kirk, which we wrote about in BLTBM, in the chapter entitled Weird Sex, or: Making the Beast with Two Backs with the Beast with Two Backs.
Over the course of his baffling career, Buchanan proved himself a master of the unconvincing creature effect, but he surpassed all previous high water marks of hackery in It’s Alive, which I fervently contend features the single worst monster in the history of moving images, and I’m including a flipbook I made in Second Grade about a carnivorous fire hydrant that traps people like flies by spraying maple syrup, and whose mortal enemy is a baseball bat-wielding dog on a bicycle. Anyway, the thing that’s alive in It’s Alive is a forced perspective “dinosaur” that looks like a cross between Kulka and Ollie, and this doesn’t even begin to describe the horror. Seriously. It makes The Giant Claw look like that thing from Cloverfield.
So if you’ve got a moment, drop by and share a little THC-buffered outrage with the boys:
It’s Alive, Part 1
It’s Alive, Part 2
“…the thing that’s alive in It’s Alive is a forced perspective ‘dinosaur’ that looks like a cross between Kulka and Ollie…” Does it have Fran’s hand up its ass?
Left by Dr.BDH on May 13th, 2010