Eye Creatures, The (1965)

... aka: Attack of the Eye Creatures
... aka: UFOs from Outer Space

Directed by:
Larry Buchanan

The Eye Creatures was one of a half dozen color remakes of black-and-white AIP productions; all made by Texas-born, self-proclaimed "schlockmeister" Larry Buchanan for his fledgling company Azalea Pictures. These things were all talky and poorly acted, had terrible special effects, were shot on the cheap on 16mm and haunted TV for a number of years, so a lot of people saw them back in the 60s and 70s. The ridiculously awful ZONTAR, THE THING FROM VENUS (1966), a remake of the Roger Corman-directed IT CONQUERED THE WORLD (1956) was the most famous of these offerings. There was also CURSE OF THE SWAMP CREATURE (1966), a re-working of VOODOO WOMAN (1957), CREATURE OF DESTRUCTION (1967), a remake of The She Creature (1957), In the Year 2889 (1967), a re-do of Day the World Ended (1955), Hell Raiders (1968), a cut rate re-filming of the war film Suicide Battalion (1958) and this one, a remake of the fun minor cult classic INVASION OF THE SAUCER MEN (1957). Like the other films in this dubious series, credit was not given to Invasion's director Edward L. Cahn nor to the film's writers Robert Gurney Jr. and Al Martin nor to Paul W. Fairman, author of the original's source story "The Cosmic Frame." Never mind the fact that the film is a nearly word-for-word remake with basically the same exact characters.

A man with a briefcase handcuffed around his wrist shows up at a top secret military instillation to drop off an important ("Civilization itself may depend on it!") canister of film. On the film is footage of UFOs circling the Earth and landing somewhere near "Security Sector 3." Presuming the invaders are unfriendly, the General (Ethan Allen), head of the UFO division of the Air Force, sends operative and public relations expert Lt. Robertson (Warren Hammack) to the small town of White Rock Terrace, where he poses as a recruiting officer while investigating. Not taking all of this too seriously are Corporal Culver (Bob Cowan) and his underling (Tony Huston), who use their high-tech infrared video surveillance system to watch teenagers necking at Lover's Lane instead of the sky. Some green saucers land near cranky Old Man Bailey's (Charles McLine) farm in White Rock just as teenage "rough neck" Stan Kenyon (top-billed John Ashley) and his girl Susan Rogers (Cynthia Hull), the city attorney's daughter, are making their plans to elope.

On their way back from Lover's Lane, Stan and Susan hit and (they think) kill a weird-looking, white, lumpy alien creature with multiple eyes. Its arm is ripped off in the process but it has a life of its own and punctures their tire. They're forced to go to Bailey's farm for help, but he's sick of "those blasted smoochers" on his property and chases them away with a shotgun. Carl (Bill Peck), a drifter and con artist who's just recently arrived in town, stumbles upon Stan's car and the injured extraterrestrial and ends up getting killed by a bunch of the aliens. When the police finally show up, Stan is blamed for the death since he and Susan had reported hitting an alien to the police earlier, so they go on the lam in an effort to prove their innocence and enlist the aid of Carl's roommate Mike (Chet Davis) to help. Meanwhile, the inept military is called in and try to blowtorch their way into the fallen spacecraft. And I shall end this plot description right here because I feel like I'm being redundant. The scenes, characters and dialogue are almost identical to Saucer Men... and I've already reviewed it once.

This was the first of these remakes from Buchanan and, though really, really bad, it's slightly less awful than most of what would follow it. Helping matters some is that they got to pilfer from a decently-written script; which was witty and intentionally campy; making it very adaptable to an extreme low-budget. However, since this is a remake, it needs to find a way to improve upon the original or offer a fresh take on an established idea and this does no such thing. The acting is terrible, the photography is flat and ugly, the effects suck and the direction is leaden. The only new scenes grafted on (the goofy peeping tom military guys) are horrible. Worst of all, the creatures aren't even any good. The original had small, highly-memorable, giant-eyed aliens played by dwarfs. This one has regular-sized men in boring, lumpy white suits. You can even see the seams on the costume at times. Though these designs are awful, they are again better than what would pop up in later Buchanan films. If you combined the eye creatures from both movies and dyed it red, it would look exactly like Muno from Yo Gabba Gabba!

Future director S.F. Brownrigg (Don't Look in the Basement) was the editor, Basement star Annabelle Weenick was the dialogue director and Bill Thurman (a regular presence in Brownrigg and Buchanan films) has a small role at the beginning. Peter Graves narrates the USAF Briefing film. Retromedia distributed the DVD, as they have with most of Buchanan's other films (which are public domain).

★

Naked Witch, The (1961)

Directed by:
Claude Alexander
Larry Buchanan

There were two different "adult's only" films titled The Naked Witch making the exploitation rounds in the 60s. The first was this very-low-budget effort shot in Texas (as early as 1957 [says IMDb] or as late as 1961 [the credits copyright]), which marked the genre debut of the usually-awful Larry Buchanan (who shares credit with producer Claude Alexander). The poster promised nudity (i.e. "an ADULT picture") and proclaimed it "The Strangest Story Ever Told!" Well, we'll see about that here in a minute. The other Naked Witch was an equally-cheap production filmed in Staten Island in 1964, which marked the genre debut of Andy Milligan, whose reputation for quality films rests in about the same gutter as Buchanan's. Milligan's movie was released as is in 1964, but was reissued three years later with 20 minutes of newly-added soft-core sex footage under the title The Naked Temptress and with the great new tagline "She made Fanny Hill seem as innocent as Mary Poppins!" Personally, I'd choose to watch a Milligan movie over a Buchanan movie any day of the week, so it figures that no known prints of Milligan's movie are still in existence while Buchanan's is an easy to find public domain title.

Running just short of an hour, The Naked Witch opens with 10 solid minutes of filler describing what a witch is ("They could turn their victims' minds into nightmares of hell!"), what a black mass is ("The most depraved orgies of filth and obscenity conceivable to the human mind!") and then a brief history of witches starting back in the Dark Ages. Gary Owens (later of Laugh-In fame) narrates as we get to see lots of (admittedly cool) old paintings of witches from "the great master artists." This is followed by a Shakespeare quote ("This is the very witching time of night when churchyards yawn and hell itself gives out contagion to this world") and then we're off... Well, to more narration as our whiny, droning clod of a hero (Robert Short) drives through the country. Known only as "The Student," he's writing a thesis on the early German settlers in Texas and goes to the small, isolated village of Luckenbach during their annual singing festival. Luckenbach has held onto its traditional Germanic roots over the years and is a simple farming village seemingly trapped in time.

The Student soon meets Kirska Schoennig (Jo Maryman), a young blonde who agrees to put him up at her parents' inn while he's in town. The older locals, including Kirska's father Hans, refuse to help and hush up any time the word "witchcraft" is uttered, but Kirska sneaks him a book about the early settlers in the area so he can brush up on the local legend of "The Luckenbach Witch." Over a hundred years earlier, a widow (Libby Hall, also in Buchanan's Common Law Wife [1963]) was betrayed by her married lover Otto Schoennig, who proclaimed her a witch and had a stake driven through her heart. She was buried in an unmarked, shallow grave but not before proclaiming that she'll be back to avenge herself on the Schoennig family. The Student finds her grave, digs it up and discovers the widow's mummified corpse. He removes the stake from her heart and then runs back to the inn afterward. The Widow regenerates and then sets about getting her revenge by stabbing victims through the heart with the same stake she had driven into hers.

So let's go ahead and cut to the chase. No one who's going to watch this really cares all that much about the story. The real question is: Just how naked does the witch get? And the answer is: Not very. Though she emerges from her grave in the nude and makes a dash for the inn in the nude, it's too dark and shot at such a long distance you can't even really make anything out. She actually shows more of what she's got later on during a moonlight swim in a pond, though again the lighting is dark. During one sequence where she threatens to go full frontal, a thick black smudge line was added to the film to conceal her naughty bits. Other than that she runs around in a black, torn negligee that she stole off of Kirska. Despite having not seen the film, I can almost say with certainty that Milligan's effort probably delivered more of what audiences wanted to see back in the day.

Buchanan would continue to make low-budget films throughout the next three decades; mostly trial movies, monster movies and conspiracy movies. I've yet to see anything by him I'd deem good. S.F. Brownrigg gets a credit for sound. Something Weird offers this on DVD, where it's paired with Crypt of Dark Secrets (1976).

★1/2

Curse of the Swamp Creature (1966)

Directed by:
Larry Buchanan

Larry Buchanan's American International Television package deal - very-cheaply-produced, shot-on-16mm color remakes of various black-and-white AIP releases of the 50s - continues with this horrendous reworking of Edward L. Cahn's VOODOO WOMAN (1957). [I've not seen Voodoo so I cannot compare them right now.] Prospector Driscoll West (Bill Thurman) shows up in a small Florida town hoping to scour the Everglades in search of oil. He ends up crossing paths with a trio of con artists; hotel owner / bartender Frenchie (Roger Ready), his bookkeeper / lover Brenda (Shirley McLine) and Brenda's dimwitted boy toy Ritchie (Cal Duggan), instead. Ritchie breaks into Driscoll's hotel room looking for some kind of map, is caught and then a horribly choreographed fight ensues. Driscoll ends up dead after being stabbed, everyone decides to sink his body in the swamp (where's its rendered unrecognizable with some kind of thrashing machine) and Brenda comes up with the idea of posing as the dead man's wife. Geologist Barry Rogers (John Agar) flies in the following day to meet up with Driscoll and instead has to make plans with his "wife," Ritchie and their guide Rabbit Simms (Charles McLine). The four then head out into the swamps for a few days looking for oil.

Meanwhile, evil, arrogant, murderous Dr. Simon Trent (an amusingly dry Jeff Alexander) is busy at work doing the usual mad scientist things at his secluded home like kidnapping people and experimenting on them. Once he's done with the bodies, he simply feeds them to a bunch of hungry crocodiles.... which he keeps in a swimming pool in his backyard! Also living in the same home are Simon's med school student assistant Tom (Tony Huston, who also scripted this), his faithful black servant Valjean (Ted Mitchell), another black man named Tracker (Bill McGhee) who's treated little better than a guard dog and his attractive wife Pat (Francine York), who is somehow completely oblivious to what he husband has been up to. There's talk of gill transplants and crocodiles being devolved back to fish, but we don't really get to see any of this. Because all of Trent's experiments have failed, he decides to experiment on Tom. He injects his with a sedative, puts him in some large foggy fish tank ("the preserver") and tries to turn him into some kind of lizard monster.

Nearby, Barry and the others ride a boat, camp and track through the forest. Just because he knows they're around, Dr. Trent sends his servant to fetch them and bring them back to his home. Pat's been causing trouble, so her husband has locked her up in her bedroom, but he lets her come out to hobnob with the guests. She finally gets fed up with the experiments and pulls the plug on Tom ("My beautiful indestructible fish man!"), which leads him to select one of his new guests as a test subject. Meanwhile, the "native people" of the swamps (i.e. a bunch of black folks who behave like they live in Haiti) do some kind of ritualistic dance around a totem pole with a skull on it, burn an effigy of the mad doctor and practice "snake magic." One of the visitors attempts to rape a dancer so she pushes him into a pit of quicksand. The titular "Swamp Creature" (a terrible-looking googly-eyed thing) finally makes an appearance during the last 5 minutes and doesn't even really get to do anything.

If the abysmal acting, terrible dialogue, talky / slow-moving / aimless plot, laughable monster suit or horrible photography don't do you in, then the constant beating of bongo drums on the soundtrack will. You won't see much worse than this one, folks. Other films Buchanan made for this same series include The Eye Creatures (1956), a remake of INVASION OF THE SAUCER MEN (1957), ZONTAR, THE THING FROM VENUS (1966), a remake of IT CONQUERED THE WORLD (1956), CREATURE OF DESTRUCTION (1967), a remake of The She Creature (1957) and In the Year 2889 (1967), a remake of DAY THE WORLD ENDED (1955). Mars Needs Women (1967) and "IT'S ALIVE!" (1969) appear to be - gasp! - original stories (in the case of the latter, Buchanan was allowed to use an unfilmed Richard Matheson script).

NO STARS!