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).

★

Killers from Space (1954)

Directed by:
W. Lee Wilder

Despite having a reputation as one of the worst of its day, I really didn't think this was that bad. Operation A Bomb Test is underway in Soledad Flats, Nevada. While an Air Force pilot and atomic scientist Dr. Douglas Paul Martin (Peter Graves) fly above the mushroom cloud in their plane Tarbaby 2 (!!), they spot a fireball-like object beneath them. The light has magnetic properties that draws the ship straight down, where they crash. A helicopter rescue unit is sent out to the wreckage and the pilot is found dead, but Dr. Martin's body is nowhere to be found. He eventually wanders back to base with no recollection of what happened after the crash. He's miraculously unharmed aside from a strange surgical scar on his chest. Thorough testing is done on him, which uncovers nothing peculiar about his health, so he's eventually released into the care of his wife Ellen (Barbara Bestar). At home he has a hard time sleeping and has visions of floating eyeballs coming at him from the window. Paranoid they're continuing on with the atomic tests, which he's been a key part of, back at the base without him, Douglas returns against the orders of his superiors.

Because of the mysterious circumstances behind his resurfacing and the fact he hasn't been acting himself as of late, Dr. Martin is taken off the project by Colonel Banks (James Seay). Before he leaves, he sneaks into his colleague Dr. Kurt Kruger's (Frank Gerstle) vault and gets his hands on some top secret information before disappearing again. A Code 4 emergency is put out for his capture. Detective Briggs (Steve Pendleton) eventually finds him in the desert - right where the plane had crashed earlier - trying to place a piece of paper under a rock. Dr. Martin punches him out, ends up in a car accident after seeing the floating eyeballs again and awakens in the hospital in a daze yelling "They're here! They're here! They're going to destroy us!" There he's given truth serum and remembers what happened immediately after the plane crash. He'd actually had an alien encounter.

Actually killed when his plane went down, Dr. Martin was taken from the accident site to an underground cavern (Bronoson caves) where the aliens have been hiding out and revived with a heart transplant. The beings are from the planet Astron Delta in a different solar system with a dying sun who now need a new home and solar system to call their own. They're intelligent and have sophisticated technology but lack of sunlight for a prolonged period of time has caused their eyeballs to grow and bug out. The current members of their race on Earth are scouts who've been sent here to prepare things so 1 billion more of their kind can take over the planet. To accomplish this, they've tapped into our electricity to run their machines and have been harnessing the energy from nuclear explosions for other reasons. Those 'other reasons' include creating an army of giant carnivorous animals and bugs to eventually unleash on the surface and wipe out all existing life as we know it. Amongst their collection are giant lizards, horny toads, tarantulas, hissing cockroaches and the all-important grasshoppers.

Because Dr. Martin was unwilling to cooperate willingly with their schemes, they went about giving him amnesia and then hypnotizing him to provide them with further information. But the truth serum has helped Martin remember an idea he had while discussing things with alien leader Deneb-Tala ("John Merrick" / John Frederick). Recalling how dependent the aliens are on our electricity, Martin makes a mad dash for the local power plant to cut the freeloaders off...

Standard issue low-budget 50s sci-fi, this is from the director of PHANTOM FROM SPACE (1953), THE MAN WITHOUT A BODY (1957) and numerous other horror and sci-fi pictures. Wilder was the brother of acclaimed director Billy Wilder and his other brother Myles Wilder wrote the story from which this is based. Fx are hokey (and those silly bug-eyed / bushy eyebrowed aliens in their hooded black jumpsuit designs are somewhat famous in bad-movie-lover circles) but there's an OK story and OK acting. Graves makes for a likable hero and gives a better performance here than he did in Corman's IT CONQUERED THE WORLD (1956). Not great, but it adequately passes the time.

This was deemed bad enough to include in the 2004 documentary THE 50 WORST MOVIES EVER MADE, but since that list also included movies like THE KILLER SHREWS (1959), SPIDER BABY (1964) and GREETINGS (1968), few actually take it seriously.

★★

It Conquered the World (1956)

... aka: It Conquered the Earth

Directed by:
Roger Corman

Often dismissed as a cheap knock-off of the same year's hit INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS, this one's main claim to fame for many is its incredibly silly-looking, Paul Blaisdell-designed alien creation, which many viewers compare to a giant vegetable. But if you can look past the creepy carrot, planet-hopping pickle, evil eggplant or whatever else you'd like to call it, and forgive some wooden performances and a clumsy final denouement delivered with stone-faced perfection by star Peter Graves, you'll find a good little film with heart and soul underneath. Like Snatchers, it's set in the contained environment of an ordinary small town, which works as an efficiently small scale reminder of what will happen to the rest of the world if the alien invader isn't stopped and stopped soon. It contains the same Cold War paranoia themes prevalent in so many other 50s sci-fi favorites and, like Snatchers, features a creature capable of possessing humans, who are then stripped of all of those pesky feelings that make us who we are. Conquered is, above all else, about the importance of human emotion - something else touched upon in Snatchers - but nicely expanded upon here. Screenwriter Lou Rusoff's message is not subtle, but it's given a sense of importance and urgency thanks to the firebrand performance of co-star Beverly Garland; playing the impassioned wife of a brilliant, though misguided, man who all but lays out the red carpet for the alien takeover.

Illustrious physicist and all-around genius Dr. Tom Anderson (Lee Van Cleef), who's retired because he's sick of not being taken seriously by the "fat heads" at the top, tries in vain to warn the military and NASA that their new satellite project is going to spell doom for the Earth. And when he says that we better keep out of the skies or else and that "alien intelligence watches us constantly" he means it. After all, he's been communicating with them by bouncing radio waves off of Venus for years! Everyone, including Tom's long-suffering wife Claire (Garland), thinks he's losing it when he says that Venusians are heading toward the Earth. Meanwhile, the satellite launched three months earlier has mysteriously disappeared. Military scientist Paul Nelson (Graves) - a friend of Tom's who's the head of the satellite project - and others try to get to the bottom of things. In the meantime, the satellite crashes by some nearby caves. Guess who hitched a ride on board? Why, one of the aliens, of course! It gets word out to Tom that it's finally arrived and he's kind enough to hand out the names of all the important people in town... including his best buddy. Coinciding with the alien's arrival, there's a strange power failure in most modern conveniences. Watches, clocks, cars, radios, phones, flashlights, airplanes and everything else has mysteriously stops working. Well, for everyone except those in cahoots with the alien.

Possession is achieved by use of "control devices:" small, flying, bat-like creature which latch onto the back of the victim's neck and sting them, making them blank-minded emissaries for the alien. The chief of police (Taggart Casey) is the first to get stung and goes on to gun down an innocent man for not cooperating and organizing an evacuation; herding the town's citizens into the desert. Next up is army general James Paddock (Russ Bender), who lies and tells his officers they're in the middle of a Commie takeover, as well as several other scientists at the military base. Dr. Nelson is even forced to gun down his own wife Joan (Sally Fraser) after she becomes possessed. Tom - lashing out at a world who has laughed at and ridiculed him over the years - is in full cooperation with the alien and its plans. Claire loves her husband regardless and makes some very sensible arguments against what he's doing. It all falls on deaf ears, though, so Claire finally takes it upon herself to try and stop the alien. During one of the most memorable scenes, Claire marches into the alien's cave dwelling brandishing a rifle and promptly informs it "You think you're going to make a slave of the world? I'll see you in hell first!"

Corman regulars Dick Miller and Jonathan Haze both have (rather useless) roles as army grunts and Charles B. Griffith (who'd go on to write LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS and others for Corman) also appears in a small role. The score is by Ronald Stein and Frank Zappa's song "Cheepnis" was apparently influenced by this movie. Conquered was mocked on an episode of the cable series Mystery Science Theatre 3000 and was remade for TV by director Larry Buchanan as ZONTAR, THE THING FROM VENUS in 1966. Academy and RCA/Columbia issued VHS versions but the film has yet to get an official DVD, which is insane.

★★★