"It's Alive!" (1969, Larry Buchanan)

Not to be confused with Larry Cohen's mutant baby saga of the same name, this is one of the many films of crap director Larry Buchanan, known for taking mediocre AIP science-fiction flicks and remaking them into something far worse (Best example: 1957's Invasion of the Saucer Men into 1965's Attack of the The Eye Creatures [oh so sic], an MST3K fave).

This bizarre little flick was one of Buchanan's originals, and it's definitely unhampered by any rational thinking. A married couple on a road trip through the Ozarks run out of gas in front of Greely's farm. Old Man Greely takes them (as well as Tommy Kirk, as a paleontologist) in... to feed the 40-foot tall monster he found in a cave. There's no need to go into much more detail, when Jabootu's Bad Movie Dimension has a exhaustive overview here. (Thanks to the Dread Pirate for pointing me to this site; it's like a combination of MST3K and Bill Warren's classic tome, Keep Watching The Skies!.)

Normally, there wouldn't be much else to say about a movie that, for the first ten minutes, looks an awful lot like Manos 2: The Knees of Doom. The acting is as bad as you'd expect. There's a gap in logic in just how people enter and exit the cave prison, so unbelievably obvious that I can't bring myself to go into further detail on it. The monster (who only appears briefly in the beginning and the end) is on par with Robot Monster, The Giant Claw, and The Creeping Terror. It gives rubber suits-and-zippers a bad name. (Apparently, the thrifty Buchanan used the costume in a previous flick, Creature of Destruction. That he'd use such an embarrassment twice, let alone once, says it all.)

But then the weirdest fucking thing happens.

Greely has a sidekick in his fiendish plans, the put-upon and sympathetic Bella, who really wants to help the captives escape. Forty-four minutes in, she tells them her sad tale of how she ended up under the mad Greely's power, and we get a twenty-two minute flashback. As Ken Beggs states in his Jabootu review, the movie, which is only eighty minutes long, is thirty-six minutes from ending when the flashback begins, and fourteen when the flashback ends. A quarter of this movie is devoted to a narratively-unimportant flashback of a supporting character.

But that isn't the weird part.

Strangely, the movie actually gets better in this sequence. Supposedly, Buchanan lost the soundtrack for this sequence, and the entirety of it is silent, save for music and the occasional narration by Bella. There is some evidence that this is true -- several shots feature Bella and Greely conversing in a static camera position, indicating that some sound was intended to be there. Yet... I'm not totally convinced. For in this sequence, and only this sequence, Buchanan begins to use his camera not as simply a recording device, but to actually tell Bella's story visually. The lack of sound (whether by choice or by lack of a microphone) frees Buchanan to move the camera, compose shots, and use editing to create an effect. It's not great by any means, but it works, and compared to the first half, it feels like there's some kind of life and intelligence behind the lens. If I didn't know better, I'd say somebody else directed this part, but I haven't found any indication of this.

But that isn't the weird part, either. This is:

Bella's story is about how Greely held her captive in his house as he tried to break her will and make her his slave. At the climax of the sequence, she throws peroxide in his eyes and flees the house, escaping into the woods. Greely chases after her, and Buchanan films it almost entirely in slow-motion. It really feels like a nightmare (Bella's obvious narration doesn't hurt as much as it should), almost like something out of Texas Chain Saw Massacre. And then the bravura ending: the camera pans and follows Greely, in a long-shot profile, as he corners Bella on a rickety wooden dock, and then removes his belt and beats her. There's only word that can begin to explain how these shots look: Kubrickian. Even more improbably, these shots are incredibly reminiscent of A Clockwork Orange... which wouldn't be released for two more years.

Did Buchanan back his ass into something resembling a style by accident? Did Kubrick catch "It's Alive!" on British TV while in pre-production on Orange? (Not impossible; this, and a number of other Buchanan films were commissioned for late-night television.) There's something delicious about a Maestro of Cinema copping ideas from one of the foremost King of Hacks, and I'm certain Kubrick would take ideas from wherever he could find them. It's unlikely there's any proof he did, of course. And seeing how literally no-one's mentioned this in all the write-ups I could find, it's possible I'm seeing something that isn't really there.

Still, I know what I saw and what I felt, regardless if there's a Kubrick connection or not. Other than a fake-backhand from Greely that doesn't even come close to looking real, the sequence got a genuine reaction from me. It's disturbing. It's visceral. It works. For a brief moment, Larry Buchanan is a real director, an artist. You can keep your Da Vinci Code -- this is truly paradigm-shattering.

Where we saw it: tv | We deign to rate it: 22 outta 100
Posted by kza at 10:35 AM | Comments (4)