'It's Alive!'

Despite its promising title, "IT'S ALIVE!" is dead on arrival. This late sixties TV creature feature opens with five full minutes of driving footage. Inside the car, outside of the car, just a bunch of driving. It tries to salvage the viewers' interest with an ominous voice-over narration that rambles about rain and sunshine. In the middle of this meaningless driving montage, we're treated to the opening credits where I discovered the one interesting thing about this movie. There's a paleontology credit, and it's attributed to Skip Frazee. A quick glimpse at Mr. Frazee's background and we see he was a sound engineer in the production world with no other paleontological credits before or after "IT'S ALIVE!". This makes sense because the movie's paleontology is limited to the revelation that the creature is a dinosaur and it should've gone extinct 65 million years ago. Good job. When the movie finally kicks into gear, we're introduced to the world's most irritating married couple, Norman (Corveth Ousterhouse) and Leilla (Shirley Boone) Sterns. The two are travelling across the country by car because Leilla loves to see America up close, and Norman never refrains from an opportunity to tell her how much he hates it. With night closing in and the gas tank nearly empty, Norman and Leilla are forced to pull into isolated reptile house tourist attraction in the middle of the woods. Here we're introduced to Greely (Bill Thurman) and his downtrodden housekeeper Bella (Annabelle Weenick), who harbor a deadly secret.

It doesn't take long for things to get weird around the Greely home. He acts shady from the moment he meets the miserable couple and, despite their bad feelings about their situation, they agree to a tour of Greely's "serpetorium". Greely runs a crappy little zoo that might've charmed mid-twentieth century America but has fallen out of favor since a new highway derailed his business. He's proud of his little operation, explaining that he caught all of the animals himself (where'd he catch a monkey in middle America?). His pride and joy rests deep underground in a cavern and he invites the couple down to view it, but surprise! It's a trap. Norman and Leilla find themselves imprisoned in the cavern with helpful paleontologist Wayne (Tommy Kirk), who had been taken captive when he stopped by Greely's to check in on the Sterns' auto troubles. Wayne plots their escape while Norman continues to prattle about how stupid he believes his wife to be, and the trio explore deeper into the cavern where they encounter Greely's favorite pet: a "dinosaur" monster. This monster costume is priceless. Wayne tries to identify the dinosaur species but it was nothing I'm familiar with and I'm sure it was bogus. The creature is your typical rubber suit, but it's got bulbous ping-pong ball eyes and rubber teeth that wobble and bounce in all directions. It shambles toward its victims and, since its face can't articulate, it kills them off screen and we're spared the action.

When that monster appeared, my views on this movie pulled a total about-face. I was willing to forgive the driving montage and unlikeable characters if this monster was going to go on a murder spree. But it never does. It takes its victim and then disappears back into its mud puddle until the final moments of the film. The remaining forty minutes are filler and garbage with yet another driving montage (not as long as the first) and then more than twenty minutes of flashing back to when Bella was taken captive. We spend a sizeable chunk of this crappy movie learning how Bella was a teacher who had the bad fortune to stop at Greely's and became his tormented house slave. None of it has anything to do with the dinosaur monster. Excuse me, "IT'S ALIVE" and director Larry Buchanan, but we came for the dinosaur monster. Give us the dinosaur monster and stop wasting our time. Maybe instead of unnecessary backstory, we could've used that time to show an escape attempt or something to up the tension. There are at least two occasions when Wayne, Leilla, and Norman could've jumped Bella (if she was uncooperative) and escaped through the access hatch she uses in the house's cellar. No, their plans are way more stupid. "IT'S ALIVE!" is seventy-five minutes of mindless filler with maybe (if I'm being generous) five minutes of worthwhile content. The dinosaur is severely underused, the characters are morons, and we didn't get nearly enough of Greely's fantastic maniacal laughter. That laugh and the dinosaur costume are the only reasons anyone should try and watch this movie, and there's barely enough of either in there to justify it.

I give this movie 1 star, but I mean it in a good way. ;-) How do you rate a hideously awful movie you have so much fun watching? It makes "Plan 9" look good. It makes "Manos" -- okay, never mind, not Manos. "Eegah" maybe, but not "Manos." This is one for the MST3K crowd. My brother and I had stumbled across it on TV many years ago. It was by far the worst movie we had seen up to that point, and we cracked up all the way through it.

Years passed, and we had completely forgotten its title. I was on a slow quest to try to find the title again. Finally, finally, I described it in an online forum (before IMDb) and someone told me the title. The next quest was to find a copy. Time passed, and my lovely bride got me the DVD as a gift. We had to share it with our horrible-movie-watching gang.

This movie was extremely disturbing to me when I first saw it as a kid. Early 70's, late night "Creature Features"! The stock music that Larry Buchanan always used in his movies contributed a lot. But what really disturbed me the most was Billy Thurman's loony character. He physically resembled an uncle of mine! That was really creepy! Considering my uncle is a nice guy. The monster was hokey as hell, but still creeped me out.(Hey! I was 10 years old!) The real monster though, was Bill Thurman's character. He played it with his usual "intensity", and it was scary! No, it will never go down in history as a "classic", but I would like to have it on DVD, to bring back that 10 year old. Just so he can laugh at it now!

This film was included on a DVD along with another wretched American-International release, YEAR 2889. Both were made by a company called Azalea Pictures--who produced only about a dozen films and several of them were even worse than these two!! MARS NEED WOMEN and ZONTAR: THE THING FROM VENUS actually manage to be even worse!! Of the two film on the disk, IT'S ALIVE is definitely the better film--but this is like comparing the Black Plague to Ebola--they're both rather nasty!

A couple from New York gets lost in the Ozarks (that probably happens all the time) and wander down the wrong road. When they meet up with a guy who offers to help, he turns out to be a maniac who wants to feed him to his "pet"--a primordial creature who is seemingly indestructible. Most of the film they are kept locked in a cave and it does manage to have some genuinely scary moments--until you see the creature! Instead of causing panic or screams, most who see it would probably laugh out loud as it looks as if they spent about $30 assembling a costume out of stuff they found lying around the house or in a junk shop! It's too bad, as apart from the 'monster', the film has a scary atmosphere and a certain low-budget charm. In particular, the first victim of the monster is someone who is such a jerk that the audience will no doubt enjoy this scene much more than if it had just been the stereotypical victim. Still, this isn't enough to salvage the film. It still has the look of a 4th-rate drive-in film--the type movie that makes Roger Corman's old horror films look like classics!

Worth a peek if you are a fan of bad films--otherwise see it at your own risk.

Absolutely cheap,bizarre tale of a madman who owns a roadside attraction and likes to feed tourists to his pet monster in a cave.Tommy Kirk plays a forest ranger who helps the young wife of a cranky older man escape.One of the madman's servants is a school teacher who was kept prisoner and forced to work for him.In flashbacks,she recalls how she was trapped.There's even a rehash of the old rat on the dinner plate gag from "Whatever Happened to Baby Jane."When the monster finally makes it's appearance,it's a guy in a cheap monster suit,complete with ping pong eyes.There's no real special effects.The monster just stands closer to the camera to make it look bigger.The suit also was reused from"Creatures of Destruction," a Larry Buchanan remake of "The She Creature."This film is good for a few laughs but no thrills.Watch at your own risk.