Creature of Destruction

Within moments I was struck with how terrible the movie looked. With a monster that looks like it was made by the Blue Peter cast, random colour filters that looked appalling and a score that made me turn the volume down it was so bad.

Telling the story of a psychic, his subject and a mysterious creature (The very same one used in multiple movies to save money)

When you can't take the antagonist seriously and find yourself squinting to work out whats going on you have to question what the creators were playing at.

Sure it's not the worst of its ilk, but this is one of those that is so bad.....it's bad and doesn't even have that goofy charm to elevate it above embarassment.

The Good:

The monster is unintentional comedy

The Bad:

Light filters are bafflingly bad

Monster is laughable

Music cuts through you like a knife

Things I Learnt From This Movie:

Science is jazz

Batman is a traditional party song

A hypnotised woman's soul regresses through time and manifests as a murderous, monstrous primeval sea-creature. This cheap-looking, cheaply-made 16mm TV fodder is one of several colour remakes of fifties sci-fi shockers that AIP hired Larry Buchanan to make in the late 1960s. While not great cinema (even by genre standards) the original film, 1956's 'The She-Creature', was moderately imaginative (in a nonsensical way), timely (reincarnation stories were all the rage after the release of the best-selling book 'The Search for Bridey Murphy') and featured one of monster-maker Paul Blaisell's most memorable creations. Buchanan's penny ante celluloid reincarnation has none of these virtues - it is tedious bargain-basement retelling with a crudely made monster that is barely watchable, even by hard-core fans of crap.

What a terrible made for TV remake film - but loads of fun. This film is the definition of cheesy z-movies. It's a remake of The She-Creature (1956) which is a pretty good B-film and this film is the groovy 1967 Z-film remade for television.

The creature costume in this one is hysterically funny but part of what makes this film fun. The other fun part is the out of sight band that is there for the entertainment of the guest singing there groovy great Batman song! --- A shameless plug for the Batman TV Series (1966–1968) I am guessing.

Okay this is a horrible film but in a way more fun to watch than the original because this one is laughable whereas the original is just a pretty good film.

3/10

1967's "Creature of Destruction" came 5th out of Larry Buchanan's 8 Azalea pictures (shot in April 1967, four months after "Mars Needs Women," mere weeks before "In the Year 2889" began May 14), mostly color remakes of AIP features of the black and white 50s, this item recycled from 1956's "The She-Creature," a topical story of that year thanks to the Bridey Murphy case, incorporating mesmerism with reincarnation and regression, which even Roger Corman tried his hand at with "The Undead." The Alex Gordon production was no classic but featured a fine cast of familiar faces, and a memorable Paul Blaisdell monster that was supposed to look female but didn't, despite the breasts. The original took place at an oceanside park, while this remake is set at a small lakeside resort, filmed at Lake Texoma 75 miles north of Dallas, with each shot looking as though it were done at dusk (one unchanged line of dialogue from the 1956 script reports the Creature leaving saltwater tracks despite now rising from a freshwater lake!). In the top billed hypnotist role essayed by Chester Morris (who had a real affinity for magic), we here have former carnival barker Les Tremayne, whose solid professionalism lent stature to many lower budgeted horrors since his co-starring part as General Mann in 1953's "The War of the Worlds," including 1957's "The Monolith Monsters," 1958's "The Monster of Piedras Blancas," 1959's "The Angry Red Planet," 1962's "The Slime People," and 1974's "Fangs" aka "Snakes" (also shot in Texas). Rather than a recognizable face like John Ashley, Paul Petersen, or Tommy Kirk, we get the eminently forgettable Aron Kincaid, who has been remembered as a veteran of AIP's Beach Party series but only did two, "Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine" and "The Ghost in the Invisible Bikini," understandably mesmerized by Quinn O'Hara's red haired beauty (he did do a pair of rip offs, "Ski Party" and "Beach Ball," guess they got confused). His unspectacular acting career ended with many voiceovers for animated shows and cartoons (as did radio veteran Tremayne). This final AIP credit finds Kincaid unbearably stiff, looking mighty uncomfortable in an air force uniform two sizes too small for him, in a somnambulistic performance entirely post dubbed in inept fashion. And please don't ask about the inexplicable presence of Scotty McKay, possibly a local talent who worked cheap, who belts out two songs (one about Batman!) before the whole mess starts to gel nearly 20 minutes in (incidentally, the five minute pre credits sequence is taken from the climax, which is conspicuously shorter as a result). Non music lovers will be pleased to note that Scotty's performance receives the scorn it deserves when he's bumped off by the Creature. A Texas filmmaker of notorious repute, Buchanan certainly qualifies as a real huckster like Al Adamson, able to churn out numerous titles despite the dearth of talent, perhaps not as laughably incompetent as Ed Wood, but worth their share of laughs in their own right. Of all his genre films for Azalea, "Creature of Destruction" probably ranks as his least interesting, receiving less airplay in its day than any of the other, better remembered titles, particularly the two with John Agar. The wet suit that doubles as the Creature (played by Byron Lord) returned for another go-round in 1969's "It's Alive!" still adorned with fins on the mask, which were missing in its first appearance (played by Bill Thurman) in 1966's "Curse of the Swamp Creature" (at least the monsters in "The Eye Creatures," "Zontar the Thing from Venus," and "In the Year 2889" were unique to them). Come to think of it, one of The Eye Creatures actually showed up in "The Ghost in the Invisible Bikini," but failed to steal the thunder from Boris Karloff. The kind of movie that one used to find at 3AM, a relic of a bygone era, which probably wouldn't pass muster with someone who never discovered it under those conditions.

The 1956 film THE SHE-CREATURE might have been a little on the cheesy and incoherent side, but compared to this hysterically poor remake it looks like CITIZEN KANE. Sporting bottom-of-the-ocean production values and acting, this is another one of the wretched remakes of sincere '50s monster movies carelessly belched out by Larry Buchanan in 1966-'67. The sinister Dr. Basso is an evil hypnotist who prowls the California beaches in a moth-eaten tux and top hat that make him look like Snidely Whiplash. The grumpy, short-fused old creep makes for a very uninteresting villain. He has a woman under a spell that causes her to materialize in the very first form in which she ever walked the earth, namely, a guy in a skindiving wetsuit and a ridiculous Halloween mask with lopsided ping-pong balls stuck onto it for eyes. Inarguably one of the least convincing monsters ever used in a movie, the dimestore demon was nevertheless used in another Buchanan disaster called IT'S ALIVE! It clomps laughably along making a noise like an electric motor in need of maintenance and occasionally kills people who are silly enough to wander around the beach at night even though there have been numerous unsolved murders there. The sort-of hero is a dorky Air Force psychologist (sometimes he's called a parapsychologist) who is described as "a national hero". The science-versus-supernatural doubletalk is preposterous and never makes enough sense to invite serious consideration. At a beach party, a rock group does a song about Batman. When the goofy creature advances toward the camera, the fin sticking out of the left side of its head frequently refuses to stand out like it's supposed to. Since the beast is an early version of a reincarnated girl, it's repeatedly referred to as a female, but, just like in FRANKENSTEIN'S DAUGHTER (1958), the suit is obviously being worn by a man. Cops always find trails of seaweed leading to and from the locations of the creature's attacks but there's never an inch of seaweed hanging on the beast when we see it. In at least one scene you can hear the director whispering instructions to his actors, and at one point a strange echo effect kicks in, so bits of dialogue can be heard twice. The whole movie is grainy and sometimes suffers from severe color shifts or goes momentarily out of focus. Many shots go on too long and the actors deliver their lines in slow, stiff, aggressively unrealistic monotones. (It's probably unfair to entirely blame the actors for their weak performances, since they had only Larry Buchanan to direct them.) When a man fires a gun, we see a closeup of his hand holding the weapon but clearly NOT firing it, while a noise like someone slamming a door is dubbed in to suggest the gunshot. The script says the victims are horribly mutilated, but one dead body is found propped up on a sofa without so much as a drop of blood visible on it. Buchanan used to complain about how little time and money he was given to make these things, but even taking his limited resources into account he should have come up with something a little less awful than this. There aren't any interesting camera setups, effects, or anything else that might have added a little professionalism. As with his other features, Buchanan directs with his typical stunning personal balance of incompetence and indifference. Another fine mess brought to you by Azalea Pictures, a company with a name that sounds significantly like "assail ya".