(1964)
Dir - Larry Buchanan/Claude Alexander
Overall: MEH
Part D-rent nudie flick, part Häxan remake, The Naked Witch is the only collaboration between Claude Alexander and schlock-peddler Larry Buchanan, the former never garnishing a single credit on another movie again. The first half is almost entirely a narrated history of witchcraft done by both an uncredited Gary Owens and the film's "star" Robert Short who takes over recanting his own tale of running into the title lady in a German Texas town while researching his thesis paper. After that, the pacing takes a substantial plunge as bad organ music plays through scene after scene of Libby Hall staring into the camera, bathing in a stream, dancing around, or frolicking with her shirtless new college student friend. The finale is laughably abrupt and anticlimactic, (Short yells at Hall to not kill another girl, she falls down, the end), but considering that this film was made for no other purpose than to have a tantalizing title as to scam a few bucks off of unsuspecting movie-goers, one should not be expecting much. At least the comparatively more fun and campy elements are presented up front as to not render the entire thing an insulting waste of time.
(1967)
Overall: MEH
The first of numerous nil-budgeted American International Pictures colored remakes that director Larry Buchanan made for television, The Eye Creatures, (Attack of the Eye Creatures), has the added misfortune of featuring the most charisma-deficient leading man of all time John Ashley receiving top-billing. To give Ashley a break, he is hardly the most embarrassing ingredient here since the movie is brimful of cheap sets, uninspired direction, flat cinematography, awkward attempts at humor, lazy plotting, and abysmal special effects. It is a film that is either ripe for being ridiculed or just deserves to be ignored, but at least all parties involved seem to be in on how pathetic of a product they are making. The original film Invasion of the Saucer Men came ten years earlier and still had a goofy agenda, but this dollar-bin reinterpretation throws in a peeping tom angle as military personal spy on teenagers making out in their spiffy convertibles instead of keeping an eye on the yo-yo spacecrafts that are landing nearby. Elsewhere, it indulges in monotonous, (bad), dialog exchanges between Ashley and a crop of local unprofessional actors who do their best with the knowingly absurd, "little alien takeover that could" material. Also, the monsters do not look any more or less ridiculous than they did in any drive-in cheapies from the day, and at least the script called for them to be shot exclusively at night.
(1967)
Overall: WOOF
Another D-rent genre work by director Larry Buchanan for the small screen, Zontar: The Thing from Venus, (Zontar: The Invader from Venus), is a loose remake of the 1956 Roger Corman film It Conquered the World, and a disastrously dull one at that. The alien thing from Venus of the title communicates through electronic blips and bloops to Anthony Huston, promising the NASA scientist that it is here to relieve Earth of all our ills. The Great Zontar also sends puppet bat birds to attack people and make them brainwashed slaves, but we are given few examples of this compared to tortuously plodding scenes of people talking about what is going on while standing in nondescript rooms. It has an Invasion of the Body Snatchers angle thematically where humankind is stripped of its emotions in order to facilitate an extraterrestrial takeover, but Buchanan has no means to elevate the material with the near non-existent budget and shooting schedule that he has to work with. Location filming, local actors trying their best, a "point the camera at them while they finish their dialog in one take because we have forty-seven other scenes to shoot today" sense of staging, stock music playing arbitrarily in the background, and the aforementioned criminal lack of exciting set pieces renders this a laborious watch. It is competent enough as to not be fun bad, but certainly boring enough to be avoided at all costs.
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