Zontar: The Thing from Venus

The best part of the movie is knowing it was filmed in Dallas in 1966. Actually, the exterior shots of the scientist's headquarters were filmed at my childhood home in Dallas -- it was quite contemporary for its time. One Sunday morning the producers knocked on the door wanting to use our home, we consented, and 2 days of muddy footprints and dirty coffee mugs later, the actors and filmmakers left. We enjoy watching the familiar scenes shot at White Rock Creek and Casa Linda Shopping Center -- particularly the mass chaos scenes of a running mob. Not a great plot and especially bad props -- Zontar looks like a black plastic bag stuck on a wire that flaps in the air.

This of course was the first movie i saw by the infamous Z-Grade Master Larry Buchanan. I saw It Conquered The World (1956) the monster was kinda stupid looking in the original but it was made like that for Venus gravity reasons, i still enjoyed the original being a B-Movie Buff myself & it was by Roger Corman one of the most well known Producers & Directors of Sci-Fi & Horror Cinema. Well I read about Buchanan's Version on the net saw screen caps & all I thought the monster in this remake looks better so i asked for it for my Birthday in September of 2001 i got it & watched it. I knew John Agar from other Sci-Fi & Horror Flicks he was really good in this one the other acting was alright not as good as him though of course i still really enjoyed it. As we all know Susan Bjurman of course was no Beverly Garland at the role & not as beautiful as Garland, but she was good at the acting part. Tony Houston was good but he was no Lee Van Cleef. Pat Delaney was as good as Sally Fraser & as beautiful i thought. The original was better in some ways & Buchanan's version was better in other ways. So overall I really liked it.

Dreadful remake of a B picture called It Conquered the World made by Roger Corman and starring Beverly Garland. This version has the king of Z's Larry Buchanan directing and a tired looking John Agar starring. Agar is in fact the only cast member that might be accused of being or having been a thespian. He also looks like he is just able to keep his composure every time he says the word Zontar or looks at a lobster-like bat alien "flying" around. Just like in the It Conquered the World, a man has contacted an alien from Venus who uses the human as a means to secure knowledge so that it can come to Earth and begin to control it. Much of the plot is the same as Buchanan had agreed to remake some of the old AIP films(like he did with The Eye Creatures - a blatant remake of Invasion of the Saucermen). I like the old, cheesy Corman film. It had heart amidst no budget, and it had talent in Corman and Garland. I even learned to like the absurd triangle, down-to-the-ground Venusian. But this film doesn't have any of that same magic. Buchanan isn't the worst director in the world, but he just isn't very good either. This movie is so cheap that nothing looks like any real care or money went into it. That is patently obvious when you see the horrid acting by all concerned except Agar who is just reasonable at best. Tony Huston as Keith Ritchie, the man responsible for bringing Zontar to our planet, is easily the worst. Nothing he says has any conviction to it whatsoever. Susan Bjurman plays his wife and is just as awful. How about the scene where she she says she didn't want to marry a monster. I was crying from laughter - not the kind of laughs that were meant to be intentional. Buchanan DOES try for laughs here and there with some soldiers, but the humour is real lame and tired material. Special effects? I mentioned the most dazzling already -- alien "bats" that look like flying lobsters and unconvincingly land on the back of necks. The other primary special effect is the alien itself, and I will be completely honest when I say that I much prefer the alien from It Conquered the World for its comparative creativity and realism. If you have seen that film, then you know just how bad it must be in this one. This film stinks to be sure but is full of great laughs in a not-in-good way. Just listen to the dialog, "This will take a second" says Huston, Agar, with as stoic a face as possible, returns and says, "I have a second." Most of the dialog is filled with similar creative juices.

Badfilm addicts all have that one special piece of drek which is their personal favorite awful movie. For some, it will always be the Godzilla, Gamera, and Starman movies. Others will have that soft spot for The Thing With Two Heads, In The Year 2889, or Creation Of The Humanoids. And naturally, badfilm devotees are devout members of the cult of Ed Wood, for whom viewings of Plan Nine From Outer Space are a religious sacrement. But for myself, my one special badfilm has to be Zontar: The Thing From Venus.

Perhaps it's because this film was one of the movies I grew up with. Zontar was a staple of the local Sunday Morning Movie program on TV which I watched religiously as a kid. Words cannot quite describe the "quality" of this movie. It can only be experienced. Zontar was evidently made in somebody's home, a local high-school, and a shopping mall in a small town situated near a cave by low-budget schlockmeister Larry Buchanan. It's not that Zontar is an exceptionally bad movie made by exceptionally awful no-talent hacks. Simply, the various elements of this movie just happen to combine in just the right way to make Zontar a classic of Grade-Z cinema.

The "plot" goes something like this: Zontar, a giant three-eyed, bat-winged mutant lobster from Venus, hitches a ride on a satellite to takeover Earth with the aid of ex-high school science nerd Keith Ritchie (Anthony Houston). Only the brave but relentlessly wooden Dr. Curt Taylor (John Agar) stands in its way. Zontar takes over various humans with its injectopods; small creatures who fly with the aid of some guy holding them on the end of a stick. Mrs. science-nerd (Susan Bjurman) whines about the victims losing their personalities, only it swiftly becomes evident that only after being taken over by Zontar do any of the people in this movie even have personalities in the first place.

Zontar begins the takeover by imposing massive Republican-style energy deregulation like they now have in California, which soon shuts down everything --electricity, gas, cars... Everything. This causes the townspeople to run about like brainless sheep through the shopping mall car park. From here, the plot thins. Curt and Keith debate philosophy over the phone. While Keith stays by his plutonium crystal radio-set, Curt barely manages to avoid becoming a Zontar zombie himself, which means he gets to remain the same lovable drone he's always been. Curt then proceeds to solve the problem of Zontar as any true red-blooded American would --by shooting everybody. He goes to Keith's house to have one more debate with his old friend before shooting him. During this, Mrs. science-nerd, having gone to the caves, is killed by Zontar, after which Keith switches sides. Curt shoots some more people, and Keith takes his handy homebuilt plutonium laser and kills both Zontar and himself. Victory for the Earth, however, means the survivors (and audience) must endure a boring monologue by Curt Taylor about the nature of mankind.

Most badfilms were made by directors devoted to their particular conception of "art" (e.g. John Travolta's and Roger Christian's Battlefield Dearth). Some are conscious ripoffs of higher-budget and better quality movies (e.g. Roger Corman's Star Wars knock-off, Battle Beyond The Stars). Zontar manages to surpass the "standards" of this genre by being not only a bad movie in its own right, but also by being itself a direct line-by-line steal of Roger Corman's low-budget schlock classic It Conquered The World (1962). For this alone, Larry Buchanan has to be hailed as a schlockmesiter of the first rank by taking cinematic incest to new dimensions and in the process managing to mutate ICTW, merely a typical piece of drek, into a true Grade-Z psychozen experience.

Seems like this is a little muddled. AIP-TV needed some truly inexpensive features to pad out a syndication package, and Buchanan ended up with the job. Reports vary, but they apparently used scripts that were "readily available", with the following results:

It Conquered The World - Zontar, The Thing From Venus

Invasion Of The Saucer Men - The Eye Creatures

Pajama Party - Mars Needs Women The She Creature - Creature Of Destruction

The Day The World Ended - In The Year 2889

Pretty mindbending to experience these, when unprepared. I was dozing in and out of "Zontar" the first time, and I woke up thinking I had dreamt most of it.

I'll have to accept the common thought that much was filmed around Dallas, but I have to say that it sure looks like Bronson Canyon much of the time...heh

--Judex.1--