Tuesday, April 07, 2009

Movie review – “It’s Alive” (1969) **

Larry Buchanan doesn’t have the best reputation in the world but I quite enjoyed this little piece of low budget horror sci-fi. It starts with quite a creepy sequence, a narrator talking as a car drives along in the rain. And the ensuring plot is serviceable – a squabbling husband and wife get lost and run out of gas; they wind up at an isolated house inhabited by a married couple who turn out to be keeping a prehistoric creature in a cave in the backyard. Tommy Kirk is a guy they run into who turns out to be a palaeontologist (there’s a touch of the Ross Geller about him). If you’re wondering how Buchanan gets a feature out of three people stuck in a cave, the answer is he doesn’t really – there’s around half an hour of flashback explaining how the woman half of the dinosaur-owning couple winds up there. In fact, this sequence is fairly full on.

Some erratic acting, flat moments and a laughable monster but it’s not bad, and the use of narration, although presumably inspired by budget more than anything else, is effective. Kirk is professional if pasty-faced there’s a scene where he’s been stuck in the cave for a while and he looks poorly and you can’t help wondering if that’s what he looked like when he was on drugs.

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