Directed by Kinji Fukasaku

Written by Bill Finger and Ivan Reiner

Run Time: 90 min

Tagline: "The Green Slime is coming!"

Other Titles: Death and the Green Slime, Gamma #3 Big Military Space Operation (Japan)

Classic quote: Doctor Lisa Benson looking over a bloody, smoking, charred body: "He’s dead."

The Green Slime is an odd sort of picture. Produced and filmed in a Japanese studio, written by an Italian screenwriter, and starring American actors, it all adds up to one huge schlock-fest.

The creator of this silly space monster tale, Ivan Reiner, has a few other writing accomplishments to his name: Snow Demons (1965), The Galaxy Criminals (1965), The Deadly Diaphonoids (1966), and of course, our feature presentation. Interestingly enough, an uncredited co-author of the story is none other than Bill Finger, writer of the stupendously awful Track of the Moon Beast released in 1976.

Japanese director Kinji Fukasaku is well known for his work both inside and outside of Japan. With over 60 films completed under his direction, and over 20 films written, this prominent artist was awarded the Government’s Medal with Purple Ribbon in 1997 for his contribution to the film world.

The special effects are typical for this type of film, i.e., low budget. The man responsible for these efforts, Akira Watanabe, is certainly no hack. With over 40 films to his credit (mostly Godzilla films and assorted ‘space’ adventures), I’m sure Akira was constrained more by the budget than by his imagination.

"The Green Slime" is a hilarious example of a groovy-1960′s cheap monster movie. Maybe a little cheaper than the rest, but it’s more entertaining because of it. And hey! What other space monster movie has a Green Slime theme song!:

"Open the door, you’ve got a secret.

To find the answer is to keep it.

You’ll believe it when you find,

Something screaming ‘cross your mind…

Green Sliiiiiiiiime!

"What can it be, what is the reason?

Is this the end to all that’s breathin’?

Is this something in your head?

Will you believe it when you’re dead?

Green Sliiiiiiime! Green Sliiiiiiiiime! Green Sliiiiiiiiiime!"

Anyway, here’s the song in all of it’s glory for you:

	Jack Rankin (Robert Horton) Veteran Western actor Robert Horton takes on the role of studly Jack Rankin. Besides over 20 films, Robert has appeared in several T.V. shows during the years, including a visit to Johnny Carson’s The Tonight Show in 1970. Robert’s last appearance was a guest role on the popular mystery television program Murder, She Wrote in 1989.
	Vince Elliot (Richard Jaeckel) Veteran character actor Richard Jaeckel portrays the hard-headed captain of Gamma 3. With nearly 100 films under his belt, Richard has often appeared as a rough-and-tumble tough guy, including the hard-as-nails Drill Sgt. Bowren in The Dirty Dozen . His career also includes a few appearances on Baywatch as Capt. Ben Edwards, and he even popped up on Fantasy Island back in 1983. After being diagnosed with cancer in 1994, Richard was quoted as saying, “I know people are pulling for me to beat this thing, but let them have a glass at the bar for me and let it go at that.” I think that’s class.
	Lisa Benson (Luciana Paluzzi) Doctor Lisa Benson seems to be everywhere in film except the sickbay. Not that I’m complaining. Luciana has shown up in over 60 films in her long career including the role of Fiona Volpe in the 1965 James Bond classic Thunderball, and a bit part in the first Italian Sword-N-Sandal "epic" Hercules (1958).

We open in space. Which is a good place to start in a space movie. Across the screen floats the U.N.S.C Gamma 3, a half-way decent model space station. Inside the "Command Center" (the words "Command Center" are actually written on the outside of the ship for some reason…), the crew is busily at work, while computers ping, lights blink, and colorfully clad crew members race back and forth performing their space duties.

Cut down to Earth, specifically UNSC headquarters, a room filled with a busy staff and, yes, a gazillion computers arrayed with blinking lights (most aren’t labeled in any fashion, so who knows what they’re supposed to indicate.). And by the way, the operations room here looks incredibly similar to the bridge on Gamma 3…hmmm…they wouldn’t use the same set for both locations, would they? (The model "city" used in this scene isn’t so bad given the fact that the film was made nearly 40 years ago. I guess the filmmakers blew the whole F/X budget on the models, because the monsters themselves…well, you’ll see.) I love these 1960′s visions of the future, full of optimism and rocket ship launch pads. Where did we go wrong?

Inside the headquarters, a leggy blonde delivers the latest satellite tracking reports to XXXX. "Same old garbage," he remarks while flipping through the paper, "Nothing exciting every happens around here." (Hmmm…I wonder if something exciting is about to happen?)

On cue, one of the satellite tracking boards goes haywire. "A lot of abnormal interference!", the board operator shouts. (Opposed to normal interference?) Anyway, the big blip on the radar board is magnified and projected on the standard Huge Projection Screen On The Wall that every space agency and government building seems to be equipped with. "That’s an asteroid!" an observant officer notes upon seeing a giant asteroid on the screen.

As many others have immediately noticed and commented upon, this asteroid resembles a gigantic meatball in every respect. The commander calls out to one of his lackeys to calculate the asteroid’s path. Upon seeing the predicted course, the commander’s face pales as he gasps, "It’s on a collision course with Earth."

Cue opening credits and the above mentioned "Green Slime" theme song. This great little groove-packed ditty was written and performed by Richard Delvy, the drummer for the popular 1960′s band "The Bel Airs". Believe me, this jam gets stuck in your head after hearing it a few times. I’ve been driving my wife nuts lately running around singing "Greeeennnn Sliiiiiimmmeeee!". Make sure to check out the little audio clip in the introduction to see what I mean.

Enter General Thompson. "This confirms my first guess," the General says upon perusing the report, "the only answer is to blast that thing out of the sky." As Thompson makes his way to his office, another hot blonde informs him that Commander Rankin has arrived. "Send him into my private office," Thompson commands. One of Thompson’s orderlies points out that Rankin has put in his resignation and it would be madness to send him on a mission where the chances of survival are "next to zero." (Seeing that if Rankin chooses not to do it, his chances, and the chances of everybody else are in fact zero, I don’t see what all the concern is about.) Thompson disagrees, reminding everybody that Rankin is "still his top officer" and he has full confidence in him. (Or is he the "rankin’ officer"? Ha ha! Get it…? oh never mind.)

Cut to an absolutely hilarious photograph of Thompson, Rankin, and a third astronaut, Elliot. The funny thing is that the photograph is real, but the actor’s heads have been (poorly) "merged" over the original astronaut’s faces. I choked on my coffee when I saw that picture! Man, I’m tempted to use it as my desktop background.

Inside Thompson’s office, Jack Rankin gazes at a picture and reminisces of times gone by. Thompson enters and notices Rankin looking at the photograph. "Rankin and Elliot," Thompson says with a sentimental tone, "The best space team we ever had."

"Yeah, until I blew it," Rankin says. Um, what are you talking about? I guess we’ll have to wait to find out since General Thompson changes the subject to a more pressing issue: namely the newly christened asteroid ‘Flora’, which, as was pointed out earlier, is hurtling towards the Earth.

"Flora, that’s a class two asteroid." Rankin remarks. (Man, he sure does know his asteroids!)

The problem? Flora is going to collide with the Earth at 7 a.m. the next morning: less than 10 hours! This impeding deadline does raise the question of how in the hell they didn’t notice such this ‘planet buster’ asteroid before now? Just how did it suddenly appear within a few hours journey from Earth? I mean, we’re talking about a Class 2 asteroid here, folks!

Ok, Ok. It’s a 1960′s cheapie monster movie, I’ll suspend disbelief and go along with it for now.

Thompson explains his plans for blasting the asteroid to smithereens. "Who’s in charge of the mission?" Rankin asks. Thompson can think of only one person with the "necessary experience". (Asteroid destruction experience?) However, since Rankin is retired, he will have to "volunteer" to lead the mission. Well, yes, he does volunteer or else there wouldn’t be a movie, so Thompson orders him to get his butt up to the Gamma 3 space station where equipment and crew will be waiting for him. Furthermore, Rankin will be put in charge of the space station for the duration of the mission. Just one little problem, Vince Elliot is currently in charge, and will not be too happy about relinquishing command to Rankin. (Conflict!)

General Thompson ends the briefing with a solemn "Good luck" punctuated by a thumbs-up. Jack returns the thumbs-up and leaves to face his destiny. (I guess because all American’s give each other the thumbs-up when parting company.)

Another sequence of cheap miniature space ship shots brings Rankin to the rocket ship that will ferry him up to Gamma 3. As kettle drums sound an ominous beat on the soundtrack, a model rocket lifts off from its miniature launch pad. (Look, I’m not trying to be overly picky about the model work done here. The models certainly are detailed, and even charming, but they are so obviously models that I just have to mention it.)

On the way up through the atmosphere one of the rocket pilots reports that they’ve "just passed through zero gravity." I’m not sure how that works, but Rankin seems to be OK with that. Wondering how long the trip is to Gamma 3? Well, I’ll tell you. 30 minutes.

On the bridge of Gamma 3, (Let me repeat that this set looks so much like the operations room back at UNSC headquarters that I thought the scene was taking place on Earth until one of the orderlies mentioned the approaching rocket. Hmmmm….) Commander Elliot watches the rocket flying towards the space station via a view screen. (Note how the rocket’s exhaust floats "up" in outer space.) Captain Martin, one of the officers of the Gamma 3, reminds Elliot that Rankin is aboard the ship. Not happy with having to give up his command to Rankin, even if only temporarily, Elliot swallows his pride and drops the subject by saying, "Since that’s the way it is, let’s be sure that’s the way it is!" (Hey, isn’t that a Zen koan?)

In the hallway, Elliot runs across Lisa, played by the red-headed Italian bombshell Luciana Paluzzi. (Why everybody else on board wears a blue military-style uniform while Lisa is clad in a silver, sleeveless, cleavage-revealing silver one-piece is not clear. But I’m not complaining.) Lisa asks Elliot to be on his best behavior with Rankin since they were best friends at one time. Oh yeah, and Rankin means nothing to Lisa anymore. (Hey! A love triangle! Who would have known?) Elliot complies and asks Lisa if she would like to join him in welcoming Rankin aboard. "I told him I never want to see him again," Lisa replies, "and I still mean it." (And she’s telling Elliot to behave himself?) Gee, this is all so original!

Rankin’s ship docks with Gamma 3 after which he disembarks. After wandering around the bustling landing bay, Rankin meets Elliot and they exchange a cordial greeting. Due to the time constraints, Rankin is set to leave in 20 minutes on his mission to intercept the asteroid. Thinking that he was going alone, Rankin finds out that his orders had been "modified" and he will in fact be accompanied by two of the Gamma 3 crew: Dr. Hans Halvorsen, the Station Space Consultant (?), and his assistant, Michael. (I guess he doesn’t have a rank so they just go on a first name basis.)

Elliot remarks that he to wants to tag along. (Rankin correctly notes, "Your place is here, Vince, and you know it.") Elliot reassures Rankin that his XO, Capt. Martin can handle the Gamma 3 while they’re away, and Rankin reluctantly allows him to come along. (Is it really that easy to change a rocket ship crew at the drop of a hat? Don’t these sort of things need to be planned a bit first? Oh well, this is The Future!) Rankin and the others (including a few Ensign No-Names which I assume will also end up in a cold, spacey grave) suit up, board their toy rocket, and blast off from the Gamma 3 towards the asteroid.

The model rocket arrives at the meatball, I mean asteroid, and Rankin takes the ship over the surface pointing out the various areas of operations. Basically, the crew will split up into 3 groups. Each group will plant a "tri-megaton unit" in the surface and viola: no more asteroid.

Once the ship lands, the 3 demolition teams (armed with rifles!?) board tracked surface vehicles (I’ll call them ‘buggies’) and leave the main ship. (As the crew looks around the asteroid’s surface, you can see the sound stage lights reflected in their helmets’ faceplates.) Rankin rallies the men and goes over last minute details. The most important is that they have less than an hour to plant the bombs and get back to Gamma 3. Why? Who knows. It makes it more exciting I guess.

The crews drive around for a while, navigating through the barren, desolate landscape of the asteroid’s surface. Well, maybe not completely desolate. One shot shows one of the buggies driving through a pool of water. Standing, liquid water on the asteroids surface. I’m no astrophysicist, but I don’t think you’re going to find pools of water in outer space.

Eventually, Rankin’s stops his buggie and says, "This place looks as good as any." (Wow! Talk about a finely calculated plan! Don’t they have, you know, certain exact locations where they have to plant the bombs? If it doesn’t make any difference, then why not just plant them right outside the main ship and then return to Gamma 3?)

Oh yeah, look at the background and you can see the actors’ shadows on the painting on the wall behind them. Oops, I mean ‘outer space’.

As the bombs are emplaced, Dr. Halvorsen studies the asteroid’s surface with a Geiger counter. (I guess it’s the only ‘spacey’ piece of equipment the film makers could afford for the scene.) Suddenly, Halvorsen notices a pulsating green glob of goo on the ground. He picks it up with a large pincers and is about to put it into a specimen jar (!!) he just happened to bring along, (that’s the first thing I would think of taking to an asteroid, wouldn’t you?), when he sees another green glob at the edge of the water. Doing what any highly trained Space Consultant would do, he simply drops the green glob he was holding, which splats all over his Geiger counter (!), and goes to have a look at the other glob. Why, hey! There’s little green globs all over the place. Oddly, the one that he dropped onto the Geiger counter seems to have grown, and is pulsating with a bright light. (Uh, Doc, don’t you think you should radio this in?)

Meanwhile, the drilling is completed and the bomb is removed from its carrying case. (The bomb is timed to go off using an analog clock, complete with ‘ticking’ second hand…to set off a nuclear bomb!?) What the astronauts don’t notice is that their buggy is being completely engulfed in these green gooey globs. As a matter of fact, green slimes have covered all the buggies, none of which will now start due to the slime’s energy-absorbing characteristics. Faced with no other option, the men start jogging back to the ship.

Out of the blue, Rankin receives a radio call from General Thompson back on Earth. It turns out that the asteroid is accelerating. (Hmmm…) Due to the new calculations, the bombs have to be detonated in 20 minutes.

"Do you realize what you’re asking?" Ranking shouts.

"I realize what I’m asking," replies Thompson.

I will say, that as the viewer, I don’t know what he’s asking, so it would have been nice for the story writer to have told me too. Oh well. I assume what Thompson’s asking is that they take a huge chance at detonating so soon, i.e., Rankin and his men won’t be far enough away from the asteroid to avoid taking a major, if not disastrous, hit from the blast.

After speaking with Thompson, Rankin goes back outside to inform the men of the new timetable.

"Detonation has been moved to three o’clock," Rankin says.

"That’s impossible!" shouts Elliot.

"That’s what I said."

Well, Rankin, if you look a few lines above, what you did say was "Do you know what you’re asking?", but never mind.

At that moment, Dr. Halvorsen runs up shouting excitedly about his green slime discovery. "It’s alive!" he shouts. Rankin, nonplussed, smashes the jar onto the ground, unknowingly splattering a glob of green goo on somebody’s space suit. (bum, bum, bum!)

The ship blasts off from the asteroid and races back towards Gamma 3. "Give it everything she’s got!" Ranking tells the pilot, noting that they have just 3 minutes before the multi-megaton nuclear bombs go off. "We’re over ten gee’s now!" grunts Elliot. (10 gee’s? I think they’d be unconscious, if not dead long before that. Assuming Rankin weighs around 170 pounds on Earth, his effective weight now would be in excess of 1,700 pounds. Needless to say, Rankin doesn’t look the least bit affected by this fact.) When the pilot hesitates to increase the speed, Rankin throws off his seat belt, jumps out of his chair, runs to the control console, and pushes the accelerator to the max. All at 10 gee, mind you.

Just as the bombs explode, reducing the asteroid to dust, Rankin pulls himself out of his seat and enables the "force shield". This shield envelopes the ship in a purple ‘cloud’ that sparkles a bit as the blast strikes. The ship shakes violently, buffeted by the forces unleashed by the nuclear bombs. Eventually, the tremors subside and the ship continues its journey back to Gamma 3.

Rankin and the crew are greeted by a gigantic cheering crowd in the landing bay and all seems well. Lisa bursts through the (unlocked) containment door to the landing bay and Rankin promptly chews her out from breaking decontamination procedures. Rankin turns to Doc Halvorsen and curtly orders him to run the decontamination checks 3 times. (Wow! 3 times!)

"Three times?" Elliot interrupts, "I can’t spare the equipment that long!"

Um, you can’t spare the decontamination equipment to decontaminate? What else were you going to use it for? Decontamination? Not sure what you’re getting at, Elliot.

When Rankin insists on decontamination, Elliot responds, "The crew on this ship has more important things to do!" (And this guy is the commander?) I mean, I have to take Rankin’s side on this issue. They just came back from an asteroid full of glowing, pulsating, green, blobs that they peeled off their buggies themselves…and Elliot doesn’t want to spend the time to decontaminate? Dude! Procedures! Procedures! (In the very next scene, the crew is shown standing on a rolling walkway, moving through a red-lit tunnel of sorts. I guess this is the decontamination equipment that couldn’t be spared. We also see the green goo on somebody’s space suit getting bigger as it absorbs the decontamination ‘energy’.)

Later, Rankin goes down to the sick bay to have his arm looked at. (He cut it doing the exciting Flying Away At Ten Gee’s scene) Well, guess who’s the doctor? Give yourself a gold star if you guessed Lisa. She treats his wound, rather roughly, and chews him out for being so strict with people. (Following decontamination procedures is being overly strict? And she’s a doctor?) Rankin and Lisa argue a bit, because the script calls for it, before Elliot comes around and informs Rankin that a communications channel has been established with Earth.

That evening, the crew of Gamma 3 hold a massive party to celebrate the asteroid’s destruction and the resulting salvation of the Earth. (Gee, you think that would call for at least a couple of beers, eh?) Champagne corks pop (with plenty of background cleavage shots), groovy 1960′s music blares in the background, and things are looking pretty good. By the way, all the men are still in uniform, while the women are dressed in very revealing mini-skirts. Huh.

Elliot proposes a toast to Rankin and the success of the mission as Lisa looks on. Cheers! By the way, Elliot lets the cat out of the bag: He and Lisa are getting married next week. Rankin’s face turns a dark shade of red, returns to normal, and then he mutters, "Congratulations." (Who wants to bet that Elliot and Lisa won’t be getting married next week?)

As the party continues, Washing Machine Orderly Nameless is taking the soiled space suits to some sort of cleaning chamber. He pushes a button, the chamber opens, and he pushes the space suits inside. Another button is pushed, resulting in a huge bank of lights coming to life (all this for a washing machine?) accompanied with high-tech futuristic "pinging" noises. (Once again, all this just to wash clothes?) As the cleaning cycle continues, we see the green goo, still stuck on the spacesuit, begin to grow and pulsate with an un-Earthly green light.

Meanwhile, Rankin and Lisa are sharing a slow dance together. (With Elliot’s permission, course.) As they weave about the dance floor, the ex-lovers discuss Elliot’s weaknesses as a commander along with the one mistake that is "eating him up" inside: the time he sacrificed ten men to save one.

Something like that. Let’s just get to the goofy monsters already.

Upstairs, or somewhere, Washing Machine Orderly notices that something is going wrong with the current load. "Oh my God!" he shouts upon seeing a bank of blinking lights which looks just the same as every other bank of blinking lights I’ve seen so far. He opens the door to the washing chamber and screams in agony. An alarm goes off downstairs in the dance hall (A ship-wide washing machine alert? How does that work? "ALERT! ALERT! Fabric softening overload! ALERT!")

Out of nowhere a security guard appears and reports to Elliot that there’s "trouble in the lab." (How do I know he’s a security guard even though his uniform is exactly the same as every other uniform? Because he’s wearing a silver motorcycle helmet.) Elliot asks "what sort of trouble," and the guard insists that he accompany him to the lab in order to see for himself. (Rankin, Lisa, and Dr. Halvorsen also tag along, because it’s their movie too.)

The lab itself has been destroyed, and laying on the floor is the scorched, battered, bloody body of the unfortunately orderly. ("He’s dead!" Doctor Lisa amazingly deduces upon seeing the smoldering remains.) Elliot notes that the kid was electrocuted. Hmmm. Suddenly the spot a burned bit of green slime hanging on a piece of broken equipment. Halvorsen remarks that it’s the same stuff that they saw on the asteroid.

"What’s it doing here?" asks Rankin.

"I don’t know," says Halvorsen.

"That’s your responsibility!" Rankin shouts in return.

I don’t see how it’s Halvorsen’s responsibility. First, he’s a "space consultant" (whatever the hell that is!), not chief science officer. Second, if they in fact went through the decontamination procedures as ordered, how is it his fault?

Whatever. Rankin orders a thorough search of the ship in order to find whatever it was that killed the orderly and left a piece of itself hanging on the equipment.

While the search is underway, one of the monitors on the bridge goes on the blink. A guard is dispatched to check out the "power terminal in block C." After creeping through a narrow access way, he discovers a mass of sparking wire, torn from the wall and laying on the floor. What he fails to see is the huge green creature sneaking up behind him. A long green tentacle wraps itself around his neck. Scratch one security guard. Elliot, Rankin and some others go to investigate and find the guard’s electrocuted body laying on the access way floor.

Suddenly a distressed voice breaks out over the ship’s loudspeaker system: "Emergency call to Commander Elliot! Come to the main power room at once!" (Uh oh! Not the main power room!)

Reaching the main power room, Elliot and Rankin discover a gaggle of guards looking up at one of the generators. Upon further investigation, they see a green thingee laying on the floor contentedly dragging its appendages along the generator, happily sucking power from the circuits. Rankin grabs a laser rifle in order to blast it. At that moment, because he’s a Scientist, Halvorsen runs up and begs Rankin not to kill it, remarking that it’s a "great discovery!" (Scientists…can’t live with ‘em, can’t live without ‘em!)

Well, since there’s still about an hour left of the movie, Elliot takes Halvorsen’s side just to spite Rankin, and the green bugger is spared. Gas and net guns are brought forward and the green monster is quickly subdued and captured. Or is it? The beast struggles and twists in the nets and finally rips itself free by using its sparkling tentacles. (Literally ‘sparkling’…Fourth of July sparklers are attached to the ends of the tentacles which the actor in the rubber suit wildly waves around.)

The monster zaps a guard and wounds Elliot before Rankin gets the chance to zap it with his laser rifle. The creature retreats from the beam, knocking another guard over a railing to his death and shoving another security man into a panel of high-voltage fuses. (This panel of lethal components is protected with a waist-high fence with a high-voltage sign hung on it. Really helpful, that. You know, don’t make the fence any higher than you have to, guys.) Finally, under Rankin’s unrelenting barrage of laser blasts, the monster flees down a dead end corridor. "Only ventilation shafts down there, sir," reports a guard. (Ahhh, yes, ‘Yee Olde Ventilation Shaft’, which is probably just big enough for the monster to squeeze into.)

Seeing that Elliot’s plan to capture it alive backfired, to say the least, Rankin announces that he’s taking command. (Um, does he have the authority to do that?) Anyway, the crew acquiesces and the guard is doubled at the corridor exit. (Gee, you think?) By the way, Dr. Halvorsen finds some green blood on the floor and swabs a bit up into a petri dish. (Does he just carry those around in his pocket?)

Back in the sickbay, Lisa is patching up Elliot’s wounds. (Why he was only cut by the monster while the ordinary crew members were electrocuted by its touch is not explained.) Finally, the big Confrontation. After a bit of Elliot’s goading, Rankin finally comes out and says that Elliot is not fit for command. Lisa tries to defend Elliot’s decision to capture the creature by noting that this is the man’s first encounter with extraterrestrial life. Rankin is not impressed. "Tell it to the wives of the guys in the morgue," he says before stomping off with his newly issued silver motorcycle helmet.

Meanwhile, a massive search is in underway. Security guards wearing a vast array of different colored uniforms (but all with silver motorcycle helmets), are driving around the ship in little golf-cart thingees and searching room-by-room for the unwanted visitor. You would think that a future spaceship of this size would have video monitoring equipment. Imagine how quickly they could find this thing, all from the safety of a surveillance center. But then we wouldn’t be able to see all the cool fights coming up.

A search crew is even sent outside the ship in order to take a look at the space station’s exterior. Unfortunately, the special effects used here are not of the highest quality, in fact, you can see the space station ‘through’ the partially transparent ‘astronauts’ from time to time. This search party consists of 4 men armed with laser rifles, floating around the outside of the ship without any apparent means of locomotion. Maybe that thing on his back is some sort of jet pack, but then where is the oxygen? Maybe they’re just holding their breathe.

The excitement of this scene is interrupted when Doctor Halvorsen calls Elliot and Rankin to the lab. Halvorsen has discovered that the monster’s blood cells "duplicate faster than anything known to man."

"It’s frightening," he adds, just to make sure we know that all this is ‘Bad’.

As Rankin and Elliot look on, Halvorsen takes a blood sample over to some sort of rigged up experimental apparatus. As the doctor applies electricity to the sample, it bubbles and expands. "It proves out!" Halvorsen remarks. "The animal feeds on energy!" Realizing that just one cell, if given access to an energy source, can grow to be one of those green monsters, Rankin gives the order that under no circumstances will anybody fire their weapons.

Meanwhile, Lisa and her entourage of nurses hook up one of their patients to the "Electronic Symptom Analyzer": a machine consisting of several buttons and a slew of unlabeled blinking lights. Noting that the machine is functioning rather oddly, Lisa looks into the alcove behind the machine where all the electronics are found. No! The Monster! "Get the patients out of here!" Lisa shouts as the nurses scream like a bunch of sorority girls in a panty raid. I will hand it to Lisa, while the others are cowering against the walls, she is doing more than her share of helping patients out of their beds and slinging gurneys at the monster. (I’m not sure why the medical staff and patients don’t just leave the room instead of cringing against the walls.)

An alarm is sounded and a security detail races to the sick bay. "Get back! Get back!" the soldiers shout. (Gee, you think?) Unfortunately, Rankin’s "no fire" order had not been issued in time and the guards open fire with their laser rifles. The beams cut into the monster’s bumpy hide spewing green goo over the floor.

In rushes Rankin shouting, "Hold your fire!" The soldiers back off as Rankin suggests that they could try and trap it in the sick bay. (Well, then leave and close the door! Sheesh!) After a few more ‘action’ scenes, including a hilarious shot of Rankin slinging his helmet right into the monster’s noggin, the monster is temporarily pinned against a wall with a bed and the men flee the room, locking the door behind them. (Hey! That was my idea!)

Out in the hallway, a video feed reveals that the monster is busy healing itself. (This "healing" process is realized by showing the monster rub a sparkler-adorned tentacle on its chest.)

"My God! It’s healing itself…" Halvorsen murmurs.

Elliot turns and asks, "You’re saying we can’t kill it?"

Well, no. That’s not what he said. But anyway.

Worse yet, the blood or slime or whatever it bleeds, is now forming into new little slimy monsters. (Through the magic of Playing Footage Backwards, the slime is seen gliding "up" the walls.) Elliot gets a brainstorm and orders all power in the infirmary to be shut off. (Duh.) Not to be out "maled", Rankin calls a staff meeting in the control room to hash out their next move.

Back on Earth, General Thompson receives a transmission stating that a "total quarantine" has been imposed.

"Total quarantine?" Thompson shouts. "Who does he think he is?" (Umm…the Commander? Does that count for anything anymore?)

Cut back to Gamma 3. Rankin makes his way to a make-shift infirmary where Lisa (and her flock of attendant hot nurses) are fussing over the monster’s latest batch of victims. Rankin informs Lisa that the wounded will not be evacuated to Earth do to the danger of getting even "one drop" of the creature back onto our planet. (Apparently, one drop would be enough to doom the entire Earth. I can’t say I would rate the Green Slime as dangerous as that…I mean, you can almost take one out by hitting it in the head with a motorcycle helmet. But hey, I’m no space commander.) As if to confirm the danger that everybody is facing, the lights begin to flicker. "Keep control," Rankin says to Lisa before rushing off to see what’s happening.

We next see a gaggle of green slimes dragging their rubber arms over some sort of electrical do-dad full of sparklers. I can only suppose that they are ‘juicing up’ or something. Or else they’re celebrating the Fourth of July.

In the control room, Elliot reports that he and Rankin have "doped out a plan." (Groovy!) I bet you’re curious, aren’t you? OK, here’s the plan. Evacuate all personnel from "C Block", then confine the monster "even further" into the storage room. How in the hell do they get the monsters into the storage room? I’m glad you asked. Elliot will cut all power in C Block, then "run a power-beam search car" to the storage room where a generator will be emplaced. Viola! The power-beam will lure the monsters into the storage room where they will be isolated.

One quick question.

Then what?

I guess I’ll just have to wait and see.

As planned, the generator is placed inside the store room as armed men take positions behind banks of equipment in the corridor itself. (Why are they armed with laser rifles? Don’t they just make the monsters stronger if hit with laser beams?) Hard to see. "Tense" seconds pass as the approaching "blackout" looms. Eventually the lights are cut and the entire space station is plunged into darkness. (Lisa and the nurses are still busy trying to evacuate all of the wounded when the lights go out. They were given 10 minutes to do the job, which seems to be not a heck of a lot of time. Nice.)

Right on cue, the monsters start making their goofy "squeaky" noise as they appear at the far end of the darkened corridor. A blast of Ominous Music indicates that this is Not Good. Rankin orders the car’s driver to slowly back up as the monsters follow the bright lights mounted on top of the vehicle.

Just as things are going so well, suddenly, and I mean suddenly, we cut to the darkened infirmary. (Well, not really darkened at all actually. I thought this was a black out…?) Somehow, a group of green slimes have broken into the infirmary and are now raising hell. Why did they stop following the light and go into the darkened infirmary? Hey, you tell me.

In the corridor, Rankin orders the men to kill the lights and then tosses a flashlight into the face of the nearest monster. (Why kill the lights? What’s happening here? Where is the infirmary in relation to these guys? These questions and more will not be answered for your inconvenience.)

Thankfully, Rankin appears in the infirmary and lures the monsters towards him with a flashlight, thus giving Lisa and her staff a chance to evacuate the last of the patients. I have to ask, why did they lure the monsters down a corridor which passes right in front of the still-occupied sick bay? Oh yeah. The script says so. Anyway, in an exciting Pushing Gurneys Down A Hallway scene, Lisa and the others manages to clear the sick bay and flee to B Block.

Somehow Rankin is back in the corridor, but surrounded by monsters. Elliot and his crew are now behind Rankin and lure the monsters away from Rankin. Really now, the mechanics of what is happening here, as far as "who is where", is really confusing. I think that the script required a certain sequence of scenes, so they people just "appeared" as needed in order to fulfill the action "sequence". Furthermore, these "action" shots consist solely of close up shots of the monsters so that we never get a chance to see just how few there really are. (Costumes cost money, you know…)

Well, ok, the monsters go towards Elliot’s light, leaving Rankin free to run a couple feet to his waiting car. So, now I’m totally confused by all this. The car was standing right next to him with a complete crew that didn’t do jack-squat to help him, like, say, turn on their lights? This scene is utterly confusing, and I’m too tired to give a damn. Now wait, suddenly Rankin is behind Elliot and his crew. (I give up.) Elliot and the others run from the monsters and join Rankin and the "light car", which starts backing down the hallway, once again luring the monsters into the storage room. (Hey, wasn’t that exactly where the plot was before the monsters rampaged in the infirmary? So what was gained by all this nonsense?) Yawn, Rankin turns on the lights in the storage room, monsters go into storage room where they make a bunch of sparks, as usual, and Rankin locks the door behind him.

Taking off his helmet after a job well done, Rankin orders C Block to be searched one final time. Alas, a booming noise from the sick bay reminds them that there is still a monster sealed inside. (Did they forget?!) Rankin calls for a "monitor car", which is as you might imagine, a car with a monitor screen where Rankin can see what’s going down in the sick bay. (Boy that is soooo much more logical than, say, a screen mounted in the wall outside the sickbay door…man, I should have been a space station designer.)

Sure enough, there’s the lonely occupant: A pissed off green slime monster.

"That door won’t hold it!" Elliot warns. (Seems to be doing the job so far…) Captain Martin suggests reinforcing the door with one of the cars.

"That won’t help," Ranking says. (Why this won’t help is never explained…because it sounds like a good idea to me.) By use of an "airlock panel" (?) Rankin suggests isolating the monster in C Block. (Umm..wasn’t that already the plan? Have I missed something here?)

"This section can’t handle it!" Elliot says. Just a minute. Your stupid plan was to contain the monsters in C Block in the first place! What the hell is going on here?

Rankin orders C Block evacuated in order to "make ready the air lock panel." OK, am I going crazy? Didn’t they already order C Block evacuated before they lured the monsters into the storage room? Headache alert. Headache alert.

Out of the blue, Halvorsen and Lisa come running down the hall. (Huh?! Didn’t she flee to B Block with her patients? Likewise, what the hell is Halvorsen doing there?) Halvorsen begs for a chance to retrieve his files from sick bay (or his office?) before they (presumably) open the airlock and flush the buggers into space. Rankin denies his request, but Halvorsen runs down the hall to his office to collect his things anyway.

Suddenly the monster busts down the sick bay door and makes his way towards the crew. As Rankin and the others make their way down the hall, the other monsters burst out of the storage room (Why? Wouldn’t they be satisfied sucking up juice from the lights in there? Why would they want to leave?) and the chase is on.

To add to the, er, excitement, Halvorsen pops out of his office, holding 5 or 6 manila folders in his arms (His life’s work?!) and almost gets run over by one of the cars. (Halvorsen drops his folders to the floor where you can see that half of them are empty!) The "speeding" car goes out of control, once again, hard to see what’s going on because of all the close-shots, presumably to hide how small the set really is. It’s really quite claustrophobic the way all this is filmed, I have no idea how long or wide the corridor is, nor where people are in relation to each other. It’s just a series of close-ups patched together with exposition from the actors so you "get" what is happening.

Doctor Halvorsen’s Life Work

Anyway, buggies crash, people yell, hard to see who. A latch is thrown and an airlock door slides into place, forcing Rankin to Leap-And-Roll to the other side Just As The Door Slides Shut. In fact, Rankin is soooo good that he can jump under the door with his helmet on and pop up on the other side without it! Man! Now that’s good!

The men quickly realize that Halvorsen is trapped on the other side with the monsters. This fact is confirmed by a video feed showing Halvorsen dodging the monsters and running for his life. (With some terribly dubbed "screams" that in no way match his mouth…maybe he’s a ventriloquist.) One genius suggests opening another door down the hall to allow Halvorsen to escape, but there is a car blocking the way. Rankin, Elliot and the others push and shove against the car, but it’s hopelessly jammed against something or other.

Elliot decides to open the original door to let Halvorsen out. Rankin (correctly) remarks that doing so would let the creatures in and, well, that’s not good. Since these guys are required to butt heads every few minutes, Elliot disobeys Rankin’s orders (boy, I would think there’s going to be not a few court martial proceedings after all this is over…) and walks over to raise the door. In a Dramatic Scene, Ranking points a laser rifle at Elliot and orders him to stop or else he’ll shoot. Just as the tension becomes unbearable (not), Lisa jumps in front of Elliot to stop Rankin from shooting. Ranking shoots and kills both Lisa and Elliot, and the station is saved.

No wait. I was dreaming.

Rankin holds his fire, Elliot opens the door, and in falls Halvorsen’s burned and bloody corpse. As Rankin correctly predicted, the monsters rush into the corridor while Rankin desperately fires into them with his laser rifle. (Doesn’t that make them stronger? Didn’t he issue an order explicitly forbidding firing on the monsters?) Once everybody is on the other side of the second air lock panel, the door is dropped into place, once again sealing the monsters off on the other side. (In other words, once again, we are back where we were 5 minutes ago.)

For some reason there is a closet full of explosive barrels just beside the door that the monsters set off with their sparkling arms. The resulting explosion destroys at least a third of the entire space station. (That must be one hell of an air lock door to protect Rankin and the others from the blast!) We are treated to an exterior shot of the ship when the explosion takes place, complete with smoke rising and debris falling ‘down’…in outer space. You have to wonder why they would keep such powerful explosives in what would appear to be a totally random place on the ship. Well, let’s continue.

Rankin and the others, now safe in B Block are regrouping and plotting their next move. Rankin asks a crew member if a scanner is still active in C Block. Despite the fact that the entire C Block is destroyed, the crewman says that yes, there is in fact a scanner working. (Now that’s one tough scanner!)

A quick camera scan reveals a bunch of dead monsters laying around.

"Look how they’re burned," Rankin says, " there must have been tremendous heat generated by the explosion."

Gee, you think?

Elliot notes that there are only 3 or 4 monster corpses…so where are the rest? Rankin calls for an external camera scan which reveals, via some totally crappy miniature work, a group of monsters on the outside of the ship where they are being healed by the sun. Rankin orders the solar generators to be shut down and Lisa to prepare her patients for evacuation. (Again!?)

Rankin contacts Earth and asks General Thompson for permission to evacuate the space station because he’s going to destroy it. Once again, just for the sake of being stubborn, Elliot argues against destroying the station. (Think now, Elliot, just what the hell else is there to do at this point? The ship is crippled and covered in self-reproducing, growing, space slime monsters, and half the crew appears to be injured or dying.)

For the gazillionth time, Elliot claims that he’s in command, and so on and so on. Rankin, finally fed up with Elliot’s subordination, orders the chief security officer, Captain Martin, to arrest Elliot and escort him to one of the evacuation ships. Elliot tries to punch Rankin, gets punched in the chops himself, and storms off the bridge in abject humiliation.

Thompson gives Rankin permission to proceed with the evacuation and destruction of Gamma 3. Captain Martin gives the order to open the "escape hatch". (I guess this is the one point of exit for the entire evacuation fleet.) Of course, the puppets, I mean the monsters, are crowded around the escape hatch, forcing Martin to quickly close it again.

Rankin takes a look via an external camera. Seeing that they are "going after the circuits on the solar generators" (?), Rankin orders 4 men to go out and "blast" ‘em off the ship. Elliot, sitting in shame in some sort of room, overhears the order and sneaks off to don a space suit himself. (Gee, I wonder if he’s going to sacrifice himself in order to save the others.) As luck would have it, the only person to spot Elliot sneaking off is Lisa (man, she’s everywhere!), who Tries To Stop Him From Doing It. Elliot shouts, "Don’t tell me what to do! I’m tired of taking orders!" Which seems like an odd thing to say for somebody whose chosen the military for a career, but never mind. Elliot goes on to accuse Lisa of still loving Ranking and yadda yadda zzzzzzzz.

Oi yoi yoi! Man, these are some stupendously terrible effects. You can see the space suit shadows on ‘outer space’ behind them! I think the last time I saw something like that was in an Ed Wood flick! No kidding! Then the guys ‘float’ (on wires) past the monsters who angrily wiggle their tentacles at them. (Casting even more shadows on ‘outer space’.) This is really crappy, crappy stuff here.

The team lands on the ship and starts firing at the monsters. So, let me ask this: Why do they have to land at all? Why not hover 20, 30, 40 feet above the monsters and just shoot from there? Anyhoo, the battle continues, for what that’s worth.

With the escape hatch supposedly clear of monsters, the first ship is launched. (Lisa, of course, is now in the control room watching over the launch of the ship!) And yes, those are suppose to be monsters on the outside of the ship in the picture to the left. Do you now realize what I go through for this web site?

As other ships are launched, Elliot and the others continue their struggle. For some reason, Elliot’s rifle goes "empty", so he simply throws it at the nearest monster and impales it through the eye!

With the entire crew evacuated except for the security detail (which for some reason includes Lisa…you would think she’d evacuated with her patients! I guess they can take care of themselves until they get back to Earth.) the final ship is made ready for launch.

Just as Rankin is leaving the ship, he is cut off from the control room by some green slime monsters. (And they came from….where?) Of course, who else but Lisa would be around to warn him to "Look out!" More bad news. The power output is too low to allow Earth to remotely guide the ship. Boy, it must be a Monday, eh? Rankin decides that he will be the one to fight his way back into the control room and set the guidance computer himself, after which he’ll put on a spacesuit and "drift up and meet you later." (!!!)

The final ship launches and picks up Elliot and his battle team via some more crappy miniature work. Lisa tells Elliot what Rankin is up to, and Elliot, in a fit of Manly Camaraderie, puts his space suit back on and floats back to the main ship to help him.

Meanwhile, Rankin has his hands full blasting monsters which seem to be absolutely everywhere. (Even though you never see more than 3 or 4 at a time, if you know what I mean.) Once again, for some reason, Rankin’s laser rifle stops working, and he too throws it and impales a monster through the eye! Incredible! Just as things are looking bad for Rankin, Elliot "Suddenly Appears" and blasts the last of the monsters, giving Rankin a chance to program the computer.

With the ship’s rockets engaged the ship begins its plunge into the Earth’s atmosphere, where it will presumably burn up along with all the monsters. (I wouldn’t think this would be 100% safe. One little speck of a monster could survive on a piece of wreckage. I would have simply shot the ship into interstellar space and been done with it. But that would have precluded the Heroic Finale for Rankin and Elliot.)

Elliot and Rankin make their escape. However, since Elliot has now completed his Selfless Sacrifice role in the film, he is cut down by a monster which appears out of nowhere. Rankin hauls Elliot’s lifeless body out of the ship and is successfully picked up by the last evacuation ship.

As expected, the Gamma 3 plunges into the Earth’s atmosphere, bursts into flames, and explodes. Yeah baby, it explodes real good.

Rankin calls Earth and reports the success of the mission. As a final gesture of respect, he gives all the credit to Elliot. As Lisa looks on with tears in her eyes, a somber Rankin gives one final salute to his dead friend…by giving the body a thumbs up! (What the…?!)

The ship descends to Earth, where I suppose Rankin and Lisa will get a bottle of Scotch and a hotel room.

As for me, I’m going to take an aspirin and go to bed.

Dennis Grisbeck (September 2005)

Read more about The Green Slime at

Written and Directed by Larry Buchanan (based on the story "Being" by Richard Matheson)

Run Time: 80 minutes

Tagline: Trapped In a Cave of Terror!

	Wayne Thomas (Tommy Kirk) Wayne Thomas, the intrepid and self-proclaimed “assistant professor of paleontology”, helps Leilla and Bella fight for their lives against Greely and his evil rubber-suited monster. Will Wayne manage to put his assistant paleontological professorship to the test and survive the ordeals of this film? Read on and see!
	Norm Sterns (Corveth Ousterhouse ) Bitchy, whiny Norm just can’t understand why anybody would want to drive cross country. But hell, he’s always willing to pull off the road and stop at the local creepy Ozark reptile farm. Note: Monsters love to eat people named ‘Norm’!
	Leilla Sterns (Shirley Bonne) Leilla, Norm’s wife, screams and faints as needed. She also falls in love with Wayne and does whatever the script requires. Anything else more than that is probably asking too much.
	Greely (Billy Thurman) The local creepy redneck, Greely, runs a “zoo” consisting of 3 snakes, a howler monkey, and an 80-foot mausasaurus. His hobbies include capturing women, feeding hitchhikers to monsters, and laughing like a maniac.
	Bella (Annabella Weenick) Bella, Greely’s last victim, finds the strength to resist Greely’s domination and help the prisoners out of the cave…but will it be too late for her? (cue evil laughter)
	The Monster (Billy Thurman) The “monster” lives in a cave and eats people. And that’s about it. Are you scared yet?

Say what you want about this film, director (and writer, and editor) Larry Buchanan never had any allusions as to the quality of his work. In fact, he often referred to himself as a "schlockmeister", and thought of the term as such a badge of honor that he used it in the title of his autobiography: It Came from Hunger: Tales of a Cinema Schlockmeister.

Yet no matter how bad his movies have been, and make no mistake, they are bad, they always turned a profit; even if barely. Compare that with the millions of dollars the so-called Hollywood professionals seem to flush down the toilet every week, and you have to give all the Buchanan’s and the Corman’s of the world a little credit: they made money and probably had fun while they did it. (Ed Wood is a different story, but let’s let poor Ed rest in much deserved peace for now.)

Buchanan embarked on his directorial career by helming a few low-to-middle ranking Westerns in the 1950′s before moving on to the fetid (and profitable) grounds of exploitation and science fiction. Tapping into the social and racial issues of the 60′s, Buchanan created ‘socially conscious’ films such as Free, White and 21 (1963), High Yellow (1965), and even a 1964 "what-if" film entitle The Trial of Lee Harvey Oswald, set in an alternate universe where Lee Harvey Oswald wasn’t murdered and actually ended up facing trial for Kennedy’s assassination.

After Buchanan made a name for himself as somebody who could get the job done, and done cheap, AIP hired him to direct a series of made-for-TV remakes of some of their earlier sci-fi films such as (and among others)

• Zontar: The Thing from Venus (1966), a remake of Roger Corman’s 1956 It Conquered the World
• In the Year 2889 (1967) a remake of the post-nuclear war flick, Day the World Ended (1955)
• Creature of Destruction (1967), based on the 1957 hypnotist-turns-beautiful-woman-into-monster The She Creature.

On a side note, It’s Alive was actually supposed to be a remake of "Being", a film production of Richard "I am Legend" Matheson’s story by the same name. (By the way, if you haven’t read the original "I am Legend" book: Read it! The movie is crap compared to it.) Much to AIP’s chagrin, "Being" had to be shelved in 1964 after lead actor Peter Lorre passed away before filming could commence. Never missing an opportunity to make a few bucks off of anything, the studio dumped the script for "Being" into Buchanan’s lap for the remake, i.e., It’s Alive, even though the original film was never made. Thus, It’s Alive might very well be the only "remake" of a movie that was never actually made.

Larry Buchanan, the self-proclaimed "schlockmeister" himself, passed away in 2004 in Tucson, Arizona at the age of 81. A New York Times obituary eloquently summed up Buchanan’s opus:

“One quality united Mr. Buchanan’s diverse output: It was not so much that his films were bad; they were deeply, dazzlingly, unrepentantly bad. His work called to mind a famous line from H. L. Mencken , who, describing President Warren G. Harding’s prose, said, ‘It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it.’"

Anyway, our tedious 90 minute journey begins with that eternal favorite cheap-movie bit: narration played over camera footage shot through a car window. Yes, folks, the Sterns, Norman and Leilla, are driving deep into the Ozarks mountains as part of their cross-country drive.

"And then…it started to rain."

Wow. Yeah. Exciting. This is going to be a fun movie.

Now instead of looking out of the side window as we drive by a featureless landscape, we endure several moments of looking out the windshield as, the narrator previously pointed out, it has started to rain. (The director, in a cruel touch, even includes the highly-annoying "squeak-squeak" of the windshield wipers as they sweep back and forth. Thanks, Larry.)

Ah, yes…now for the required "legend" story…

The local legend has it that when it "rains and the sun shines at the same time the Devil is kissing his wife."

HUH???!!

You call that a legend? And I thought Johnny Longbow’s legend was dumb!

As the narration drones on (narration generously provided free of charge by Director

Larry Buchanan), we see a "Dinosaur Land" type tourist trap off to the side of the highway which "…bekons to the traveler…" At least according to the narrator. To me it says "Run the other way!"

"If Norman Stearns had known what danger lay screened by an Ozark forest…he never would have left the highway."

(And if I had known how bad this film actually would be, I never would have bought the damned DVD.)

So, narration completed, the car turns to the right, even though we just saw the Dinosaur Park on the left side of the road. But who cares, right?

With the credits rolling, and still looking out the damned windshield, Norm suddenly realizes that they’re almost out of gas. (Oh man, not the old Out of Gas bit…c’mon…)

"We should have at least been in Los Angeles by now," Norm complains.

Uh, Norm…you’re in Missouri, so you’re, what…1800 miles behind schedule! But you still have time to pull off the main road and take a look at a run-down Dinosaur Park in the middle of the freakin’ Ozark mountains??!! Oh, and you’re out of gas?!

Again: what an idiot.

After driving along a creepy dirt road for a while, Norm spots a jeep pulled off to the side of the road and stops to take a drink from a metal canister tied to the back of the Jeep. (Boy, Norm, help yourself.) When the Jeep’s owner, Wayne Thomas (Tommy Kirk), pops out of the bush, Norm asks for directions back to the highway. Since they’re low on fuel, Wayne suggests that the Stearns continue up the road to a, bum! bum! bum!, small farmhouse where they might be able to buy a little gas.

Cut to said farmhouse where creepy Farmer Greely runs a creepy "zoo" for the tourists. (For some reason, a howler monkey is foleyed onto the soundtrack at this point…Maybe Buchanan wasn’t aware that there are no howler monkeys in central Missouri…who knows.) The Stearns pull up and Norm begins to (rudely!) honk his horn like it’s some sort of service station. (Note to Norm: Don’t be rude to Ozark rednecks that run creepy zoos in the middle of nowhere.)

Greely announces that the gasoline truck will be around later in the day, so Norm and Leilla might as wait inside until the truck shows up. (Greely’s sly questions as too whether or not anybody is waiting for them, looking for them, etc, would have raised anybody’s hackles, but, no, not the stone-headed Stearns.)

Once inside, Greely scurries off to find his house keeper, Bella, only to find her sulking in her room, refusing to "do it again". What this "it" is, well, you can probably imagine it involves the giant ping-pong ball eyed monster on the DVD cover. Greely, always considerate of other’s feelings, smacks Bella around a bit and threatens to feed her to the monster if the Stearns catch wind of what’s going on and run away. Realizing that she has no choice, Bella goes downstairs to distract the Stearns while Greely goes outside to hide their car.

Just as Greely gets outside, Wayne drives up and asks if the Stearns are ok. (Why would he care?) Greely, responds by konking him on the back of the head with his pistol and dragging him down into a cave behind the house. Say what you may about Greely, but he sure is efficient.

Meanwhile, Bella brings the Stearns some tea and engages them in nervous chatter but balks when Norm asks her to open the curtains because she’s afraid they’ll see Greely dragging Wayne off into the woods. (Not to mention that they’d see Greely hiding their car.) Murmuring something about how "Mr. Greely doesn’t like to have them open," Norm shouts back "Well! He’ll just have to make an exception this time!" (I guess Norm isn’t used to being a guest in somebody’s house!) Leilla, the only one with any kind of sense, demands to leave, but Norm poo-poo’s her concerns and hell, the car’s out of gas anyway, so blah blah blah.

Greely, with the aid of crappy editing, suddenly teleports back into the living room and suggests that they take a gander at his "zoo" while they wait. As Leilla whimpers with nervous fear, and really Norm, maybe you should pay more attention to her misgivings, the Stearns accompany Greely behind the house to see his eclectic menagerie of stock-footage animals. (Snakes, monkeys, some sort of bob cat…basically whatever footage Buchanan could get his hands on for the scene.) At the end of the massive collection of, oh, 5 animals, Greely takes them down into his cave to see his "prize" animal.

Greely’s Amazing Zoo

Being a crappy, talky, turgid film, we’re now tormented with a long, long walking scene as the actors trudge through a real cave that I guess the producer bribed to have opened to them on a Sunday or something. (Or maybe they just filmed it when the tour guides weren’t looking.)

(In fact, the cave scenes were filmed in Onyx Cave, Eureka Springs, Arkansas, a local tourist destination. I couldn’t resist looking up the web site for this place. The cave does have self-guided tours, and even though movie was filmed 40+ years ago, I suspect it has always been so – I wouldn’t be surprised if the camera and equipment were just snuck in and used to film the scenes.)

When Greely leaves the Stearns alone for a moment ostensibly to go and "turn on the rest of the lights", Norm and Leilla gaze around the cavern in numb disbelief.

"What kind of a place is this?" Norm wonders while peering about the, well, cave. So I Guess that’s what it is, Norm. Oh, wait, now I see it…there’s a bed and nightstand standing against the far wall. Yeah, that would be kind of strange.

To my great non-surprise, Greely pulls a lever which releases a set of iron bars behind Norm and his unwitting wife. "This room…wasn’t intended…just for us," Leilla stammers, "There’s been others here…what do you supposed happened to them?" (Once again, we’ll just have to take the actor’s word for it since the viewer is never shown anything.) Suddenly, up crawls a wounded Wayne Thomas from behind a set of stalagmites where Greely had previously dumped him. (How somebody couldn’t notice a grown man laying behind a little stalagmite is beyond me.)

OK, this is really BS. Thinking back to when Greely bonked Wayne on the head while the Stearns sat in the living room, there’s no way he could have dragged Wayne that deep into the cave and gotten all the way back to the living room in the time it took Norm to stand up and open the curtains. No freakin’ way. Normally I wouldn’t make such a big deal out of what might be considered an insignificant detail, but there are a couple of factors to keep in mind:

1) This movie makes me mad, so I want to "get even" with it.

2) This site thrives on insignificant details. So…there. Now I feel better.

Later that evening, Greely tries to rationalize his actions to Bella, who’s having second thoughts about the whole "feed strangers to the monster in the cave" lifestyle she’s been sharing with him all these years. Greely, using an allegory involving a drop of rain, a lizard, and a hog (!) tries to explain in a round-about way how everything is important in the circle of life.

Or something.

Meanwhile, back in the cave, Leilla sees the iron bars and locked door and astutely notes, "It looks like we’re prisoners here." Boy, there’s no sneaking one by you, is there Leilla?

"Hey, there’s a tunnel back here," Norm shouts, "It goes almost straight down!" (Uh…how in the hell is that supposed to help then? Shouldn’t you be more interested in the "up" direction?)

Anyway, Bella brings some food down to the prisoners at which time Norm immediately accosts her and demands to know about the tunnel.

"The house…[dramatic pause]…the cellar of the house," Bella meekly informs him.

"You could both go to jail for this!" Norm threatens as he demands to see Greely. (Um…could go to jail?)

Leilla jumps in and tries a softer, ‘womanly’ approach.

Bella quickly confesses that there is an "it", but if she reveals any more information, then Greely will give her to "it" as well.

Realizing that this would be an ideal time to escape, Norm and Wayne overpower Bella, force her up the tunnel to the cellar door, and force Greely to unlock the passage and let them out.

Wait. No. That’s what anybody with half a brain would have done.

Our group of imbeciles, simply ask Bella to give them her lantern as they let her traipse back out of the cage and lock them in again.

"What is this thing?" Wayne asks. (Well, Wayne, actually it’s an "it", but let’s not split hairs.)

Norm, actually showing a rare glimpse of intelligence, suggests that Greely is just trying to scare them into paying him money for their release.

"Well, they don’t stand to make too much off an assistant professor of paleontology!" Wayne says in what has to be the Year’s Clunkiest Line of Dialog.

Anyhoo, Wayne takes a flashlight and decides to explore the tunnel.

"You really take this ‘thing’ business seriously, don’t you?" Norm derides him. (Again, guys, at the risk of being pedantic, if they’d listened to Bella, they would remember that it’s an "it", not a "thing". Sheesh! Attention to detail, people, attention to detail.)

Not wanting to see Wayne go into the scary crevice alone, Leilla accompanies him into the darkness. Norm, not to be out-toughed by an assistant professor of paleontology, reluctantly trudges along with them into the "darkness". (I type "darkness" in quotes because this was filmed in a tourist attraction after all, so as our intrepid prisoners plunge deeper into the unknown, there are helpful handrails (!) and artfully placed spot lights illuminating all the rock formations in cheerful colors. It just doesn’t say "Cracks of Death".)

"Listen!" Wayne says as the trio comes to an abrupt stop.

"It sounds like water," Norm helpfully explains to the viewer since the soundtrack is absolutely silent. (I guess the sound-fx guys forgot to foley water noises over the scene. I’m not kidding. It’s really that bad.)

"Good Lord, look at this," Norm says with as much enthusiasm as somebody asking for an Arby’s job application.

Yep, it’s another helpfully illuminated and hand-railed staircase leading down into even more indistinguishable caves. But this time it’s extra spooky because one of the film crew set off a fire extinguisher to make a bunch of "fog". (I just have to reiterate how funny it is to think that the evil Greely would actually install safety handrails leading down to the monster’s feeding pit.)

"I’m going to find out where that water leads to," says Wayne in a determined assistant professor of paleontology manner.

Greely, realizing that there’s about 40 minutes of run time left, teleports out of nowhere so the others can kill some time and try to convince him to let them go. Blah blah blah, in an awkward scene, even for this movie (!), Wayne manages to knock Greely’s gun out his hand; the camera gives us a quick cut-away to make sure we realize that this is a Plot Point.

Greely just laughs and runs off while the others stare at his receding figure instead of, oh, I don’t know, grabbing the gun and forcing him to let them out of the caves.

Oh wait. In the scuffle for the gun, Wayne was shot. (Nice editing.)

"I’ll be ok," he says as Leilla dabs her handkerchief directly over his heart. (So he was shot in the heart!?)

"Did he get away?" Wayne gasps.

"Yes," Norm growls, "and thanks to you he probably won’t be coming back!"

OK…what the hell is Norm’s problem? Fine. He’s a jerk. But he’s just a jerk for the sake of the script. There is no reason for him to despise Wayne as he does. I mean, Wayne managed to disarm Greely and took a bullet to the chest in the process, and Norm still feels compelled to nag on him. Why, Mr. Buchanan, why?!

Oh man, now Norm and Leilla start arguing over their relationship and what Leilla really means to him and…folks, is this really the time to air out your dirty laundry? Soooo…Norm trudges off down into the fog by himself as Leilla finishes tending to Wayne’s wounds.

"Stearn…you better get back up here!" Wayne shouts with a surprising amount of energy for somebody who’s just been shot in the heart.

"Why?" shouts Norm from below.

And…as if to answer that very question, up pops the Monster in all of it’s rubber-suit, ping-pong ball eyed glory:

This really has to be one of the goofiest monsters of all time. And after over 5 years of running this site, that’s saying a lot!

Norm fires off a couple of shots at the..oh wait…is it that big?!! Oh…come on! Yes, through the magic of foreshortening, i.e., filming the monster closer to the lens to make it look "huge", we’re supposed to believe that the creature must be about 100 feet tall.

Anyway, Norman, because he’s a jerk, gets eaten, while Wayne, magically recovered from his sucking chest wound, jumps up and shields Leilla from the horrible sight as he shooshes her up the stairs and back to the relative safety of the caged area.

"There’s been nothing like that for millions of years!" notes Wayne, who is after all, an assistant professor in paleontology.

(I’ll go out on a limb here and say that there’s probably NEVER been anything like that…)

Wayne suggests that the monster is a "massasaurus" a kind of "aquatic lizard."

Uh, sure, Wayne, sure.

Later, Greely saunters down to the cave to indulge in the film’s obligatory "James Bond Villain Exposition" scene. (The scene where the Villain spills the beans to James Bond just before he kills him because there is just NO WAY Bond can escape, so what the hell? Might as well reveal all the details…) As the prisoners listen in rapt attention, Greely proceeds to fill in the monster’s back story about how he found it, locked it up in the cavern and fed it "cattle, sheep,…sometimes a coyote that I’d catch…"

As you probably guessed, Greely eventually moved up to feeding transients and tourists to the monster, "people who wouldn’t be missed…people whose family and friends thought they’d been swallawd up [sic]."

As Greely curtly reminds Leilla that she must decide whether she wants to be his new woman or be monster food (I think I know what I’d choose), Wayne makes one last ditch effort to appeal to Greely’s rational side,

"Greely! For once, try to think like a scientist!"

(Did Wayne mention that he’s an assistant professor of paleontology?)

"Why should I care about mankind?!" Greely bitterly shouts before breaking into a bout of really, really bad mad scientist laughter. (Really, I thought actor Billy Thurman would get a hernia from forcing his laughter so hard.)

Well, while Greely laughs his ass off all the way back to the house, Bella sneaks down to the cave and explains her story to Wayne and Leilla via a long, boring flashback sequence.

"It seems like an eternity ago…" she begins, (Yeah…tell me about it!) as we fade to see her driving a car around through the woods. (Oh no, please, not another driving scene…)

Blah, blah, blah-diddy-blah. Like many others before her, Bella made the mistake of stopping over for the night and was captured by the psychopathic Greely. But instead of feeding her to <cue evil laughter>, "it", he kept her around because she was so "purdee".

He finally serves her a dead mouse on a plate and she cracks…Uh. Whatever.

OK, after 20 minutes of Bella’s flashback…

20 minutes!!! It’s a new Monster Shack Flashback Duration record! The whole freakin’ movie’s only 80 minutes long as it is!…

Bella tries to escape but Greely eventually catches her, knocks her to the ground, and begins viciously beating her with his belt.

Charming.

"…I’d become one of Greely’s animals," Bella tearfully concludes as we leave the flashback and cut back to the cave.

Moving right along, Wayne convinces Bella to abandon Greely and join sides with them. Remembering that he has some dynamite in his bag (and what assistant professor of paleontology wouldn’t have dynamite with them at all times), Wayne tells Bella to sneak upstairs and bring back a couple of sticks of dynamite from his car. ( I’m not too sure that setting off explosions in a cave while you’re in it is such a good idea, but let’s just keep moving along.)

Bella, desperately needing an excuse to sneak the dynamite down to Wayne, decides that delivering a fresh pot of coffee to the prisoners is the best ruse she can come up with. (Bella, Greely’s dumb, but he ain’t that dumb!) Since everything just sort of "happens" in this movie for no reason, for no reason Greely just happens to walk into the kitchen at that very moment. Naturally, Greely suspects Bella of sneaking around, and deftly drugs the coffee behind her back so he can go down and snoop around the cell after everybody’s been rendered unconscious.

Sooooooooo…Bella nonchalantly goes back down to the cave and delivers the (unbeknownst to her) drugged coffee along with the smuggled dynamite. Wayne immediately sets to work rigging a crude bomb and instructs Bella to meet them at the car in "…oh, about 30 minutes…". (Wow! Now that’s precision timing!)

BUT WAIT!!! WAYNE AND LEILLA DRANK THE COFFEE!

I guess Greely’s poison is a slow acting agent since it gives Leilla time to flirt with Wayne and discuss getting together with him once they escape the caves. (Good grief woman, your husband was just eaten by an 80-foot beast from hell only 30 minutes ago!) Thankfully for the viewer, this nauseating flirt scene is interrupted as the drug finally takes effect causing Wayne and Leilla to quickly pass out… but not before the Wonder Wayne manages to hide the dynamite under the bed! You go, boy!

After a few moments, Greely comes down and begins snooping around to see if Bella and the prisoners have been conspiring behind his back. Not finding the dynamite which is laying juuuuuuuust under the edge of the bed (read: of course he would have seen it!), Greely scoops Leilla up in his arms and takes her down to the feeding pit. Seconds later, Bella comes down (from the house? Wasn’t she told to meet them at the car?) and tells Wayne, groggy but recovering, that Leilla is in mortal peril in the room below.

Meanwhile, down below, Greely binds Leilla’s arms and legs (why? why?) as the monster peeks out from behind a rock to see what’s on the menu for tonight.

And man, there’s no way that monster is 80-feet tall…

I mean, come on!

Greely, in a rare fit of generosity, gives Leilla one last chance to join him in the house and become his servant, or else, to put it bluntly, she’s monster chow. (That’s probably a pretty tough decision for somebody to make…hmmmm…be fed to a hell beast or become Greely’s maid…I know what I’d choose.)

Unsurprisingly, Leilla refuses, the monster gets closer, and, and…oh, here comes Wonder Wayne running down the steps to save the day. (I guess we’re not supposed to remember that he was shot in the chest 20 minutes ago. He’s seems remarkably recovered, and his shirt doesn’t even have a blood stain on it. Strange.)

As luck would have it, Greely spots his pistol laying on the floor at the foot of the stairs (Remember the pistol that Norm knocked out of Greely’s hand about an eternity ago?), but Wayne plants a vicious kick right in Greely’s kisser and knocks him unconscious before he can grab it. (Using "Greely" and "kisser" in the same sentence really gives me the creeps.)

Well, Wayne and Leilla run back to the surface as Bella walks down the stairs. (Boy, this place gets a lot of freakin’ traffic for a hell-beast feeding pit!) Seeing the dynamite on the floor, Bella lights the fuse and explains to the now-recovered Greely that she plans to blow the place up in order to put an end to the monster. (And the film.) Naturally, the time Bella uses to needlessly explain her motives to the viewer gives Greely an opportunity to grab the pistol and shoot her in the chest. (If Bella’s powers of recovery are anything like Wayne’s, she really has nothing to worry about it.)

Anyway, big surprise, the monster craws out of its goo-pool just as the dynamite goes off burying it and Greely beneath tons of rock.

Boy, it’s just so damned ironic, you know?

Back outside, Leilla insists that Wayne should tell someone about all this. (Uh, ya think?!)

"Yeah, they’ll dig," Wayne whines in reply, "They’ll dig, but they won’t find anything!" (They won’t find the corpse of an 80-foot lizard-man in a tiny cave complete with stairs, handrails, and illumination?)

"Maybe there never was anything…" Wayne puzzlingly concludes as we cut back to the monster’s bubbling pool and, yes, see the the corny closing shot…(Maybe he’s referring to Monster A-Go Go?)

Dennis Grisbeck (June 2010)

Read more about It’s Alive at

Directed by Kurt Neumann

Run Time: 78 minutes

Tagline: PLANET ROBBER TRAMPLES EARTH…STEALING ENERGY FOR OTHER WORLDS!

Kronos is a little 50’s sci-fi treat that I somehow missed earlier in my misspent life. And since I thoroughly enjoyed it I’m going to feel a little guilty as I make fun of it. So I want you to know that I’m making fun of it with love. The same kind of love that I feel for Hostess cupcakes. A shameful, guilty love, but one I can’t resist. And actually, it’s a good thing I didn’t see it as a kid. For I’d probably have had the same reaction as my friend Doug McKeown, who wrote me:

Last time I saw (Kronos) was, I believe, the 3rd or 4th week of April, 1957. I was several months over ten years old by then…I did not enjoy myself in the darkened Forum Theatre on Main Street. A lot of talk by dull adults. The monster? Just a big metal thing chugging along the horizon (as I recall) and no grotesque alien monsters or giant squids, apes or lizards.(It’s a sign of how seriously Doug takes grotesque alien monsters that he went on to write and direct 1983’s The Deadly Spawn.)

Grave charges indeed, and alas, true. But I would argue for a suspended sentence because Kurt Neumann and his talented crew tried to do something rare – make a low-budget sci-fi film that was relatively plausible and adult. In this they succeeded with a surprisingly good looking production that features Karl Struss’s elegant cinematography and Theobold Holsopple’s handsome production design. And thankfully, it still has plenty of campy charm, 1950’s style. Now it’s time to line up the usual suspects – i.e., have a look at the cast:

	Dr. Leslie Gaskell (Jeff Morrow) Ah Jeff, he of the strong chin, warm yet gravelly voice, and puppy dog eyes. He was certainly no stranger to menaces from outer space, he even played one! His soulful performance as Exeter in 1955’s This Island Earth is a one reason it’s such an enjoyable blast of sci-fi pulp adventure. 1957 was a big year for Jeff; he not only confronted Kronos, he went up against The Giant Claw too! That must have been a traumatic experience, because his IMBD history records no further sci-fi activity until something called Octaman came out in 1971. (I will, of course, now have to track down Octaman.)
	Vera Hunter (Barbara Lawrence) Poor Vera goes through a significant portion of the movie in a bad mood – because her boyfriend Dr. Gaskell is the kind of distracted worrywart who cancels a date when a 4.9 mile wide planetoid starts plunging towards the earth. Scientists, sheesh! Kronos is the only sci-fi work that Barbara Lawrence ever played in, according to the IMBD. And while she doesn’t have Mara Corday’s spirited va-va-voom, or Faith Domergue’s sultry mystique she does a decent job with a thinly written part.
	Dr. Hubbell Eliot (John Emery) Dr. Eliot isn’t himself today, and you’ll find out why in the review. Like Barbara, John is something of an alien presence (ha ha!) in 50’s sci-fi, with Kronos being the only example he was in. He did, however, co-star with Vincent Price and Eva Gabor in 1954’s The Mad Magician.
	Dr. Arnold Culver (George O’Hanlon) Dr. Culver is a single guy, a programmer, a lover of Mexican food – and has a computer for a girlfriend. Thus he is possibly the movie’s most accurate prediction of the future. (Listen carefully to Dr. Culver, and he might sound very familiar. George O’Hanlon’s most enduring legacy is as the voice of George Jetson. A role he reprised in 1990’s Jetsons: The Movie.)
	SUSIE SUSIE is a classic 1950’s mega-computer, and Dr. Culver’s “girlfriend.” I have to admit, she has nice lines.
	Kronos Alien energy-absorbing technology meets the International Style of architecture. Can mankind be saved?
	Dr. Albert Stern (Morris Ankrum) It’s Morris! What 50’s sci-fi movie would be complete without him as the tough, no nonsense general who heads up earth’s brave defense against whatever was attacking it that week. He performed this heroic service in such gems as: Red Planet Mars (1952) – as Secretary of Defense Sparks Invaders from Mars (1953) – as Col. Fielding Earth vs. Flying Saucers (1956) – as Brig. General John Hanley Beginning of the End (1957) – as General John Hanson The Giant Claw (1957) – as Lt. General Edward Considine Kronos let’s Ankrum show off his range. Here he plays a medical, not a military man, and it’s a little disconcerting to see him out of uniform. He’s still tough and no nonsense though!

THE STORY:

We open in outer space when a classic, and quite decent UFO ejects a small ball of bright energy. Down it flies towards the innocent and unsuspecting planet earth, and to a lonely road that winds through the nighttime desert. Here we meet an average American guy minding his own business and whistling to the radio as he drives his average American pickup truck – until the engine mysteriously shuts off. Getting out to have a look under the hood he has an unearthly encounter with that ball of energy, and the next thing we know he’s driving to the off-limits and probably hush-hush LabCentral. Overpowering the guard he makes his way to the office of head scientist Hubbell Eliot. Moments later the guards rush in to make sure the good doctor is OK, only to find the intruder dead. Eliot seems strangely unconcerned and merely orders the guards to take the body away.

Dr. Eliot wants the dead body to stop cluttering up his very cool mid-century modern office. Who can blame him? And note the lamp over his desk. Then look at the image below…..Coincidence???

Unaware of the commotion going on down the hall, Dr. Leslie Gaskell is caught up in an excitement all his own – checking on the co-ordinates of M-47. It’s a new “asteroid” he’s just discovered and has yet to name. Pressed by Dr. Culver we get some scintillatingly risqué banter:

Culver:
She’s a beauty alright. Have you named her yet?
Gaskell:
I don’t think I know her well enough to call her by name. After all, I haven’t even computed her ecliptic yet!

Rim shot! But Gaskell has more than a name to worry about, take a look at M-47!

Cue ominous music.

Just when you start to wonder if Gaskell isn’t the sharpest pencil in the cup he redeems himself by noting that the glowing, metallic looking saucer-shaped “asteroid” has “slightly” changed its course. And indeed we see it do a zig-zag before shooting off the screen. Culver doesn’t notice these extreme maneuvers (!) but Gaskell is so excited he delays his movie date with Vera to make some additional measurements. She’s a scientist too, though not a Ph.D. mind you. Yet waiting along with the guys for the most current results she pouts, “SUSIE gets a lot more affection than I do.” Culver tries to cheer her up by explaining what SUSIE means: Synchro Unifying Sinometric Integrating Equitensor.

Synchro Unifying Sinometric Integrating Equitensor.
(And yes, there WILL be a quiz after the review.)

Eliot, meanwhile, has been doing something mysterious in the “Insulation Chamber” and SUSIE soon goes on the blink. “I can’t figure it out.” an upset Culver exclaims, “The interlace in the diode loop went right out of sync for no reason.” To which Vera purrs, “Seems like your girlfriend is getting temperamental.” (Me-aow!)

Fortunately for the earth, whatever Eliot did in the “Insulation Chamber” wasn’t very effective, and before long Gaskell and Culver are in his office with new readings that show a 4.9 mile wide planetoid will strike within 16 hours. Pressing a strangely apathetic Eliot, they get him to contact the military and we are soon awash in stock footage showing U.S. testing of captured V2 rockets. And here I’d like to tip my hat to the movie, because the V2 stands in for a missile meant to hit an asteroid in the upper atmosphere – and not an interplanetary spaceship. Much more plausible, and it’s these little touches that really count with me.

Plausible, but alas, ineffective. For although the way-before-it’s-time missile defense system manages to hit the target, the “asteroid” stays on course to strike the earth. With an ominous roar it races across the North American sky, only to crash into the ocean off the Mexican coast. Meanwhile Eliot, lurking creepily in the hallway collapses in a faint.

Everyone breathes a sigh of relief, except Gaskell. Picking up on the “asteroid’s” strange behavior he becomes convinced it is controlled by an intelligence. And with Eliot in the hospital he’s free to brow-beat, I mean inspire, his colleagues to travel down to Mexico for a look before the thing under the ocean “makes a move of it’s own.”

Down “Me-hi-ko” way we enjoy the “calm before the storm” with Gaskell, Culver and Vera as they ride around in a helicopter, burn their tongues on home-cooked Mexican food, and prance about the beach in unfortunate shorts. As a bonus we get a “From Here to Eternity” moment near the surf as Vera finally manages to pry Gaskell’s attention away from the extraterrestrial menace lurking off the coast. And wouldn’t you know it, the blasted thing picks just that moment to radiate a huge glowing dome of energy that’s visible from the shore. Poor Vera just can’t get a break.

What the well-dressed scientist of 1957 wears down to a Mexican beach.

Meanwhile, back in a hospital in the good ol’ U.S. of A., Eliot is under the care of Dr. Stern (Morris!) – who is mystified by the case. Eliot babbles about being controlled by some alien intelligence after Stern tries electro-shock therapy, so Stern does the rational thing and has him sedated. – Later Eliot seems to calm down, and he stops spouting paranoid nonsense. That’s a relief. Only once he “calms down” all of his brain readings get really weird. It’s a neat plot twist. When Eliot’s brain waves are normal he babbles on about a fantastic invasion from space. When his brain waves are weirdly off the chart he acts normal. What to make of it? Think Dr. Stern, think!

Back in Mexico it’s the morning after the glowing energy bubble appeared, and as the sun raises everyone notices that a 10-story tall metallic structure has appeared on the beach. Flying out in the helicopter to investigate, our intrepid three land on top and experience weird energy vibrations before the surface under their feet splits apart to reveal the great machine’s unearthly interior. (“Jump Vera!” Gaskell shouts encouragingly.)

Now that the special effects have started in earnest, I’d like to take a moment and credit Kronos writer, special effects meister (he also worked on Rocketship X-M, and The Atomic Submarine), and sometime production designer (Forbidden Planet!) Irving Block. This man of many hats and his five (5!) credited partners obviously worked hard to make the effects look good. Today they look quaint and dated, of course, but they were made in 1957 for little money. Which leads me to the budget. According to my gi-normous Overlook (Sci-Fi) Film Encyclopedia (it’s actually made of paper!) Kronos cost $160,000 to make. I then found something on the Internet called The Inflation Calculator, and discovered that this translates into $1,205,500 as of 2009. (The calculator hasn’t reached 2010 yet.) That’s pretty low-budget for a theatrical release movie. But it got me to thinking I’d like some more context, and I become curious what a really low-budget movie cost back then. So I did some checking and found that according to Wikipedia Plan 9 From Outer Space, which was shot in 1956, cost $60,000. That comes to $468,336 in 2009, by the way. Wow. That’s more than I would have guessed!

Going the other way I looked up the cost of David Lean’s epic The Bridge On The River Kwai, which won the best picture Oscar in 1957. It cost $3 million ($22,603,129 in 2009), and this almost shockingly low figure says a lot about how the economics of movie-making would change, and change soon. Just a couple of years later came Ben-Hur. In 1959 it cost $15 million, which in 2009 would have been $109,171,076. And of course in the actual 2009 we had Avatar, which cost something like $230 million. (If you’re interested, that would have been $30,526,746 in 1957.) It’s interesting to note that Ben-Hur had thousands of live human extras in period costumes and dozens of huge, life-size sets, while Avatar was mostly created on a computer screen.

So anyways, Kronos cost $160,000 in 1957. I hope that’s clear.

Back at the hospital Dr. Stern reviews the outlandish claims made by Eliot during his “lucid” moments. Namely, that a great energy “accumulator has landed on this earth under the direction and control of his incubus. Unless stopped somehow, others will land and suck the earth dry of all electrical and atomic energy resources.” Dr. Stern can’t bring himself to believe this, until…..but we won’t go into that.

He’s not the only one who’s slow on the uptake. Reports of a giant alien robot landing on the Mexican coast have reached the U.S., complete with an artist’s rendition. (This was before satellite uplinks, cell phones, email, and even home video cameras, after all. Another way to think of it is that the people in this movie were closer in time to the dinosaurs than they are to us.) The preposterous image of the “Kronos” amuses the smug, period anchorman.

That’s right,smile, you fool, smile!

Gaskell, however, is ahead of the curve. Even before the 10 story robot appeared he mused, “I never looked at the night sky without an awareness that there’s more out there then we can ever hope to understand. Things we might sense, if we weren’t too stupid to admit their existence.” Gaskell’s willingness to insult the intelligence of the human race is one of his more endearing qualities. At least to me. And I’d like to take another short, geeky detour. Here are some things out in space we had yet to understand by 1957:

Quasars: The first real breakthrough in understanding these
didn’t come till 1962 through the work of Cyril Hazard and
John Bolton.

Cosmic microwave background radiation:
This leftover radiation from the Big Bang was first
observed by Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson in 1964.

Dark Matter: First hypothesized by Fritz Zwicky in 1933, confirmation
didn’t come till 1975 with the work of Vera Rubin and
Kent Ford.

Dark Energy: Proposed by Michael Turner in 1998, to explain
the increasing rate of expansion of the Universe.

Kronos: As of May, 2010, no independent verification. Of course-
that doesn’t prove that it DOESN’T exist.

Back to Gaskell and his gloomy meditations, which prove more and more on the nose as Kronos lumbers off towards the Nevarez Electro power plant. There he, Vera and Culver witness the destruction of the power plant, as well as a squadron of fighter planes from the Mexican air force. Racing back to the States they find Dr. Eliot back at work in the neat looking Insulation Chamber. Gaskell is horrified to learn that Eliot has approved a U.S. plan to drop an atomic bomb on the Kronos. “I am convinced the giant sucks up energy like a sponge. Feeds on it. Is a walking storehouse of energy.” He explains. “And you propose to feed it the most concentrated dose of pure energy that man has ever been able to devise!” But Eliot is unmoved, and we cut to a sleek, silver B-47 bomber taking off from a desert air force base. Loaded with an atomic bomb it flies towards the Kronos in a desperate bid to prevent it from entering the United States. At the same time Vera searches for Gaskell with some important news from the hospital – only to run into Eliot instead.

And here I’ll end the review, as I hope you’ll check Kronos out sometime, and I don’t want to give away all the sensational thrills to come.

“YOU’LL HAVE TO BE SHOCK PROOF – TO WITHSTAND THE EMOTIONAL ASSAULT…OF SCIENCE FICTION’S BIGGEST THRILL SENSATION!”

Sean Ledden (May 2010)

Read more about Kronos at

Directed by Dan Milner

Written by Richard Bernstein

Run Time: 73 minutes

Tagline: Frightmare! Born of Jungle Witchcraft! Created by a Curse!

	Dr. William Arnold (Tod Andrews) Mandatory Good Guy, Will refuses to let anything come in between him and the object of his desire: Dr. Terry Mason. Even an Earth shattering scientific find like a walking, sentinent tree is in danger of being tossed in the local pool of quick sand so he can get back to wooing his love interest. Dedicated scientist indeed.
	Dr. Terry Mason (Tina Carver) Jungle skin disorder expert, and designated cutey, Terry is determined to revive the “Tabanga” using her patented “Formula 447″…even though it’s only been tested on parrots and monkeys. Can you guess what happens?…
	Mae Kilgore (Linda Watkins) Loathsome cougar (kids…ask your dad), and wearisome Comedy Relief, Ms. Kilgore runs the local trading post and cracks lame ‘randy’ jokes to break the film’s non-existent tension. (One has to wonder at the prudence of setting up shop on a plague-ridden, Tabanga-infested South Pacific island populated by hostile natives, but there you have it…)
	Prof. Clark (John McNamara) An expert in “trees and plants”, Clark plays the required sober ‘third wheel’ for Will and Terry’s tepid relationship. Oh, he’s also some sort of scientist that does and says things when the script requires it.
	Tabanga Yes, the demonic resurrected spirit of “treacherously murdered” Kimo: A walking tree. Are you scared yet? (But oh, man, would I love to find this monster-suit on eBay!)
	Chief Maranka (Baynes Barron) Scheming, power-hungry Maranka masterminds the trecherous murder of Kimo in order to possess his wife, Korey. Unfortunately, Maranka must not have paid attention in Local Legend School since he decides to bury Kimo in a tree trunk, thus paving the way for Tabanga’s return! Doh!
	Witch Doctor Tano (Robert Swan) Pity poor witch doctor Tano; his “medicine” is never strong enough to counter the White man’s “devil dust”. Everybody keeps dying and even the Tabanga gets away from him: Now that has to suck when you can’t even outwit a tree!

From Hell it Came is one of the many cheapo sci-fi films that polluted the theaters during the 1950′s; although this one is much more than a run-of-the-mill crappy movie. Produced by the wizards at Allied Artists, a notorious Poverty Row studio, one can only imagine what kind of return they’d hoped to garner from this ridiculous movie. Then again, given that the cost to make it must have been close to zero, I suppose nearly any box office return would have been a positive investment. Let’s put it this way, From Hell it Came makes any Bert I. Gordon flick look absolutely lavish in comparison.

Open with Polynesian music playing over a hand drawn picture of a jungle-ish island scene. The pleasant music actually makes the opening scene the best part of the movie. Well, the best part except for the part where the words "The End" appear.

So, yeah, I guess if you look at that way, everything between the opening credits and the words "The End" pretty much sucks.

Ahhh, yes, an opening scroll provides the back story. Cheap and gets the job done with minimal effort. Let’s take a look:

In Haiti, a corpse walks, as a Zombi!

In primitive India, the dead return as animals!

[Wow! They! Sure! Loved! To! Use! Exclamation! Marks!]

On certain Pacific Atolls, a warrior treacherously murdered, may turn into a tree! [WHAT?!!]

Or so it is said by the Shamans…

Ok, we’ll just take the word of the "Shamans" but really, murdered warriors come back as…trees? Man, that has got to be the stupidest thing I’ve heard. But hey, without movies like this there wouldn’t be the Monster Shack, now would there?

Oh crap, more back story…

Our story occurs on a savage island where a Prince is killed unjustly.

Oh hell, read it for yourself…

So. Ok. The legend states that if a "treacherously killed" warrior (whatever the hell that’s supposed to mean) is buried in a tree trunk his soul will return in the form of a living tree. Yeah. Sure it will.

It might just be me, but isn’t it obvious then that if you "treacherously" kill somebody…don’t freakin’ bury him in a tree trunk!!!

Anyway….

Cut to the "savage" island where a group of islanders sit around watching Tano, the village Witch Doctor, stab a voodoo doll with a knife. (A Voodoo doll?! Aren’t those from Haiti?)

The new village Chief, Maranka, accuses Prince Kimo of the "great sin" of joining sides with the local American scientists and using their "bad medicine" on the villagers to curse them with a "Black Plague"; the most recent victim of which was Kimo’s father, the previous village chief. These accusations are of course BS, but somebody has to be "treacherously killed" or we wouldn’t have a movie, would we? Even Kimo’s wife, Korey, goes along with the ruse since she now has the hots for Maranka. (I don’t get this: If she wanted to be married to the man in power, why betray Kimo? Being the prince, wouldn’t he be next in line for the throne anyway?)

Kimo, staked out on the ground with a bunch of chickens scratching around his head (!), swears his vengeance before being dispatched with a ceremonial dagger. (Kimo’s execution takes place off screen probably to spare the teen-age audience anything too "icky".) In a strange little touch, the executioner uses a dagger with a goofy plastic skull attached to the hilt. I guess it’s a "native" thing. With the job done, the natives engage in a listless Hawaiian dance number. (Nothing like eating up run time with a boring dance number….beer break. Back in a minute.)

Little do the villagers realize that the Ms. Kilgore, the middle-aged owner of the local trading post, has witnessed Kimo’s brutal betrayal and rushes off to tell the other Americans…

Meanwhile, back at camp, our 2 male leads, Dr. Will Arnold and Professor Clark, jump into high-expository gear and spew line after line of bland back story as the hapless viewer tries to take it all in.

Basically, it runs like this:

"Hey, it’s a good thing we’re here to help the natives."

"Yeah, especially after the radioactive fallout. They sure do need our help."

"Yeah, it’s too bad that freak typhoon carried the fallout all the way over here to this remote, savage island."

"Yep, it sure is."

"Yeah, boy, the natives sure are surly lately."

"Yeah, I guess we better be careful."

"Yup, we sure better."

"Yessirree."

Yes, radiation reveals yet again one of its baffling and hitherto unknown characteristics: It can transform dead people into a demonic trees. Boy, radiation sure is mysterious.

After this exciting exchange, Will starts whining to Clark that the woman he loves, Dr. Terry Mason, is too dedicated to her work to have any time for him, i.e., she refuses to give up her career, marry him, and move back to the States to be a housewife. Sheesh, women, huh?

"She considers marriage as a type of prison," Will laments.

"What do you expect from a pretty girl a few years out of med school…she wants excitement and adventure," says Clark.

"Sometimes I think I could just…kick her beautiful teeth in," says Will as he gives us an intimate glimpse of his romantic side. (Boy, I just can’t see how Terry couldn’t be attracted to this guy.)

Anyway, Kilgore manages to struggle through the movie set, er, jungle, and reaches the camp perimeter before letting out a ear-splitting scream and fainting to the ground. (Hey, it was the 50′s…what did you expect a woman to do?)

Cut back to the native village where some sullen tribe members carry Kimo’s body (now ensconced in a tree trunk…why bother?!) to an open grave and plop him into the ground.

And again, folks, if there’s a legend that involves the revenge of betrayed people if their body is buried in a tree trunk, then why do it???!!!

And…..cut back to the camp where Kilgore, in an amazingly irritating Cockney accident, spouts about the recent murder of Kimo.

"It was ‘orrible! Simply ‘orrible!" (Yes, lady, your accent truly is ‘orrible!)

In order to calm Kilgore down, Professor Clark gives her a stiff shot of booze which she immediately gulps down before saying "Don’t be stingy at a time like this!" Quickly snatching the bottle from Clark’s hand, Kilgore refills her glass and continues drinking. (By now your Odious Comedy Relief Sensors should be off the chart…this is going to be a long haul…)

The next day, Dr. Terry Mason, arrives on the island via Stock Footage Airlines.

Realizing that his dream girl has coincidently be sent to the island (what are the odds…what are the odds?), Will eagerly volunteers to hop into the jeep and pick her up. On the way to the heli-pad, Will drives directly by Kimo’s grave, which means the main road must go straight through the natives cemetery. (No wonder the locals are so pissed!) The camera helpfully zooms to Kimo’s grave where a a spooooooooky skull atop a stick has been plunged into the ground. (So whose skulls are they using to mark the graves?) A close up at the dirt (yeah, it’s as exciting as it sounds) reveals that it’s starting to heave and crack as something buried in the ground begins to push out…mwu ha-ha-ha-haaaa!

In some boring back-story scenes, Terry explains that she doesn’t mind being assigned to the island even though there’s a plague going around. Will explains that the real danger isn’t the plague, it’s the latest change in the native’s disposition, as confirmed by a quick cutaway to a group of 4 extras dressed in Polynesian garb trying to act surly. (So were they just standing 10 feet away from them the whole time?)

Back at camp, or the trading post, or whatever, (how much trade can you expect on an atomic wasteland island?), Terry meets Mae Kilgore, and banal dialog ensues. (God…what a talky film!)

As luck would have it, one of the local (and beautiful) half-Dutch native women, Orchid, is to be Terry’s lady-in-waiting. To facilitate the plot, it turns out that Orchid is an exile so "she’s not subject to tribal law." I’m sure the reason for so many damned characters will become apparent later in the film. [Note from the Future: It won't.]

Later that night we witness a secret rendezvous between Kimo’s ex-wife, Korey and her lover, Chief Maranka.

"Ever since [Kimo] died," she complains, "the fire of your love has grown cold."

"I’d never have a traitor like you for my wife," Maranka shoots back. Wow. I guess the honeymoon is over.

Yadda yadda yadda, Korey knows that Tano has been sleeping around with another native girl, Naomi. And, hey, right on cue, Naomi shows up with a bowl of fresh poison berries for Tano’s "Poison Darts For The Americans" project. Korey, furious at being snubbed for a younger, hotter chick, stalks off to plot her revenge.

Meanwhile, Will has his hands full trying to convince Terry to marry him. Unfortunately for Will, Terry is an unusually strong-willed woman (I’ve run into a few of those in my time too…), so she really doesn’t want to be tied down to a humdrum life in the civilized world "being cooped up in a stuffy apartment…having my ears blasted by rock-and-roll."

"Rock and Roll? Wait to you hear the natives’ drums…they’ll really rock you."

Will, you are one smoooooooth talker, bro.

Getting frustrated, Will blurts out, "Terry, will you stop being a doctor first and a woman second? Let your emotions rule you, not your intellect."

As this stimulating conversation winds down, Terry just happens to look over and spot Kimo’s grave-skull-stick-thingee topple over.

"Is that the natives’ cemetery?" Terry asks. (No, babe, it’s Arlington National. Good grief, what the hell do you think? And if you remember from earlier in the film when Will drove out to pick up Terry, Kimo’s grave was right next to a road. Now it’s sequestered in a tree-filled grove in the middle of nowhere.)

Puzzled by this strange growth protruding from Kimo’s grave, Terry and Will decide to have Prof. Clark take a look since he’s an expert on "jungle trees and plants." (Wow…trees and plants?!)

Later, after examining some drawings of the outgrowth, Clark decides that it’s probably just a "malformed bush". (Yep, he’s an expert!)

In walks a local native couple that the Americans have been treating for radiation burns, Norgu and his wife, Dori. (The poor guy playing Norgu looks like he’s being forced to wear a pair of shorts wedged way up high…) Norgu (complete with a farmer’s tan!) happens to glance at the drawings and quickly identifies it as the "Tabanga". With the scene petering out, in comes Orchid and informs everybody that the strange growth has gotten larger and even has a ceremonial dagger sticking out of it! (Yowsa!)…so off to the cemetery we go.

Upon reaching Kimo’s grave, Terry whips out her stethoscope and takes a listen. "It’s a human heartbeat," she concludes. (Huh? It’s a what heartbeat?!)

Despite Norgu’s pleadings to throw the damned thing into "the quicksand at the edge of the forest" (Plot Point!), the wise scientists opt instead to just leave it in the ground and radio Washington for instructions. With a neck-breaking jump cut the instructions are returned: Dig it up and study it.

"Well, that’s that!" Terry glibly remarks, "Now the only thing to do is to go out, dig up the monster, and bring it back to the lab!"

(Uh, doesn’t anybody in these movies ever watch crappy monster movies? Don’t you know what happens when you bring things "back to the lab"?!)

Will, a man truly devoted to science and discovery, says "I say we throw it in the quicksand and forget about it." (!)

Meanwhile, back in the village, Chief Maranka plans to enslave the Tabanga for himself via a special poison so that it will "kill when I tell it to!" (Yes! Aim high, brother, aim high!)The first on the hit list is Norgu, because he likes hanging out with the white folks and trusts their "medicine" more than his. Oh, and Maranka also wants to murder Korey because, well, I guess there just aren’t enough subplots in this movie yet.

But wait, Korey JUST HAPPENS to overhear the conversation and runs off to tell the Americans about the plot against them.

After Korey spills her guts about Tano’s plans to take control of the Tabanga and use it as a murder machine, Will and the others agree to take her under their protective American wing. With no time to lose, the Americans rush off to the cemetery to procure the Tabanga before Tano can get his hands on it. Naturally, any footage showing the actual removal and transport of the Tabanga would have been too costly (and too hilarious), so we simply cut to the lab with the Tabanga already laid out on a gurney.

"It reminds me of a chemistry project I once had at middle school," Terry muses as she listens to its heartbeat. (What the hell kind of school did you go to?!)

(And I wish the camera would stop focusing on the pulsating "heart" because it really is reminding me of something else that I’m not going to go into right now.)

"It’s dying! The pulse is getting weaker," Terry says, "Probably a clot in the aorta." (Sure it is.)

"Can’t we try to stimulate the adrenal glands with an electro resistor?"

"He much energy do you need?" Clark asks.

"I’ve read of experiments where they used seven hundred and fifty amps at one thousand volts," Terry responds.

When Clark and Will realize that the camp’s generators can’t produce that kind of juice, they decide to call it quits. But, oh, not Terry! She rushes to the fridge and whips out, Tada! "Formula 447".

"I’ve used this on monkeys and parrots before," Terry reassures the others. (So, yeah: parrot, monkey, Tabanga, it’s all the same.)

Before anybody can call "Bullshit!", Terry whips out some Formula 447 and administers it to the Tabanga via an IV drip!

After standing around staring at the monster and noting no changes in its condition, the Americans begin to lose hope. Terry, however, points out that the last time she used the formula on a living creature it took around 8 hours before effects were seen. (Well, at least when the formula was administered to parrots, so what the hell? It will probably take just as long on a Tabanga, right?)

With nothing to do but wait, Terry and the others wisely set up a guard rotation, put on a pot of coffee, and dig in for a long night of careful observation.

Uh, actually, no. That’s not what they do. Even though that’s what everybody else on this planet would have done.

No, in this stupid movie everybody makes a deal to meet back at the lab at 6 a.m. and heads off to bed.

Sure enough, the next morning, everybody returns to find the lab in shambles and the Tabanga nowhere to be seen. (The Tabanga’s resurrection and rampage is, naturally, not shown; most likely due to budget constraint.)

"The reaction never took less than eight hours," Terry mumbles in confusion. Well, Terry, the Tabanga isn’t a parrot!!!

Clark wisely suggests that the natives broke into the lab, stole the Tabanga, and smashed their equipment like "angry children."

"I know this sounds crazy," Will says, "but maybe the Tabanga is real…"

Gee, what tipped you off, doc? The fact that it has a pulse and bleeds?

Anyway, they also discover that the radio room is ransacked so they are, <sigh>, "cut off from the outside world." (Ooooooooooof course you are, of course you are.)

Later that day Korey spies Naomi swimming in The Local Lagoon. (Or is it Naomi spotting Corey?! I can’t tell them apart!!!) A really, really poorly choreographed cat fight ensues and Naomi (I think) bonks Korey (I think) on the head just hard enough so that she faints and the other can run away.

Hey kids! Look who shows up! Tabanga!

The Tabanga tosses Korey into Ye Ould’ Local Quicksand. Obviously, the poor guy in the rubber Tabanga suit had limited vision, not to mention that the suit’s arms barely bend, so he was forced to drop her on cue about 2 inches from dry land. Thus to make the scene "realistic", the actress had to actually swim away from shore so she could drown in the mire.

Sooooo….Naomi, scared out of her wits, runs back to camp and tells Tano that she’s just seen the monster.

"Well, how did you know it was the Tabanga?"

Really, Tano, do we have to answer that?

Anyway, Tano and Naomi rush off to the cemetery in order to find out if what Naomi saw really was Kimo resurrected in the form of a Tabanga, or if it was just some other random ambulatory demonic tree. Upon arrival, Tano, smart as a whip, quickly notes that Kimo’s grave is empty, and is forced to admit that his ex-rival is now a Tabanga.

"It will kill us all!" Naomi whines.

"Not if we kill it first," says Tano. (I guess that’s why Tano is the village wise man.)

Realizing that it was the Americans who dug the Tabanga out of the ground, Tano gives a sinister smirk and adds, "After the Tabanga dies, the Americans die!"

Naomi then leads Tano out of the cemetery and back to the forest where she recently fought with Korey and saw the Tabanga.

When Korey’s body is nowhere to be find, Tano concludes that "Tabanga must have thrown Korey in the quicksand…We must find the Tabanga!" (Wow. This guy is good!)

Meanwhile, back in the village, Chief Maranka is standing around sharpening his spear. (You know what I mean!) Being the village chieftain and presumably top warrior, Maranka still fails to notice a living tree "sneaking" up behind him. When he finally does spot the Tabanga, Maranka takes careful aim with his spear and tosses it clear over the monster’s head…from 3 freakin’ feet away! Good grief. Whatever. As you can imagine, instead of, oh, I don’t know, running away!, Maranka allows himself to be cornered and killed by a monster that moves at 1 yard per hour.

When Naomi and Tano return from the quicksand pit, the nervous villagers confront their wise witch doctor: "Maranka is killed by the Tabanga. Tano, why did you not kill the Tabanga with medicine?" After a rousing speech, consisting solely of "Come! We must kill the Tabanga!", Tano and the villagers rush off to build a trap.

Back at the American’s camp, a breathless Orchid warns the Americans that the Tabanga is alive and busily stomping around killing people.

"Oh no, I just wanted it to live…not to destroy," Terry laments when she realizes that the Tabanga’s resurrection is pretty much her fault.

"Don’t blame yourself, Terry," Will consoles her, "The radiation dormant in the monster must have set off a chain reaction."

Uh, yeah. Sure it did.

Anyway, Orchid tells them that the villagers are pretty pissed off about the whole Tabanga business, so they’d better keep their distance while looking for the monster.

Back at the village, the trap is set and Tano bravely uses himself for bait.

As can be seen from the screen shot above, Tano’s awesome plan is to stand in the middle of an open field until the Tabanga shows up, and believe me, this makes for some exciting cinema. Man, they should warn people about scenes like this in case somebody has a heart condition or something. Sooooo…the Tabanga eventually shows up and shambles after Tano who deftly sidesteps the lumbering monster. Caught completely off guard by Tano’s amazing footwork, the Tabanga falls into the pit at which time the excited villagers emerge from their hiding places and toss in a bunch of torches. With a few token cheers of joy, the natives presume the Tabanga is now burnt to a crisp and go back home.

Oh. And obviously, nobody bothers to stay behind and actually MAKE SURE the Tabanga is truly dead, because hey, how could it EVER survive that?

Hey! What the hell?! After the villagers leave…the Tabanga pulls itself up from the pit and, I’m totally serious, it’s STILL ALIVE!

WOW!!!!!! I thought for sure the movie was over. Now that was clever writing right there, buddy, lemme tell ya.

Like I said, since none of the natives actually, you know, bothered to ensure that the Tabanga was really dead, the monster crawls out of the pit and "flees" into the forest. (Just how the Tabanga managed to clamber out of the hole is not shown since the rubber suit can’t even bend at the waist.) Anyway, a few minutes later some local yokels are totally surprised to see the Tabanga strolling along a forest path. With a few shouts of horror (laughter?), the natives turn tail and rush back to the Americans to beg for help. The Americans, maybe feeling somewhat responsible, agree to assist in dispatching the Tabanga once and for all.

After grabbing their weapons, the Americans are rushing out the door, when in bursts Ms. Kilgore who breathlessly explains that she’s been so scared lately she hasn’t dared to leave her house, blah, blah, blah. "You girls stay here," Clark insists. (Well, it was the 50′s after all. Killing Tabangas was no job for a woman.)

"I’m not staying ‘ere alone! What if that ‘orrible thing comes back?" protests Kilgore in the WORST ACCENT EVER.

"She’s right," Terry agrees, "locked doors mean nothing to that monster." How she knows that is unclear since the Tabanga has never been locked in anywhere. (On second thought, maybe she’s referring to the fact that it broke out of the lab after receiving that fateful dose of X47. Who knows. Still, it’s a pretty bold statement to make.)

Anyhoo, since the girls have to come along so that one of them can be captured by the Tabanga (Oops. Sorry.), Eddie, the local Army attaché , procures an extra pair of weapons for the women. (Just how many guns did these guys think they would need to study skin diseases? This place is a freakin’ armory!)

Well, it looks like Tano’s time is up. In a wild jump cut, we see the doomed witch doctor tripping over a log and screaming as the Tabanga slooooooowly bends over and reaches a rubbery arm towards the ground. Obviously, since the rubber suit was too stiff to actually bend all the way over (and how could a tree bend at all?!), the camera cuts away as a scream is foleyed onto the soundtrack. We next see the monster tossing Tano’s body into a crevice where we notice that he’s been impaled by a branch or something. Oh…the irony.

Sooooo….5 minutes to go, so hang in there folks.

Cut to Will, Clark, Eddie, and the 2 "girls" tramping through the jungle. With Ms. Kilgore yapping away the whole time, nobody notices that Terry, last in line, has stopped to take a pebble out of her shoe. (Somebody, please, please, toss her to the Tabanga and I will forgive the rest of the film of all its faults…) As you probably have guessed, Terry looks up after putting her shoe back on and notices that she is completely alone. (Yeah, after 10 seconds…everybody else is just gone. Not a sign of anybody. Uh-huh.) What Terry doesn’t seem to notice is a 10 foot-tall living tree with a skull-tipped knife sticking out of it standing 2 feet to her left. (I’m assuming that Tabangas are not known for their stealth, so just how in the hell that snuck up on her is beyond me.)

After a couple of seconds of "suspense", Terry looks up and finally notices the Tabanga standing right beside her. Understandably upset, she proceeds to let out a couple of unappealing screams…very hoarse and low pitched. Ugly screams. Definitely not the type of scream that would make me want to fight off Tabangas just to save her. (Now, the cute chick from King Dinosaur had a nice scream.) Anyway, to facilitate things for the ungainly Tabanga, Terry faints directly into its arms so that it doesn’t have to actually reach over and pick her up.

The others meanwhile, still stomping along without even bothering to do a head count to make sure everybody is still there, hear Terry’s shrieks and dart off to the quicksand pit.

"It’s Terry!" Will astutely notes upon spotting the Tabanga carrying, well, Terry.

Will, using his Hero’s Amazing Powers of Deduction, concludes that shooting the knife further into the Tabanga may do the trick.

"Fire for that knife! If we hit it, we might drive it through the monster’s heart!" Will orders.(Thanks to Sean for reminding me that, yes, the Tabanga is still holding Terry in its arms as they open fire.)

I assume by now you know what’s going to happen so I’ll be brief. The Tabanga, after being bombarded with bullets, tosses Terry to the ground and turns to give the Americans a perfect target. After yet another barrage of bullets, and yes, watching people shoot a tree is as exciting as it sounds, Will hits the mark. (Naturally he does, since he’s the hero and all.)

Anyway, Will’s amazing marksmanship drives the knife through the monster’s heart and, acting as some sort of on/off button, the monster instantly dies and topples backwards into the quicksand.

One of the, <cough>, natives turns to Clark and admits, "We know now that American magic is better. [Well...duh!] Maybe we need new medicine maker to replace Tanto [sic!]…Will you be our witch doctor?"

"Isn’t that thrilling?" Kilgore coos as she cuddles up to Clark. (Ack.)

"By the way professor," says Kilgore as she longingly stares at Will and Terry smooching at the edge of the quicksand pool, "are you married?"

Oh dear, oh dear.

Fade to black,

The End.

Dennis Grisbeck (April 2010)

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