It’s Alive

It’s Alive – 1968 – United States

The story of Tommy Kirk (star of It’s Alive) is way more interesting than this movie. He acted for Disney until he was outed as gay and got fired. He was hooked on drugs for a while, and to pay the bills, he made a lot of crappy movies like this one.

A couple of New York yuppies are on a road trip in the Ozarks when their car runs out of gas. They coast into a rundown tourist attraction operated by an animal tamer named Greely. Greely seems friendly enough, but he is actually a total psycho who abuses his housekeeper and keeps a mutant fish-man in a cave on his property. He traps the yuppie couple in the cave along with a paleontologist who just happened to stop by. The prisoners escape and blow the cave up with dynamite, sealing the creature away forever. Maybe. We can never be sure since the ending title card reads, “The End?”.

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Curse of the Swamp Creature

Curse of the Swamp Creature – 1966 – United States

Schlock director Larry Buchanan made Curse of the Swamp Creature and Zontar: The Thing from Venus in the same year. Both star John Agar, stony-faced veteran of numerous sci-fi, western, and war flicks. American International Pictures is known for entertainingly dumb teenybopper trash (I Was a Teenage Werewolf, Beach Party) and Roger Corman classics (It Conquered the World, House of Usher). However, AIP’s television division churned out notorious garbage of which Curse of the Swamp Creature and Zontar are prime examples.

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