#Leylas is such an amazing name. looks weird but it sounds amazing. and it's just Leyla with an S

[creature-once-removed]

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[mst3kproject]

It’s Alive!

This movie has Tommy Kirk and several alumni of Attack of the The Eye Creatures, including director Larry Buchanan.  Watching it will either kill me or make me invincible.  Only one way to find out which.

Norm and Leyla Sterns are on a boring-ass road trip through the Ozark plateau, looking for the Real America or something. They detour to see some fiberglass dinosaurs and then realize they’re almost out of gas, but helpful stranger Wayne Thomas directs them to a nearby farmhouse that might have some they could borrow.  This place turns out to belong to a reptile-obsessed guy named Greeley and his abused housekeeper Bella.  They don’t have any gas but the delivery truck should be along soon, so Greeley insists that the Sternses stick around and see his menagerie of creepy-crawlies. It’s pretty obvious (even to Leyla) that he’s going to kill them, along with Wayne when the latter shows up to look for them, but I doubt anybody expected he would try to feed them to the suspiciously humanoid dinosaur that lives in a Styrofoam cave under his house.

Holy shit, is this movie ever bad.  For starters, I have no idea whether it’s supposed to be taking place during the day or at night.  In Attack of the The Eye Creatures we had people telling us it was dark out, so we knew that we were looking at shitty day-for-night instead of just shitty photography in general. In It’s Alive! we’ve got exactly the same bright sunshine through a dark filter lighting whether we’re inside, outside, down in a cave, high noon or the middle of the night.  Worse, all these poorly-lit shots are set up so that it’s almost impossible to tell where people (and monsters) are in relation to one another.  We never get a sense of the spaces we’re in, or which ones are dangerous and which safe.

The actors are impossibly bad, every single one of them.  They all try, but they all fail – whether it’s Bella weeping for fear, Leyla shouting at her husband, Greeley cackling evilly as he threatens them with a gun, or Norm calling for help as the monster closes in.  You never believe a moment of it.  At best you’re laughing.  At worst you’re squirming with secondhand embarrassment.  This is especially fatal to the inevitable love story, which was doomed from the start because Wayne and Leyla are hitting it off mere hours after Norm was eaten by the creature.  The married couple were arguing just before it happened, true, but you’d think Leyla could spare a little time to grieve for somebody she once loved, rather than making jokes about how love will last with a paleontologist, because the older you are the more interested he is.

The pacing is weird.  The first bit of the movie, with the Sternses looking for gas and falling into Greeley’s trap, Leyla wanting to leave and Norm telling her not to worry, is not too slow and feels like its going somewhere.  It tends to remind the MSTie of Manos: the Hands of Fate, except that It’s Alive! has fewer awkward pauses and less repetition (now there’s some faint praise for you). Things bog down a little once the protagonists are trapped in the cave, but eventually Bella arrives with her offer to help Leyla and Wayne escape if they’ll take her with them… and the movie veers off into a long-ass, no-dialogue flashback about how Bella ended up working for Greeley.  This features lots of dreamy music and slow-motion running, and feels like part of an earlier daft just got randomly sewn into the film we’re watching in order to extend the running time.

If that seems oddly specific it’s because I’m around eighty-five percent sure that’s what happened.

And of course there’s the monster itself.  In the halls of the St. Phibes Institute for B-Movie Monsters, it’s a legend, right up there with ridiculous specimens like the Giant Claw and the Creeping Terror.  It looks kind of like a catfish costume made by a junior high drama club who didn’t have the money to buy any supplies that weren’t already in the art classroom. It’s got bulging eyes and teeth that stick out at odd angles, and I think it’s supposed to be significantly bigger than a human but it’s obviously not.  It’s hilariously awful, and the most amazing thing about it is that Larry Buchanan actually recycled it – it originally appeared in his previous film Creature of Destruction (which was a re-make of The She-Creature, of all fucking things).  There was so little money for this production that they had to re-use bits of previous under-funded productions.

It’s too bad the monster is only in at best a minute and a half of footage, because the only real entertainment to be had here is laughing at it.  It’s even worse that it never appears in the same shot as any of the characters except in one particularly awful matte, because seeing this thing strangle people and then pretend to chow down would have been bad movie diamonds.  It is pretty funny when Wayne tries to explain that it’s a mosasaur (a mosasaur - @palaeofail is crying right now and doesn’t know why) that somehow survived millions of years in the cave in suspended animation.  Sometimes ‘it’s a cave, caves have monsters in them’ really is all the explanation you need.  It worked for The Black Scorpion.

The slogan of Attack of the The Eye Creatures seems to have been we just don’t care, but I get the impression that a few people cared a little about It’s Alive!, because the movie does attempt to say a couple of things. First, it’s a film about the lost joy of the Road Trip.  Leyla Sterns grew up in New York and wants to see the real America, which she imagines as a rural idyll of small towns and roadside attractions.  Greeley has a similar view of his own life: he ran a little zoo called the ‘Serpentorium’, where people would stop to see his snakes and lizards, as well as a few more exotic animals such as a lynx and a monkey, and to get a tour of the caves. Once the new highway came along, his visitors dried up, and he devolved into a misanthropic asshole.  One of the little joys of travelling, along with the livelihoods earned from it, has been sacrificed at the altar of efficiency. Grist for the wheels of progress, if you will.

On a less-explicit level, It’s Alive! is also a film about the nature of monstrosity. The creature in the caves is a monster – it’s loud and ugly and it has big teeth, and it eats people for dinner. Nobody could argue that’s not a monster, right?  Maybe so, but what about Greeley himself?  He kidnaps and tortures travelers to either keep them as slaves, as he did with Bella, or feed them to his creature, as he plans for Norm, Leyla, and Wayne.  People who torture and murder strangers in real life are often described as monsters, and unlike the thing in the cave, Greeley is aware of the moral dimension of what he does.

The creature, after all, is an animal.  It’s just doing what it does, feeding, protecting its territory, and defending itself.  Greeley is a human being.  He, too, must eat, protect what is his, and defend himself, but he consciously chooses to do these things in a way that harms others.  If he wanted a housekeeper he could have hired one, but he chose to force Bella into that role instead.  When he learned that the creature preferred humans to the animal carcasses he brought it, he could have refused to indulge it, but he didn’t.  The fact that he makes excuses for the things he does only reinforces that he knows he is in the wrong.

Can we not therefore argue that it’s Greeley who is the monster in this monster movie?  I honestly think this is a point the film-makers were trying to make, because we see way more of Greeley’s evil than we do of what the creature’s doing. Bella’s over-long flashback never shows us the creature once.  Instead it’s all about how Greeley captured and broke her.  The creature is just one of several tools he uses to express his hatred of the human race.

Another kind-of-interesting thing in It’s Alive! is the question of who’s story it is. Our audience identification characters are Norm, Leyla, and Wayne, but they’ve wandered into a story that was already happening.  The real protagonist is Bella.  Her flashback shows us her capture and how she tried to escape but couldn’t – now Greeley is getting tired of her and may replace her with the younger, prettier Leyla, and so she acts to save not only her fellow prisoners but herself.  For years now that only thing that’s kept her going is fear of death, which she eventually overcomes to have her revenge on Greeley and his creature at the cost of her own life.  She dies at the end, but she wins, because she dies knowing that she's accomplished her goal.  I’m pretty sure this was intentional, too, because Bella being the hero of this story is the best explanation for why her flashback was so damned long.

It’s cool that there’s some actual stuff to think about here, but the poor execution means It’s Alive! is still not enjoyable on any level but a b-movie bullshit one.  Even then, it’s hard to watch, because everything in it looks and sounds so terrible – the lighting, the monster, the actors, everything. It’s not boring, but not particularly exciting, either.  It’s just… bad.