Larry Buchanan’s It’s Alive! is less a monster movie and more a cinematic prank played on anyone foolish enough to watch past the opening credits. Imagine driving all the way to rural Arkansas, only to find out your vacation “attraction” is a guy in a scuba suit with ping-pong balls glued to his face pretending to be a dinosaur. That’s the villain. That’s the “terror.” Forget atomic-age nightmares or Ray Harryhausen’s stop-motion artistry—Buchanan gives you the aquatic cousin of the Dollar Store Godzilla, and he expects you to clap like a trained seal.
The plot—if we’re generous enough to call it that—concerns a mad farmer named Greely, who lures a stranded couple and a paleontologist into his shack so he can feed them to the monster in his cave. Sounds simple enough. But Buchanan, never one to leave a perfectly bad idea alone, stretches this premise into 80 minutes of pacing slower than a hungover mule. The dialogue? Stiff enough to be used as firewood. The suspense? Imagine being locked in a waiting room with elevator music and an overfed raccoon scratching at the door—that’s the level of menace here.
Tommy Kirk, a Disney alum who once frolicked with talking dogs, now finds himself begging the audience to believe in a man-eating beast that looks like it escaped from a high school play about Atlantis. He gives it his all—shouting, running, emoting—but you can practically hear his soul dying behind his eyes. Shirley Bonne, as his fellow victim, spends most of her screen time looking like she wishes the dinosaur would hurry up and put her out of her misery. And then there’s Bill Thurman as Greely, the farmer whose idea of menace is frowning hard and occasionally smacking his “housekeeper” around. Truly, a villain for the ages—if the age in question is nine and still believes in Scooby-Doo.
And let’s not ignore the cave itself: Onyx Cave in Eureka Springs, Arkansas, where Buchanan shot this masterpiece in six frantic days. The cave is the real star here—its stalactites and shadows do more for atmosphere than any of the actors or “monster.” Buchanan boasted about doing 57 set-ups in one day. Maybe he should’ve tried just one good one.
By the time the dynamite goes off in the climax, collapsing the cave and burying the monster along with any shred of audience hope, you’ll be wondering if the real horror wasn’t the film itself. It’s the kind of ending where the viewer doesn’t feel relief, only resentment that they didn’t light the dynamite themselves an hour earlier.
It’s Alive! is the cinematic equivalent of being promised filet mignon and getting a gas-station hot dog rolled in sand. It’s so cheap, so careless, so utterly joyless that even the monster looked embarrassed to show up. As Tommy Kirk once raged, the whole thing is “so disgusting.” And yet, like a bad carnival sideshow, you almost have to respect the sheer audacity of Buchanan throwing a wetsuit and ping-pong balls on screen and calling it horror. Almost.
This isn’t a monster movie. It’s a hostage situation.
on’t want to spend 94 minutes wondering whether feline revenge qualifies as justice under California law.
