The Eye Creatures (1965) 80m.
Some movies are bad because of their writing, their acting, or their directing, but nothing is spared in this insipid horror flick from the 60s. Armed with a script that could have been written by your average twelve-year old, our clean-cut young heroes Stan and Susan find themselves spending most of their elopement trying to convince adults that the local necking spot in the woods is being invaded by saucermen. Will they listen? Of course not.
It's hard to tell which is the single worst feature of this movie, but the writing must surely be a likely contender for the top spot. Every phone conversation is ridiculous, and when the dialogue isn't expository it's just plain dumb. How about that line when Susan's pop, who happens to be the city attorney, snaps at her hit-and-run suspect boyfriend "You're lucky in one respect! The man you killed was a nobody!" To take the heat off the script, the acting is pretty rank, too (in some cases the cast is required to pretend they're driving stationary cars and act at the same time). At least Cynthia Hull (Susan) has the foresight to distract audiences from her performance with her vaguely ethnic, gravity-defying hairdo. The most unforgivable failing point of the movie, however, is the monster attack itself. Attack? What attack? I've never seen an alien strike force so ineffective and vulnerable (one hopeless specimen walks off a cliff at one point, for no apparent reason). The eye creatures, conveniently human-sized humanoids with bubbly heads, manage to do away with at least one unfortunate bystander, even if it is only by chasing him very, very slowly and pawing at the air in front of his face, but after that the "attack" is all but over. In any case, the monsters have got to be less of a public menace than the neighborhood crank who keeps stomping about the woods with his shotgun in search of trespassing teens.
At first, the film appears to be indulging its young target audience by portraying all adults and authority figures (parents, the military, the police) as skeptical, patronizing, or incompetent. It's a little perverse when you consider the film was made by adults, which is why it should be reappraised. Sure, these teens save the day, but in the end they're just as ineffectual and witless as the adults they complain about. In the final scene Stan and Susan have forgotten about their marriage (their first step into adulthood, maybe) and admit they're just a couple of self-professed "crazy kids" canoodling along with the rest of the gang in their cars. But what director Larry Buchanan (of MARS NEEDS WOMEN fame) is most famous for in this flick is his daring juxtaposition of daylight scenes with night-time ones. No, not really. The production's day-for-night technique was just as inept as the rest of the picture.
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