LARRY BUCHANAN

When the drive-in movie phenomenon exploded in the 1950’s, it helped to create a whole generation of low-budget “guerilla” film-makers who churned out cheap and nasty films at a frenzied pace to cash in. Some, like Roger Corman and Francis Ford Coppola, went on to achieve a kind of respectability and success in the greater Hollywood domain. Others like Al Adamson, Jerry Warren, and T.V. Mikels, became infamous for their low quality output. We’ve covered just about all of this latter bunch here at Wormwood over the years. But one name we have overlooked…

That would be Texas’ favorite son, Larry Buchanan. Larry could spew out the down and dirty schlock as fast as any of them. His career spanned 50 years and he never really escaped the ghetto of low-budget films though he tried mightily. But if Larry’s output never became really respected, it did manage to become something else...beloved. You gotta tip your hat to any guy that started in the earliest days of the drive-ins and lasted all the way to the era of video rental stores and DVD’s. And that’s just what we’re gonna do with this article!

In a lot of ways, Larry was born to be in the movie business. His actual life story is very inspiring, as he rose from very hard and difficult beginnings to finally find success in his chosen field. As is typical in show business, “Larry Buchanan” is a stage name. Larry was born as Marcus Larry Seale Jr. in 1923 in the small town of Lost Prairie, Texas. His childhood was deeply unhappy, as he was orphaned as an infant and never really knew either of his parents. He was sent to a Dallas orphanage where his youth was a dull and dreary existence, generally spent avoiding bullies and authority figures. Only one thing really provided entertainment...the world of movies. He was absorbed with the movies shown at the orphanage and was fascinated by the nuts and bolts of creating film. He made a promise to himself to try and find a career in the film world.

He made that dream come true but in a peculiar way. Making to the move to Hollywood as a young man, he started at the absolute bottom. He became a bit actor known as “Larry Buchanan” and had silent walk-on parts in a variety of low budget films. His real job was working in the prop department at 20th Century Fox, which gave him a basic knowledge of how things were done behind the scenes. As happened with many other actors and film-makers, World War II interrupted things. For young Larry, the Army provided him with a lot of knowledge. He wound up making cheap training films for the Army Signal Corps. 

Buchanan’s film career got its proper start with a short feature called “The Cowboy” in 1951. This one was made for the princely sum of $900, dirt cheap even by the standards of the era. That movie set a pattern of penny-pinching that Larry followed for the next 50 years. He wound up returning to Dallas with his wife and two kids and tried to scrape together some kind of film industry there. He did a movie called “Grubstake” in 1952 which he shot for about $7000...a quantum jump over what he used for “The Cowboy”. As you might expect, both “The Cowboy” and “Grubstake” have disappeared into the mists of regional film history and will likely never be seen again. One other note about “Grubstake”...Larry hired a struggling young actor to play the bad guy. His name? Jack Klugman!

For the most part, Larry got by on doing TV commercials for local channels. He could have really continued just with these, but his dream of doing his own movies never faded. In many ways, it was Larry Buchanan’s perseverance that laid the groundwork for the future Dallas film industry. It took until 1961 for Larry to get his real break. He found an investor who was willing to put up $8000 if Larry could churn out a sensational exploitation flick that could draw money in the exploding regional drive-in movie scene.

Larry’s answer was “The Naked Witch” and man, if any movie had a title designed for the drive-in circuit this was it. In grand exploitation tradition, no naked witch actually appears. Strategic camera placement and smears of vaseline are used to make sure nothing really extreme is ever shown. As for the witch herself, she is resurrected from her grave by an idiotic young hunk of a history student and she promptly goes on a spree of revenge against the descendants of the villagers who killed her. Where did this witch killing take place? Why, where else but Luckenbach, Texas, immortalized in song by Waylon and Willie and! Well, there’s a reason the town is famous for the song and not the movie...one look at this piece of rock bottom cinema will show you why.

Yet the film made back its meager cost many times over. That shows what a sexy movie title can do, whether it’s honest or not. It was Larry’s first real success and showed that if he pointed a working camera in the right direction, he could say he made a movie.

The movie was more impactful than Larry could dream. Although it played almost exclusively on the Texas circuit, its strong earnings caught the eye of a real mover and shaker in the film world: Samuel Z. Arkoff. Arkoff and his partner James Nicholson were the men in charge of American International Pictures, which had become the king of the American low-budget movie scene. A.I.P. churned out dozens of profitable monster movies, teenage delinquent flicks, brainless beach party movies and cheap Westerns. Many of those movies were helmed by the master of getting the most out of the least, Roger Corman. But Arkoff’s thirst for B-movie programmers exceeded even Corman’s ability to fulfill. So the sharp eyed movie mogul made contact with Larry Buchanan. And Larry’s career was ready to take off.

One of Larry’s films that’s seldom mentioned today is “Free, White and 21”. This was an exploitation film, but one with some degree of intelligence to it. Released in 1963, before Buchanan sealed his A.I.P. deal with Arkoff, this movie is quite a bit more advanced than “The Naked Witch”. It is basically a courtroom drama designed to cash in on “To Kill A Mockingbird” and “Anatomy of A Murder”. A black hotel owner is accused of raping a white woman who was in Dallas as a “freedom rider” for civil rights. While still cheap and derivative, the film shows some sensitivity with its subject matter. It has been said by some that this film represents the “real” Larry Buchanan more than any of the schlock horror and sci-fi pictures he was about to attach his name to.

In fact, you can see Larry experimenting with different kinds of film in both his early and late stage career. Surely one of his most unusual and heartfelt films was “The Trial Of Lee Harvey Oswald”. Filmed in Buchanan’s home base of Dallas, Texas, where the horrific assassination of President John F. Kennedy took place and left deep scars, the movie very much lives up to its title. It is an actual speculation on how Oswald’s trial would have gone had he not been shot by Jack Ruby. The movie is cheap and minimalist in the extreme, basically taking place in a courtroom set and featuring a cast of local Dallas actors. Buchanan rushed the film into production and it was released just five months after Oswald was shot. Some of the quotes from “witnesses” were actually taken from the Warren Commission itself.

Despite its explosive subject matter, the film is not really exploitative at all and does not engage in outrageous conspiracy theories. Like “Free, White and 21”, it dealt with subject matter that Larry was deeply interested in and he did not approach it like a drive-in movie. Unfortunately, Larry’s deficiency as a director and the shortcomings of the local actors give the film a leaden feel. Nevertheless, this remains a real interesting relic of not just Larry’s career, but regional Texas film-making altogether.

“Naughty Dallas” and “Under Age” were more typical sex-oriented grindhouse flicks Larry churned out during this period. These were often considered “indecent” films, but they weren’t true “roughies” featuring a lot of nudity and weird sexual behavior. Rather, they were more like naughty melodramas that teased such an approach but didn’t indulge in it. An odd combination of “social message” movie with sexploitation elements was “High Yellow”, released in 1965, which told the story of a young black woman who’s skin was light enough to “pass for white” and the grief that condition brought her. This was real soap opera stuff, but done for the drive-in crowd. 

After “High Yellow”, Larry was about to dive into the most well-known yet derivative portion of his career. His partnership with Sam Arkoff and A.I.P. was now going to go into high gear. That meant that Larry had to churn out a high volume of cheap films at a fast clip. There was no time for subtlety or constant tinkering with these movies. Arkoff demanded profit above everything else. Larry had a family to feed so he dived right in to a frantic pace of movie-making.

To satisfy Arkoff, Buchanan had a novel strategy: instead of wasting time coming up with new scripts and ideas, he would simply remake some of A.I.P.’s black and white horror/sci fi films in color and with a new cast! Instead of being obvious remakes, these Larry-helmed films would tweak things a bit, renaming the movies and the characters in them. Thus, Larry’s take on “Invasion of the Saucermen” became “Attack of the Eye Creatures”. The plots of both films were virtually identical, but whereas the original “Invasion of the Saucermen” was a rather droll satire of 50’s alien invader flicks, “Attack of the Eye Creatures” was done straight, although it was laced with painfully unfunny “comic relief” scenes. The Saucermen were midget-sized pop-eyed beings with giant heads...the Eye Creatures were just extras in rubber costumes covered with “eyes”!

“Eye Creatures” was filmed in the Dallas area with mostly local talent. Larry would always try to find one “name” actor to put in his films…usually a veteran who’s best days were far behind them. In this case, though, teenage hunk John Ashley was the main player. “Eye Creatures” was the first movie to be released through Buchanan’s own production outfit, Azalea Pictures. These were the A.I.P. “updates” he did for Sam Arkoff and though some of them would play the Texas drive-in circuit, they went straight to television, where they haunted many a local horror movie show.

Larry slammed out a bunch of Azalea movies in quick succession. “Mars Needs Women” is one of the best B-movie titles ever and made Larry a ton of money. It was a thinly veiled remake of “Teenagers From Outer Space”, which itself was quite the sci-fi schlock classic. For this one, Larry got a down on his luck Tommy Kirk, a former Disney teen idol, to play DOP, the leader of the Martians who falls for the Earthwoman he is to kidnap and bring back to Mars as breeding stock. Playing the love interest here was the beautiful young Yvonne Craig, who very soon would be TV’s Batgirl opposite Adam West.

Next came “Zontar: The Thing From Venus”, Larry’s riff on Roger Corman’s classic “It Conquered The World”. This one had B-movie vet John Agar playing the part originally done by Peter Graves. Where Graves fought a scowling giant cucumber in the original, Agar found himself up against what looked like a three-eyed giant bat covered with melted wax. People thought nobody could do a cheaper monster than Corman; Buchanan said, “hold my beer”. Zontar was the first Buchanan monster to feature eyes made out of ping-pong balls cut in half. This would soon become a Larry characteristic.

Larry found time to churn out two cheap Westerns that almost nobody saw, “Sam” and “Comanche Crossing”, but his bread and butter were the Azalea monster movies.  “Creature Of Destruction” was up next...a remake of “The She-Creature”. A sinister hypnotist turns his lovely assistant into a monster that commits murders for him. This time, Les Tremayne, a favorite character actor of mine, gets the role of the hypnotist originally played by Chester Morris. Once again, the monster was a pop-eyed inferior version of what was originally a rather impressive monster. And while “The She Creature” had a strange dreamy atmosphere, Larry’s lifeless direction made “Creature Of Destruction” sleep-inducing.

One of my favorite Buchanan films was “In The Year 2889”. The movie title was absolutely nonsensical because the film took place in contemporary California and had nothing to do with the future. Maybe the name was meant to cash in on the ZAGER AND EVANS hit “In the Year 2525”. At any rate, this movie was another remake of a Corman classic, “The Day The World Ended”.  It followed the plot almost to the smallest degree, with a small group of survivors stuck in an isolated valley after World War 3 destroys the world. The family group at the center of it all has to deal not only with criminals breaking in on them, but a lurking radioactive mutant. I have to admit, I actually saw Buchanan’s film well before the Corman original. While I acknowledge Corman’s version is superior, there is a strange homely feeling to Larry’s cheap knock-off that I find very appealing. The mutant is not as outrageous as Roger’s three-eyed monstrosity, but it seems more dangerous and the feeling that the monster is actually the fiancee of one of the women survivors is more keenly felt.

Getting a little tired of remaking A.I.P. monster movies, Larry next decided to remake an A.I.P. war movie.  “Hell Raiders” was his version of “Suicide Battalion”. The original was already threadbare enough but Larry almost took it as a personal challenge to make something cheaper and duller. Although the movie featured John Agar and Richard Webb as its stars, it just didn’t have the budget to be a convincing war film. So it was back to monsters with ping pong ball eyes for Larry and his next film “It’s Alive!” (not to be confused with Larry Cohen’s killer baby movie of about ten years later) featured a real dandy. Believe it or not, this movie was inspired by a story from the great author Richard Matheson. Matheson was responsible for classics like “The Incredible Shrinking Man” and “Duel”, not to mention many memorable episodes of “The Twilight Zone”.

I can only imagine Matheson’s amazement and depression upon seeing Buchanan’s adaptation of his story. “It’s Alive!” is usually considered the very worst of Larry’s Azalea Pictures movies and it’s easy to see why. It is so utterly devoid of talent and budget that it exerts a strange fascination, much in the manner of Coleman Francis’ “The Beast of Yucca Flats” or Ed Wood’s “Bride of the Monster”. The story is simple: a bickering couple from “Out East” get lost in the Ozarks and wind up at the shabby roadside zoo of a seedy looking character named Greely (Bill Thurman, who was in most of the Azalea movies, exudes a backwoods menace), who turns out to be a complete nutcase. He traps the couple, along with a local game warden played by Tommy Kirk, in a dimly lit underground cave. The cave is actually quite authentic and does possess a menacing atmosphere. Deep in the cave is a prehistoric monster that Greely hopes to one day exhibit and make a fortune from. The monster is a guy in a cut-rate suit, complete with fanged mouth and ping pong ball eyes. Larry’s photography in the monster scenes is so poor that it took me a while to realize the monster is supposed to be a giant. I thought he was man-sized during his first scenes.

The movie has such a seedy, home-movie kind of feel that it actually becomes creepy. In addition to tormenting his “guests”, Greely also tortures a female companion, giving her a rat to eat. The scene where this character tries to escape and runs through a swamp with Greely on her tail is so poorly shot that it achieves an avant-garde kind of brilliance. If there’s one movie that sums up the strange charm of Buchanan’s Azalea movies, this is it. Incidentally, Larry also serves as narrator for the film.

Apparently making “It’s Alive!” was such an ordeal that Buchanan swore off Azalea Pictures and monster movies. He wanted to branch out into different kinds of films and as a result, he did some of his most interesting movies during the 70’s, his era of creative freedom.

His first movie of this period, “A Bullet For Pretty Boy”, proved to be a difficult one. It was an attempt to tell the story of notorious Southern bandit “Pretty Boy Floyd” on the rampage during the Depression. To play “Pretty Boy”, Larry managed to snag a REAL “pretty boy”...former teen idol Fabian. The casting made actual sense, but once Larry got into the meat of the film, he found he was running out of money. He was fired before the film was completed and the remaining scenes done by Maury Dexter. The resulting movie actually did quite well and featured a few exciting scenes despite its cheapness.

If there’s any movie that shows both Buchanan’s promise and banality in equal measure, it would be the obscure arty exploitation flick “Strawberries Need Rain”. If that title sounds like something from Ingmar Bergman, it’s no coincidence. This was Larry’s attempt to do a serious film while still having sex exploitation elements. It starred the very attractive Monica Gayle (most famous for the cult smash “Switchblade Sisters”) as a teenage virgin who is paid a visit by Death Himself (an unusual role for the great Les Tremayne). Death comes across Gayle’s character Erika swimming naked in a pool...the young girl begs for another day of life so she can lose her virginity and “die a woman”. Death agrees and Erika goes on an improbable and disturbing series of adventures with a teenage nerd, a violent and rugged biker who whips her with a belt and her own high school teacher who feeds her strawberries soaked in champagne (hence the title). There’s a good case to be made that this is Larry’s best movie and for sure it is one he felt strongly about, as opposed to the Azalea films. But the movie played very little outside of the Texas circuit and remains obscure.

Buchanan always had a fascination with Hollywood’s glamour girls who died an early death. That manifested in a very strong way with his 1976 film “Goodbye, Norma Jean”, which told the story of the greatest of all, Marilyn Monroe. It’s hard to believe, but “schlock” movie maker Larry was the first director to do a serious look at Marilyn’s difficult life. He chose beautiful Misty Rowe, who was one of the “cornfield girls” on “Hee Haw”, to play Norma Jean Baker, i.e. Marilyn Monroe. Unfortunately, Rowe’s acting ability is not up to the part and the movie itself is a cheerless and often mean-spirited look at a blonde bubble-head being abused and exploited by every conniving man she meets. The acting in general is poor here and although you could sense Larry was invested in the story, he just didn’t have the talent to pull it off. However, the film was a huge success and without a doubt his biggest moneymaker. In 1989, Buchanan would shoot a few new scenes and re-release the movie as “Good Night, Sweet Marilyn”, where he tried to cash in on the VHS/DVD market.

Larry tried to have lightning strike twice with his look at the career of starlet Jean Harlow and her “romance” with whacky millionaire Howard Hughes. 1977 brought “Hughes And Harlow: Angels In Hell” but the success of “Goodbye, Norma Jean” was not replicated here.  The acting of Lindsay Bloom as Harlow and Victor Holchak as Hughes was tepid and uninvolving; Harlow came across like a foul-mouthed bimbo while Hughes was a country bumpkin instead of a world-class financier. The script took great liberties with the facts and always went for the vulgar. In the end, movies like “It’s Alive!” and “Mars Needs Women” wound up being a lot more fun to watch.

Larry’s career was starting to slow down. No longer was he churning out potboilers at the rate of more than one a year. But he was still churning out potboilers. A good case in point was 1979’s “Mistress of the Apes”. A description of the plot here makes it sound like a batshit crazy sleaze classic: the wife of a missing anthropologist loses her baby when a gang of drugged out losers raids the hospital she’s at to get their fix. To recover from the tragedy, she decides to head to the jungles of Africa to find her missing hubby. “Africa” in this case looks suspiciously like the outskirts of Malibu, CA, but there ya go. She stumbles into a crazy “lost world” full of ape-like “near men” and sexy Amazon ladies, as well as some murderous poachers

This sounds a lot more promising than the way it plays out. There’s some “interspecies” copulation between human women and near-men which raises eyebrows...but nothing else. It was like Larry could imagine sleazy sexploitation situations but just couldn’t pull the trigger on them. The sex is never explicit and the violence is ham-fisted. But the movie does boast the presence of the ravishingly beautiful Barbara Leigh as a close friend of the female lead. And Jenny Neuman as the heroine is also extremely easy on the eyes. So while “Mistress of the Apes” is not the sleazefest it could have been, it does have more feminine pulchritude than any other Buchanan film.

1982 saw Larry bitten by the cryptozoology bug, as he did a good old-fashioned monster flick with “The Loch Ness Horror”. OK, this movie is pretty bad and it’s about as Scottish as Cincinatti, OH, but I have a real soft spot for it. I love anything to do with lake monsters and films like this were virtually extinct in the 80’s, following the “Star Wars” summer blockbuster boom. Larry’s version of Nessie is pretty nasty as it is a plesiosaur-type beast that loves to snack on people...just like the real thing, ahem. Toss in a mad scientist, a mystery involving a Nazi plane sunk in the loch and shady military coverups and you’ve got a Loch Ness story like no other! As for Nessie, the effects are of the practical kind and range from acceptable to awful. Also watch out for B-movie legend Stuart Lancaster, a Buchanan favorite, in the cast!

Predictably, “The Loch Ness Horror” sank like a rock when released and I think the failure of this one took a lot of wind out of Larry’s sails. He was beginning to realize that the movie world he knew, the one of drive-in and grindhouse films, was coming to an end. There were only a couple of more films left in the Buchanan canon. “Down On Us” was supposedly a serious conspiracy film theorizing that the government killed Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison and Janis Joplin because they were spreading messages of freedom. The murders were all made to look like accidental deaths. Again, this premise had some actual promise, but the actors chosen to play the rock stars had little to no actual talent and the “live music” scenes were so cheap and phony that laughter is the only possible reaction. Once more, Larry’s ideas were interesting but the execution bland and unconvincing. 

That really marked the end of Larry’s directorial career. He never really got out of the movie business completely, but there were no more Sam Arkoffs in the 1990’s and 2000’s to bankroll him. He settled down and spent time writing a rather charming autobiography entitled “It Came From Hunger! Confessions of a Cinema Schlockmeister”, which is well worth a look. Larry was a better writer than director and admitted it. At the time of his death in 2004, he was trying to complete a project he had first started back in the 70’s entitled “The Copper Scroll of Mary Magdalene”, which was no less than a look at the life of Christ through the eyes of his mother. To my knowledge, this project was never completed. Which is either a disappointment or a blessing, depending on how you look at it.

You can’t separate Larry Buchanan from the world of movies. From the beginning of his life up until the end, film was the reason for his existence. And he made a living at it and provided for his family. I find one thread that connects almost all of the “bad” film-makers is their sincere love of movies. Larry Buchanan, Ed Wood, Al Adamson, T.V. Mikels, even the misanthropic Andy Milligan...they were all obsessed with the lure of Hollywood. In some cases, they died for the movies as well as lived for them. Larry really came out ahead in the end, no matter how cheap and quick he was. I for one really miss guys like him in the business.