I wonder how many old school creature features there are that spend close to their entire runtime building up to a five minute appearance for the monster. Probably hundreds, it was popular practice to splay a lurid and menacing beast across the publicity material for films whose creatures were nothing more than embarrassed stuntmen in ill fitting suits, gesturing and roaring for comical effect. Creature of Destruction is no different from these masses in the silliness of its creature, but it does switch things up a couple of gears by having it on display more than one might expect. Like other Larry Buchanan joints of the 60's, the story here is a graft from an earlier film, in this case She Creature. I've never seen it myself but it tends to be fairly well liked, with a cult cachet. The same does not seem to have attached to Creature of Destruction, but it has its charms nonetheless. Regrettably its highlight comes early, the wordless opening seven minutes as our creature stalks its prey to booming stock music, the inherent craziness of the startling boggle eyed beast made all the weirder by the defunct print quality, with colours shifting mid take and patches of gloom that look to have been lensed through marble ditch-water. Its captivating, wildly edited stuff and amongst Buchanan's finest work, but the film can't keep up the momentum. Focus is largely on oddball scientist and lecturer Dr. John Basso, a weird and unscrupulous guy whose hypnotic experiments are causing all the badness of the film to go down. As Basso, actor Les Tremayne contributes a weird and wryly malefic performance, interesting but often too low key. In acting terms Neil Fletcher comes off best, a broad, bold and money loving business type entering into partnership with the nefarious Basso. Aron Kincaid is somewhat wooden as heroic psychiatrist Dr. Theodore Dell, whilst unearthly charms are conferred by Pat Delaney as Basso's abused assistant and agent of destruction. For all that the cast do their best the film is generally a bit too talky, probably its biggest problem. The story and themes are interesting but the script (by Buchanan regular Tony Huston) isn't well developed enough to make good use of either and the general character banter isn't quite lively enough to make up for the slack action. Still, the creatures attacks are hilarious (its a lively beast despite its clunky and slightly ill fitting costume, it also seem to like wetly slapping at victims), there are some vintage beach partying scenes with accompanying groovy tunes, plus goofy footage repetitions and screwball slip ups in the dialogue, altogether plenty of bonkers meat for daft cinema lovers to sink their teeth into. Not something I would recommend to most, but if you happen to be the sort of person that digs this sort of film, it's worth at least a one time watch.
Review of Creature of Destruction
