It’s Alive! is a 1969 American monster movie directed by Larry Buchanan and distributed by American International Pictures. The story concerns a mad farmer who tries to feed a stranded couple to a dinosaur he keeps in a cave.

In 1963, John Tomerlin was reportedly adapting the Richard Matheson story “Being” for American International Pictures under the title It’s Alive.

The film was reportedly originally written for Peter Lorre.

Buchanan stated that the film was shot in a cave in Arkansas in six days.

“One day we did 57 set-ups!” he said. “We didn’t see one foot of film until the whole batch came from the lab a week later. Nine days later we had cut, scored and printed the film and delivered it to AlP, who made a five o’clock deadline for a package to one of their stations. It was frantic. It was a different way of doing movies.”

Kirk had previously made Mars Needs Women for Buchanan. The actor later called the film “a monster movie so cheap that the monster wore a scuba suit and had ping-pong balls for eyes”.

The cave scenes were filmed in Onyx Cave in Eureka Springs, Arkansas.

The monster suit for the dinosaur was reused from one of Buchanan’s older films, Creature of Destruction.

Buchanan said “Tommy was a really fine actor, but he just disappeared into the woodwork. He had a lot of emotional problems, and needed to talk things out. And the problem of being the director and an Aquarius, I didn’t get much sleep having to listen to those stories. After putting in a 10-hour day, he’d want to go and have a few beers until two in the morning. We’d talk about Europe, traveling, philosophy, what he wanted to do with his life. He is a very cultured person, and a very proud person, so he probably took as much as he could before dropping out.”

color, mono, 16mm fullscreen transfer, runs 80 minutes. DVD-R comes packaged as shown in color DVD case, wrapped in plastic!