It's Alive / Year 2889 DVD

• 1.0 Dolby Digital Mono (English)
• Special video featurette "Hangin' With Paul Petersen"

Byron Lord, Annabelle Macadams, Neil Fletcher, Quinn OHara, Paul Peterson, Tommy Kirk, Max W. Anderson, Bill Thurman, Hugh Feagin, Corveth Osterhouse

Often viewed as the last stop for American International Pictures' fading stable of young stars, the Texas based Azalea Productions, headed by director Larry Buchanan, produced some jaw-droppingly bizarre movies in the 1960s. Often shot on budgets hovering in the $30,000 range on 16mm film stock these films provided AIP honchos Nicholson and Arkoff with a handful of much needed color films to market the rapidly evolving TV syndicators that had grown weary of the company's earlier black & white sci-fi offerings.

It's Alive! us a partcularly grim curio featuring Disney cast-off Tommy-Kirk (who would also star in Buchanan's seminal Mars Needs Women who had come to rest at AIP for some of the later Beach Party movies.

In a story featuring Roadside Zoo keeper (Billy Thurman), who kidnaps people to feed to his pet dinosaur-man (also played by Thurman in a tatty suit leftover from Azalea's Creature of Destruction), Kirk manages to keep a straight face, obviously wishing he was somewhere else. Thurman turns in an inspired performance in his dual role. Director Buchanan has likened It's Alive to Edgar Ulmer's Detour. You decide.

As this disc's co-feature, Year 2889, is yet another depressing exercise in Buchanan's fatalistic vision of the world around us. Here a youthful Paul Peterson (TV's The Donna Reed Show) is destined to walk that last mile to Texas where so many others had gone before (Azalea stars included John Agar, Richard Webb, Francine York and John Ashley). Boosted ably by the lovely Quinn O'Hara (Basil Rathbone's sultry daughter in Ghost in the Invisible Bikini) Petersen gamely tackles the role of a young man saddled with the task of fathering a new world after a nuclear war has decimated Texas.