Three days before the holiday season, and my long overdue return to the blog after such a long lapse, I have to report news like this.
A friend of mine sent me an e-mail asking me if I had heard of Larry Buchanan's passing, which he had just read in the Post. I hadn't, and the news both saddened and shocked me.
For those who may not know, Larry Buchanan was a director of micro-budget genre films from the 1950s to 1989. He is perhaps best remembered for a string of made-for-TV science fiction horror pictures in the late 1960s (among them, MARS NEEDS WOMEN, THE EYE CREATURES, ZONTAR THE THING FROM VENUS) which over the years has continued to delight or baffle many a channel surfer in the wee hours of the morning. For the most part, people poke fun at these movies because of the same cheap monster that appears in most of the seven films (made under the banner of Azalea Pictures, released by AIP), and that they are lethargic movies made on ridiculously low budgets. All right, but ESR's mandate has always been to look behind the cheap curtain and see what is operating there.
Thus, in 2002, we did just that.
