Our Take

Zontar, The Thing from Venus (1966) - Larry Buchanan took a three-legged alien and a handful of local actors to create this legendary slice of regional sci-fi. Zontar is a creature from the stars that wants to fix the world by taking away our electricity and our free will. It’s a talky, high-stakes melodrama that feels like a secret play performed in a suburban backyard. It’s got a strange, hypnotic earnestness to it, proving that you don’t need a billion dollars to tell a story about the end of the world—just a weird costume and a lot of conviction.