Zontar: The Thing from Venus
Larry Buchanan
A study in microscopic paranoia, Zontar is one of the more outrageous products of mid-sixties UFO Fordism. Its roadkill ‘plot’ shoulders on Body Snatchers territory: An absurd papier-mache creature plans world domination by zombifying the Military Industrial Complex, beginning with a lonely SETI outpost in the Mojave. Most of the inaction takes place in clapboard rec-rooms, abutted to stock footage of missile silos and pans of a stark desert moonscape (the latter is actually a suburb of Dallas, according to the scholars). Inside their pre-fab hells, the inmates mix drinks and threaten each other, occasionally erupt in spasms of wild emotion, then settle down again to the demands of stage-bound budgeting and the confines of a constant medium-shot frame. In a performance that must have been deeply influenced by Milgram’s torture experiments, Tony Huston is especially manic and perplexing as Zontar’s first human dupe, a NASA egghead called Keith. There are hints of a deep-seated nihilism behind his near-hysteria, but seeing that he also wrote the script, maybe it’s just the glee of a strange and lonely pride. His foil is John Agar, an actor who always seems to take on the attributes of the furniture around him. He is a practitioner of Taoist wu, the necessity of presence – neither more nor less.
Zontar finally arrives on earth and sets up command and control in a cave, where he cuts a touchingly vulnerable figure. As he is quite immobile – perhaps because Agar’s salary ate up most of the budget – he is assisted by strange airborne skeet-creatures who zombify the local servicemen and townspeople by stinging them. Repetitive shots of these cardboard demons flying over telephone wires, suburban bungalows, and stalled trucks look like captures of today’s drones haunted-up in memorial black and white. This is indeed skeletal filmmaking at the margin of afternoon fever-dreams, and it has a genuinely purgatorial atmosphere of cramp and marginal reality. Zontar of Venus looks splendid: a Duk-Duk fetish, proud and pitiful in glaring fabrication and bad lighting, an abandoned nightmare decaying in front of overgrown children, waiting for the end like a Mormon angel.
Huston soon realizes that Zontar is an intergalactic fascist whose plans are not liberation but human slavery. In a climax more desperate than thrilling, he rids the universe of both Zontar and himself with something called ‘plutonium ruby crystal’ – yet one feels a terrible certainty that the ‘story’ will repeat in a never-ending informational loop. The living and the dead will again assume their places and carry out their tasks once more, until the last flickering of recorded time. This sense of cyclical production is perhaps the ghostly product of Zontar’s eternal run on rosy-hour TV for the last half–century, as if the film itself had taken on the substance of its own interminable repetition. Zontar is cousin to Milstar.
The film has an occult undercurrent of loathing and cynicism that is strangely difficult to convey or qualify to the uninitiated. Line-readings are deadened but feel deviously mannered when taken as an (un)dramatic whole; the dialogue ignores Victorian ideas of psychological depth in favor of old-world Manicheanism, typified by Agar’s Augustinian pronouncement of the seduction of evil ending in “death… fire… disillusionment… loss”. The awful boredom of endless scenes in interchangeable rooms is eerily hypnotic, resembling the cycles of Bioy’s Morel or a Marienbad motel. These interiors form a wheezing geometrical figure that holds the participants hostage rather than leading them to any dramatic resolution, despite the conspiracy and murder of the goings-on. It seems fruitful here to ask whether Zontar is a reactionary film. Is this Brechtian dramaturgy really a right-wing Modernism á la Marinetti and Lewis? Is its indictment of middle-class complicity with alien martial entities just xenophobia demanding a military coup?
Robert Alcott’s savant camera captures the séance-like proceedings in the naive manner of an ethnographic documentary, and the film is not so much edited as chronologically interrupted. I hazard that Larry Buchanan, the auteur behind this and other narcolepsies such as The Eye Creatures and The Naked Witch, may be the last unexplored property in the American cult terrain, perhaps because he is seen as the most unexceptionally wretched – if he’s seen at all. There are some encouraging signs that this has been a major critical miscalculation.
As evidence prima facie in the case, consider the film’s similarities to post-war German cinema: both Fassbinder and Buchanan are obsessed with the traumatic scars of inertia; Zontar’s documentary camera predicts Thomas Mauch’s and its cheap look resembles Kluge’s futurist Marxian epics; the ensemble nature of Buchanan’s films puts him squarely in the avant-garde, while his workmanlike ethic is pure proletarian. The picture was actually made for television, which goes some way toward understanding its rat-like, neurotic presence, but not the choices of a director who embraces each limitation as a mark of personal obsession. On top of the humiliation of being small screen, Zontar is also a remake of Roger Corman’s junker It Conquered the World, churned out ten years earlier. So Buchanan’s film is therefore a de facto critique (but of what??), as well as a revision.
It is entirely beside the point that Zontar is a ‘terrible’ film, just as it is obvious that bourgeois questions of formal unity, technical proficiency and diegesis do not apply here. Rather, its 80 minutes are hard to forget and give, for my insomnia, more pure unheimlichkeit than any of the more respectable fantasies of the period. It also offers far more to us today than say, The VVitch or Heredity – to name two recent neoliberal swindles made by people who once read about art in college and dress groan-inducing ideas up in murky Silicon Valley blues.
by Martin Billheimer
Postscriptum:
The abysmal quality of copies of the film only add to its mystique, as if it has projected itself forward in time to wallow in its own pixilation. For example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-e9Cs87gbwg
Excellent proof of this can be found here: https://www.braineater.com/zontar.html