Zontar, The Thing From Venus is a 1966 film about a scientist from Earth who teams up with a mind-controlling Venusian invader bent on world domination. It's pretty terrible, and no wonder: it's a rip-off/remake of Roger Corman's 1956 It Conquered the World, a film bad enough to have been featured on an episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000. Yikes. (You know you're in trouble when you're watching a rip-off of a Roger Corman movie).





The film begins at a government installation where science is taking place: all around, men and women in white lab coats are flipping switches on big UNIVAC-style computers and peering intently into radar screens. Stolid B-movie mainstay John Agar (the film's hero) wanders into the scene and proceeds to offer this extremely clumsy bit of exposition: "You know it's strange...after all this time and money and work, the laser satellite is finally ready to go." I'm not sure what's so strange about that -- maybe Agar thinks time and money and work aren't supposed to get you anywhere. Well, whatever; the line serves its purpose by establishing to the audience what the scientists are doing: they're getting ready to launch a "laser satellite." Further expository dialogue indicates that this "laser satellite" project cost the U. S. government fifty million bucks, which the assembled scientists all seem to think is an outrageous amount of money (it's not; the Viking missions to Mars in the early 1970's cost around $935 million dollars, and that's not even adjusting for inflation). It's also established that Agar (who plays a guy called Curt) is in charge of the project.

Moments before the launch of the satellite, Curt's good friend Keith confronts him. Keith, an unusually intense fellow, warns Curt that bad things will happen if the satellite launches: specifically, he's concerned that there are extraterrestrials out there who might not appreciate it. "Mankind isn't ready to join the brotherhood of the countless galaxies," he declares. Curt dismisses his fears and implies that he's a lunatic, and launches the satellite anyway...but apparently there's no hard feelings, because that night Keith invites Curt and his wife Ann over for dinner at his house. Evidently it's important to remain on good terms with people you believe have just condemned the Earth to alien attack or worse.

Keith and Curt and Ann and Keith's wife Martha talk about the laser satellite over their TV dinners or whatever the heck they're eating. Ann and Martha quickly grow bored of the conversation; their pretty little housewife heads can't handle all the science-talk. So, Keith and Curt excuse themselves and continue their conversation in the living room, where Keith shows off his new wood-paneled air conditioning unit -- or, no, wait, I guess it's supposed to be the high-tech interplanetary communication device he invented. The conversation suddenly takes a very weird turn, as Keith begins rambling about how a Venusian called "Zontar" got in touch with him through a kind of "hyperspace hypnosis". Oddly, Curt barely raises an eyebrow at all this -- I guess rambling monologues about hyperspace hypnosis and aliens called Zontar are something he's come to expect from his friend. Or maybe Agar is just being typically unemotive. At any rate, Curt and Ann soon leave, and Keith (with a hint of madness in his eyes) talks at Martha about how great Zontar is and about how he's on his way.





The next day, Curt heads to the government installation place, only to learn that the laser satellite has apparently vanished -- none of their instruments or whatever can find it. This is followed by more of Keith's rantings: to the alarmed Martha, he says, "It's what I've been predicting for years, and it's good instead of evil. My one uncertainty was whether it would be for good or evil. And it's for good!" Then he talks to Zontar over the air conditioner (Zontar's voice is represented as an electronic hum, so Keith helpfully repeats everything he "says" to the audience: "Yes, it's true I'm your only friend. Yes, it's true no one understands your superior intelligence as I do." That kind of thing). Zontar lets Keith in on his secret plan: he's transported the laser satellite to Venus in order to board it; after he's boarded it, he's gonna zap it back to where it was, which will confuse the scientist-guys and cause them to bring it back down to Earth for an inspection (satellites aren't generally brought back to Earth intact for inspections after they're blasted up there, but whatever). Anyway, Zontar does all this, and crash lands on Earth. He immediately slinks off to make his headquarters in a cave with a hot spring in it, because, as Keith informs us later, underground caves with hot springs kinda-sorta resemble Venus, and the guy wants to feel at home while he's visiting. (The movie doesn't give us any good clear shots of Zontar just yet; they save that for the end of the film).

Keith grows increasingly deranged. A very large (and dull) chunk of the movie, I should note, consists of arguments between Keith and Curt and between Keith and Martha over Zontar and whether he should be welcomed as the savior of mankind (Keith is convinced this is the case, and tends to chew the hell out of the scenery while making his points). He talks constantly about how awesome Zontar is, and -- over the next few scenes -- demonstrates his allegiance to the Venusian by giving him the names of the people he ought to start mind-controlling first (the mayor, the local sheriff, the cigar-smoking general who's always hanging around the installation...and, of course, Curt himself). Zontar quickly gets underway, sending his flying "injectopods" out to possess the important people around town. (That these poorly-realized flying creatures require nothing more than a name to track down their prey says something, I think, about the advanced state of Venusian technology). Keith isn't particularly bothered by Zontar's desire to control the minds of earthlings; he remains convinced that Zontar is a benevolent being, and that everything he's doing is for our own good.

Zontar succeeds in zapping the general with an injectopod, and in creating a worldwide (I guess) panic by rendering all mechanical devices inoperable. Yep: blatant Day The Earth Stood Still rip-off (and the injectpods are reminiscent of Invasion of the Body Snatchers). This earth-shattering development doesn't really strike any of the people in the film as especially noteworthy, though (apart from a buffoon soldier, who blurts, "I wonder what effect this power failure will have on my wife's big mouth!") so there's really no point in going into it at length -- suffice it to say, the idea that Zontar is capable of shutting down the very laws of physics but needs the hapless Keith to do his grunt work for him is pretty silly.

Eventually, Zontar gets around to sending an injectopod after Curt's wife Ann. Curt shoots her dead, then (understandably upset) goes to chew out Keith for his part in it. Meanwhile, Martha (tired of her husband being such a Zontar sycophant) decides to head down to the cave where Zontar is hanging out in order to personally put a stop to his malfeasance. She's unsuccessful: the Venusian (a man in an awful rubber monster suit adorned with giant bat wings) kills her. Keith abruptly realizes at this point that maybe Zontar's intentions aren't all that noble after all, and teams up with Curt to take him down. Curt makes his way down to the government base to shoot all the Zontar-infected bigwigs while Keith grabs his "beam gun powered by a plutonium ruby crystal" and sets off to zap Zontar with it. They both succeed (although Keith dies in his attempt) and that's the movie. The end.





It's all very dumb. The plot? Well, like I said, it's a straight-up rip-off of It Conquered the World, and It Conquered the World, though a beloved Corman classic, is pretty damn derivative when you get right down to it. The acting? Well, Agar basically knows what he's doing, but the rest of the leads are all hopeless: Tony Huston (who plays Keith) is lousy, and Susan Bjurman's performance as Martha is incredibly bad (her tearful pleading with Keith being an especially sorry spectacle). Special effects? Ugh. Keith's "beam gun" sucks, and they probably would've been better off not showing Zontar at all.

The film's biggest problem, though, is its sheer by-the-numbers lifelessness. No one in the film ever really gets very worked up about anything that happens in the story -- except, occasionally, for Agar's character, and when he gets worked up, the movie tends to collapse under the weight of its own silliness (listening to Agar give a serious speech about the possible wicked intentions of a bat-winged Venusian mind-controller will probably strike most viewers as at least a little absurd).

So: bad movie.

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