( 1966 American International Pictures) Director:  Larry Buchanan Starring: John Agar, Susan Bjurman, Tony Huston, Pat Delaney, Neil Fletcher

With a title like that...you'd expect it to be goofy, right?

First off....this little flick is very misleading.  I pick up a title like this, I expect some "Thing from Venus" action, y'know?  Not "scientist in very stagey shots talking endlessly" action.  Zontar...in all of his "thing from Venus" glory, does not make an appearence until nearly midway into the flick.  Plus...this is the talkiest science fiction movie I've seen since Ang Lee's HULK.. The only difference being that in Lee's film, the very wordy script emphasized dialouge to help build little things like character and motive...whereas the scientists in Zontar...well...they just keep repeating themselves with very Criswell-like repetitive double talk.

The Plot: Seems mankind is yet again poking his nose where it doesn't belong, outer space.  Haven't these folks ever watched any sci-fi movies?  They should know by now that any advancements the space program makes never comes to any good.  We're always bringing attention to ourselves by shooting off all of our little bottle rockets into the stratosphere...some more highly adavnced race takes notice and figures Earth would be either a suitable breeding ground or just generally a better place to live than where they're at.  Most times, we seem like a pretty good foodstuff to them....in any of these scenarios, we always get the bad end of the deal.

Take Zontar, for example...seems like he's a nice enough fellow over the intergalactic space phone to the resident creepy scientist of the film.  "Oh...I just want to help the human race advance itself."  'Course, it's always a bad sign when the most rational fellow in the movie is the one talking back to bad reverb noises (this is supposedly Zontar's native language) coming from what looks to be the same hi-fi stereo system my mother purchased from Fingerhut when I was a kid in the 1970s. Needless to say, Zontar isn't as harmless as one would be led to believe, science betrays man yet again, and all hell breaks loose. The End.

When's NASA gonna learn?   We need to straighten up some stuff here on Earth....y'know...like hunger, crime, homelessness....and the occassional creepy scientist that talks to himself...before we go inviting giant bat-moth bug-eyed space monsters over for dinner....