From the L.A. Times:
Larry Buchanan, the self-declared “schlockmeister” who created such critically panned but highly successful television movies as “Mars Needs Women,” “Curse of the Swamp Creature” and “Zontar, the Thing From Venus,” has died. He was 81. He made roughly 30 pictures over four decades, horrifying critics, delighting fans and gratifying financial backers with his one-man, self-described “guerrilla filmmaking.” He wrote, directed, produced and edited most of his films, and even photographed and acted in a few. One of the filmmaker’s most durable productions was “Mars Needs Women” in 1967, starring Tommy Kirk and Yvonne Craig. The sci-fi plot calls for Kirk and a few of his Martian friends to invade Earth in search of nubile women, with the goal of increasing the birthrate on the red planet.
“I suspect I might first have been recognized for the wrong reasons,” he told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram in 1997. "It kind of stung, at first, to be singled out as a maker of movies that are considered ‘so bad they’re good,’ but then you’ve got to realize the only bad recognition is no recognition."Along with his horror-tinged sci-fi offerings — “The Eye Creatures,” “In the Year 2889,” “It’s Alive!” — Buchanan cooked up his own conspiracy theory docudramas, such as “The Trial of Lee Harvey Oswald” in 1964 and “Down on Us” in 1984, which claimed the government was behind the deaths of entertainers Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison and Janis Joplin.
