Following the ‘success’ (the word is used advisedly…) of the dreadful Octaman (1971), writer Harry Essex had another crack at directing (only his fourth foray behind the camera and his last) with this low budget adaptation of the short story Dune Roller. The Cremators causes some confusion as to the parentage of said story – the screen credits one Judy Ditky as the author though it’s clearly based on the 1951 short story by Julian May, whose married name is the slightly different Dikty. The Judy Ditky name doesn’t seem to have been used anywhere else (the original story was credited to J.C. May) and May gets no recognition anywhere in the film’s credits.
Which is probably no bad thing for her. In padding the original short story (first published in the December 1951 edition of Astounding Science Fiction) out to feature length, Essex quite literally lost the plot and resorted to that great bugbear of low budget film-making, having his characters wander around aimlessly waiting for a chance to do something even vaguely interesting.
The most interesting part of the film (and please see the word ‘interesting’ in context here) is the opening in which a doom-laden voiceover fills in the back story – 300 years before a giant glowing meteor crashed in some mountainous region of the States where the local lake has a tidal flow (the film never quite makes its mind up where it’s supposed to be set). It’s into this ‘lake’ that the meteor crashed, witnessed only by a solitary Indian (who promptly gets fried) and… a fish. Yes, a fish. Or more accurately, a hammerhead shark. Which raises a couple of questions far more interesting than anything else in the film – what’s a hammerhead shark doing in a lake? And how does the narrator know what this fish witnessed 300 years after the event?
While pondering these questions, the plot limps into action. It’s now the early 70s and this apparently sentient creature is back to retrieve its offspring, small glowing rocks that the locals have been fishing out of the lake. The “Dune Roller” (one character refers to the meteor thus without explanation) lays waste to the local population while a soppy cat-loving hippy runs around in the surf and spies on the action – why, we don’t know, but he seems happier than the poor viewer tempted in by this tedious nonsense.
On a budget as low as this (reportedly $50,000) you don’t really expect believable effects (actually the “Dune Roller” effects isn’t all that bad – we’ve all seen worse) or even credible acting but given Essex’s impressive pedigree (he worked on the screenplays for It Came From Outer Space (1953), I, The Jury (1953), which he also directed, Creature From the Black Lagoon (1954) and scores of others) we had the right to expect a tighter script. For the majority of its meagre 74 minutes, The Cremators just plods along in the less-than-scintillating company of its scientist leading men, Essex seeming to want to mimic the 50s science fiction films he worked on two decades before but, as with Octaman, making a complete hash of it.
The Cremators doesn’t even manage to rise to “so bad it’s good” levels – it’s just plain bad, poorly acted, incompetently made and lacking even the basic rudiments of what one might call entertainment. Lovers of early 70s drive-in trash will already have picked up the Retromedia DVD release. Others, less tolerant of ineptitude and tedium, may want to look elsewhere for their home entertainment kicks. Try It Came From Outer Space, The Creature From the Black Lagoon or indeed Man Made Monster (1941), another Essex scripted genre movie – they’re all so much more fun than The Cremators.
Trivia-more-fascinating-than-anything-else-in-this-film: co-star Maria De Aragon not only appeared in some much more fun R-rated smut around the time she appeared in The Cremators (Blood Mania (1970) and Wonder Women (1973) among them) but was inside the Greedo suit in Star Wars (1978).
The EOFFTV Review 