EDITOR’S NOTE: The Eye Creatures was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, June 5, 1971 at 1:00 a.m. and April 22, 1972.

Directed by Larry Buchanon and written by Paul W. Fairman, Robert J. Gurney Jr. and Al Martin, The Eye Creatures is based on Fairman’s “The Cosmic Frame” and is a remake of American-International Pictures’ Invasion of the Saucer Men. It was made in Dallas for $25,000 as a series of remakes that would fill in AIP’s TV packages. They had Jonn Ashley, who took up most of the budget, but his wife left him just before they made the movie.

Buchanan told Fangoria, “We got John Ashley on the weekend that his wife Deborah Walley said goodbye to him. And here I am with him on the set the next morning; he was in bad shape. Deborah had gone over to Arkansas on an AIP publicity junket for one of those “Beach Party” things, and John asked me if he could fly up and see her. I said, “John, we just started!” I sat down with him and worked it out, I shot around him for two days while he tried to reconcile with her. It didn’t work. But it did work for me in that when he came back, he worked his tail off. I told him he had to make a break— he had a little money— and go as far away from Deborah as he could get. And we talked long into the night, about shooting, casting and making movies. I don’t think we ever stopped on that picture. We would work all day and talk all night. And then he went off to Manila and began making those Bamboo-girl pictures and made a fortune.”

Buchanan also made In the Year 2889 (a remake of Day the World Ended), Zontar, the Thing from Venus (a remake of It Conquered the World); Curse of the Swamp Creature (a remake of Voodoo Woman); Creature of Destruction (a remake of The She-Creature); It’s Alive!,  Mars Needs Women and Hell Raiders (a remake of Suicide Battalion) for AIP. All of these movies went straight to late night horror shows on UHF channels.

AIP told him, “We want cheap color pictures, we want half-assed names in them, we want them eighty minutes long and we want them now.”

Project Visitor should be used to search for UAPs, but the horny soldiers use it to watch teenagers like Stan Kenyon (Ashley, who was a 33-year-old teenager in this movie) and his girlfriend Susan Rogers (Cynthia Hull) make out. When she tells him that she thinks someone is watching them, he tells her that everyone in every car is watching each other. Maybe later, they’ll watch some other couples. 1967 is wild.

As they pull out of lover’s lane, they hit and kill an alien with their car. The alien body ends up getting used in a get rich plan and the government looks for it. It. turns out that the aliens plan on attacking the town but the teens soon learn that bright light destroys them, so everyone stops dry humping and shines their headlights on the eye creatures, destroying them.

If you watch The Ghost In the Invisible Bikini, the eye creature shows up. There’s a lot more recycling in this movie, as the UFO scene is from Invaders from Mars and music is taken from Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, Beach Party and The Hypnotic Eye.

You can watch this on Tubi.