A meteorite crashes to earth during a torrential thunderstorm, bringing with it a slimy, three-headed alien beast that craves human meat and gives birth to hundreds of eel-like spawn. The monster takes up residence in the basement of a family home, devouring the parents without anyone else's knowledge. The oldest son Pete (Michael Robert Coleman) is a science major in college, and his younger brother Charles (Charles George Hildebrandt) is a horror movie fanatic who loves to dress up like his favorite monsters and scare his visiting aunt and uncle. When an electrician arrives to check the fuse box, Charles follows him into the basement in costume for a little fun, but instead discovers the hideous alien and what's left of his mother's corpse. Meanwhile, two of Pete's friends come over for a study session, bringing along the remains of a dead alien spawn that they found on the side of the road. Baffled, they dissect it in an effort to establish its origin, but it seems to defy everything they've ever been taught in class. Their intellectual curiosity is abandoned when they find Pete's uncle being eaten by a swarm of alien spawn, and from there on it's a fight for survival against the monster.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, literary enfant terrible Norman Mailer shocked the film world when he decided to step behind the camera for three experimental motion pictures, with technical assistance from cinema v~rit~ pioneers Richard Leacock and D.A. Pennebaker. Though long commercially unreleased on video, all three of the Mailer features appear back-to-back in this box set from The Criterion Collection's Eclipse series. Wild 90 (1967) stars Mailer himself, Mickey Knox and Buzz Farber as a cadre of gangsters holed up in a New York City apartment, where they spend the entire movie boozing, brawling, and arguing. Beyond the Law (1968) is a far more conventional cop drama starring Mailer, Rip Torn and others as Irish cops and set in a New York police station and a nearby bar. Finally, Maidstone (1970) stars the