UUURGH... So far since 2022 started I've been having fun with 2012, and Planes, and... well not so much with Test Tube Teens... but otherwise it's been mostly decent movies here however that is all about to dramatically change as I turn my attention to *deep breath* The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies. Potentially the worst name for a movie ever bettered only potentially by The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. Actually no, I think it's worse than that. And something else it was also worse than was every single other movie ever made, according to the 2004 DVD: "The 50 Worst Movies Ever Made," which may have just been added to birthday wishlist. I am going into this with some trepidation because if this is really worse than Maniac, worse than Beast of Yucca Flats, worse than Hercules in New York then it really is sinking to levels so low they are not yet fully understood by humanity. So it's time to find out and time to tick my first "worst movie" of 2022 off the list, here we go:
After a genuinely unsettling and creepy as fuck opening credits... we cut to Jerry (Ray Dennis Steckler) and Harold (Atlas King) who spontaneously decide they are bored and go to pick up Jerry's girlfriend; Angela (Sharon Welsh) before driving to a massive amusement park by the beach. Meanwhile dancer; Marge Neilson (Carolyn Brandt) who is struggling with a drinking problem, completely messes up her routine that evening and is threatened with the sack from her boss if she can't get straight. Feeling at a loose end she visits the park's fortune teller, Madame Estrella (Brett O'Hara) but when the cards reveal the death card she freaks out and flees, running straight into Harold. Deciding it would be amusing to get their fortunes told, the trio enter Madame Estrella's tent where she tells them that there is much unhappiness on the horizon for Angela, but when Jerry presses her to tell his fortune she reveals she is unable and the 3 leave unsatisfied where upon Jerry meets the gaze of exotic dancer; Carmelita (Erina Enyo), sister of Madame Estrella, and is immediately hypnotised by her. After Jerry and Angela fall out when Angela refuses to go see the exotic dancing show with him, Jerry sends Harold off after her and goes to see the show alone and after sitting through a few routines, Carmelita finally takes to the stage for the main event and as Jerry watches on, some creepy, weird looking guy smoking a cigarette hands him a note instructing him to meet Carmelita in her dressing room after the show. Finding her dressing room, Carmelita lures him behind a curtain where he suddenly walks into a room with a large spinning spiral where he is hypnotised by Madame Estrella to become her slave. Later that evening as Marge and her dancing partner, Bill Ward (William Turner) are performing, a very clearly disturbed Jerry appears from behind the curtain and proceeds to stab them both to death in potentially the worst murder scene I've ever watched... The following morning after suffering from terrible nightmares, and struggling to remember everything that happened, Jerry goes to visit Angela and the pair sort-of argue with Angela still annoyed at him and Jerry offering his apologies but when Angela starts to spin her umbrella, it triggers Jerry and he tries to strangle her, believing her to be... Marge I think? I'm not sure but then that scene and it's dramatic music is abruptly cut off as we pan to Jerry striding away from the scene next to a tram line... where as he crosses over a bridge he overhears someone listening to a news report on the radio informing listeners that police are searching for the killer of Marge Neilson. Deciding to return to the park Jerry confronts Carmelita and Madame Estrella where he is again hypnotised, this time to kill another one of the exotic dancers, Stella (Toni Camel)... Meanwhile back with Angela, Harold arrives and begs Angela and family not to call the police but instead help him find Jerry, and guessing he may have gone back to the park the pair rush off with Angela's brother, Madison (Pat Kirkwood) in tow. Jerry, returning back to the park after knifing Stella and some poor bloke who just so happened to turn up on her doorstep at the time, is still in a trance where, making his way into Madame Estrella's tent she splashes acid on his face for... some reason... and has him escorted to the back of her tent to be imprisoned with the rest of the people she has done this to before, but as her weird smoking bloke opens the cage door several of the people she holds prisoner burst out, all of them facially disfigured and a skirmish breaks out with Madame Estrella, the weird bloke and Carmelita all strangled to death by the prisoners. With the prisoners now free, they begin to cause havoc in the park, attacking another dancing routine, until they are shot dead by the Police, who, making their way to Madame Estrella's tent discover the dead bodies. Meanwhile Angela, and friends have just arrived at the park and immediately make their way to the same tent where they watch as a slightly disfigured Jerry, still in a trance, appear from behind the curtain and immediately jumps out the window running away, sprinting along the beach with everybody in hot pursuit. As Jerry runs further and further into the rocks and through the crashing waves, pursued all the way by Angela, Harold and the Police, he, eventually, scales a rock too high and finds himself a dead end where he shot by the Police and falls into the ocean. But, in a painfully drawn out final 5 minutes, Jerry emerges from the ocean, initially alive, but then dies on the beach surrounded by his friends.
Wow. This was... shit. Well, ok there was some parts of it that I actually liked. The creepy music at the beginning was genuinely unsettling, and some of the other musical numbers as well were actually pretty decent. Maybe it's because I was watching a really dodgy copy from Archive.org but because the audio was so lo-fi and at times, with completely unstable audio tracking, it gave it a really wonky, kitschy feeling that made it more interesting than it probably was originally. Aside from that and aside from some, at times, pretty decent cinematography work there wasn't a lot of much else worth praising here.
So let's focus on the good bits first. As mentioned I thought some of the musical numbers were decent, and the soundtrack on whole was generally alright. I'll move on to criticisms of the cinematography shortly but there was a couple of scenes genuinely shot really differently and uniquely, to a degree, in particular the scene where Jerry was first hypnotised. That and... erm... no... no I think that's everything.
Everything about this stunk rotten of low budget. Where do you want me to start? There was a heavy degree of padding going on. From b-roll of the park rides, b-roll of the scenery, scenes that were just musical numbers; people singing and dancing that had no bearing on the plot development whatsoever, from a 1 hour, 22 minute movie, perhaps half an hour of that was actual plot. The rest was pretty much all just filler, or inconsequential scenes that made no difference anyway. A good half of this movie, I think, was probably just dancing parts. It had less to do with "mixed-up zombies" and more to do with exotic dancing?!
Secondly; I reckon a good half to 2 thirds of this movie was shot in one take. Poorly. There was so many scenes, so many scenes shot on the wonk, or with that weird style that seems to pop up alot in these low budget movies where the characters head and face is just completely misframed so that their chin almost runs off the bottom of the picture. I have no idea if that's intentional, and if so I don't know why, but it just makes the watcher feel really uneasy, like they want to camera to pan out and bit and they feel uncomfortably close. I hate it. There was also a good sprinkling of composition correction mid-shot, particularly during dancing segments which is a dead ringer for amateur cinematography. I almost got the feeling that the people shooting this flick had literally never filmed a movie before.
The acting; mostly terrible. Brett O'Hara was decent and probably had no rights souring her reputation in the dodgy movie, Ray Dennis Steckler was... ok... when he was trying to act normal and casual he was pissing terrible, but the bits where he was hypnotised and disturbed were not so bad, although he had a tendency to just have open his eyes really wide and it looked a bit goofy really. Both Atlas King and Sharon Walsh were so horrendously wooden you could have substituted them for rag doll models and dubbed in voices post prod and it genuinely might have been an improvement. I don't know if it was lack of script, lack of direction or if they are generally just not very good, but they stunk. Everybody else; instantly forgettable.
And whoever was behind editing this final cut must have taken to it with a pair of rusty hedge trimmers. There was a fair old sprinkling of complete dead stops with no transition, with a good 2 or 3 scenes that built to a dramatic crescendo only to seemingly be cut off during the climax to begin roll of the next scene? The whole thing just stank of amateur, low budget film production and destroying any absorption the movie might have had.
The motives of Madame Estrella and why she wants several of her work colleagues bopped off is never really explained, or hinted at. It just sort of is. It doesn't even really give it reason for her to have a bunch of facially disfigured "zombie" prisoners before she even hypnotises Jerry? What has she been doing with them before now? Why did she need to hypnotise Jerry to kill when she could have just deployed one of them? It makes no fucking sense. The whole, poorly thought out idea, just exists to give the movie some degree of shock value and build around the whole premise being about zombies when in actual fact it isn't and it's just a waste of time.
Just one final key point before my closing statement. This entire movie promises a "monster musical" but in reality you are a good 45 minutes in before Jerry get's hypnotised, and the actual facially disfigured "zombies" that are plastered all over this movie's marketing material show up 15 minutes from the end and occupy about 4 minutes of screen time. The whole thing takes far too long to get to the grizzly bits and they are all over before they've even had a chance to build momentum. I don't know if this is down to budget, poor storycraft, or what but the whole point of the movie is that it's supposed to be about "strange creatures" becoming "mixed-up zombies" and none of that particularly features that heavily? It was more about exotic dancing and some bloke doing standup. Badly.
I had more or less decided the moment the credits rolled at the end that this had scored a 1 out of 5, because luckily for this movie I have watched and covered far, far worse atrocities than this. Some
barely qualifying as movies at all. And whilst this movie smacked of incompetence, low budget, and inexperienced film making, it just wasn't quite as awful as some of the garbage I've seen before it. And in that sense; it's lucky. Because if I'd have covered this before covering say,
some other movies, I feel it was have been squarely in the zero club, but fortunately I have subjected myself to even more terrible garbage than this, and by which it, in comparison, almost feels like a competent movie. That being said, paradoxically, this almost makes movies I've given zero stars to, feel like cinematic masterpieces.
Alone in the Dark I take it all back pal, you are forgiven. So I sat and stared at the laptop screen for a little while and thought to myself; no really, where do you actually rank this movie. And whilst it had some minor elements that I enjoyed I concluded that my enjoyment of them was more because of the lo-fi nature of the movie, and less of the movie's deliberate intention to actually present them, and although it had bursts of genuinely impressively cinematography, they were horribly overshadowed by the horrendous production of the rest of the flick. This was absolutely not the worst piece of cinema I've ever watched, but I can't justifiably rank this alongside
Fire Maidens from Outer Space,
Eegah and
Frankenstein 1974 so uh yeah, it's a 0 out of 5 from me.
