Zaat (1971)

To be honest with you, my favourites amongst the Worst Movie features are always the really crappy old sci-fi ones. Some of them have been absolutely fucking horrendous. But I can't deny that if I'm going to subject myself to movies widely considered to be amongst the worst ever made, I'd much rather watch a naff sci-fi move than some romance movie that doesn't go anywhere. Yknow, like last months. That being said, as I work my way through the 1970's, this week I'm covering Zaat, A.K.A. Blood Waters of Dr. Z which, although not being the lowest IMDB rated movie I've covered yet, it does retain a paltry 2.1 / 10 scoring it amongst some of the lowest rated movies I've covered yet, but not the lowest, that honour still sits with Manos at the moment. It is potentially the only movie I'll ever watch revolving around a mutated catfish though... so I guess it does have that going for it...

For reasons not immediately clear... Scientist and all round admirer of catfish, Dr. Kurt Leopold (Marshall Grauer) develops and tests an experimental serum; ZaAt on himself, transforming him into some kind of a weird humanoid amphibian, which for simplicity we will refer to as the monster (portrayed by Wade Popwell) from here on out. After swimming around for a protracted amount of time, the monster launches his first attack, capsizing a boat and killing the husband, wife and son on board in what appears to be a revenge attack against one of his peers who doubted him. The resulting floating body attracting the attention of Sheriff Lou Krantz (Paul Galloway) and his Marine Biologist assistant, Rex Baker (Gerald Cruse) who rescue it from the lake before determining the victim was murdered by some kind of claw attack. After Rex witnesses the monster for himself, tearing up a fishing net in the local lake, and after a second victim turns up slashed to death in his own armchair, Rex and the Sheriff draft in help from an organisation called INPIT who undertake investigations into strange phenomena. Arriving at the Sheriff's office, Agents Martha Walsh (Sanna Ringhaver) and Walker Stevens (Dave Dickerson), both clad in red jumpsuits making them look like something from Blake 7, opine that the murders are being caused by something from the fish family but with claws like a cat, or ape...  and as they travel to the local lake, the monster makes his move on a lady camping by the lake when she goes for a swim, grabbing her and dragging her underwater. The motive later revealed to be for selection as his "aquatic mate". Taking her back to the lab (where she is somehow miraculously dry...) he straps her into the same contraption he used to turn himself into the monster and attempts to recreate the experiment that lead to his creation. But it doesn't work out a second time and just kills the unnamed lady instead, causing the monster to lose his temper and smash a bunch of machinery up before he decides to dissolve the body in a vat of acid... At the lake, Rex and the INPIT agents erect a net complete with radiation detectors to try and snare the monster and catch him, which almost works but he manages to break free and attacks Agent Walker in the process who manages to wound the monster causing him to retreat but not before Agent Martha is able to get a photo. In order to cause as much panic as possible, the Sheriff orders the entire town to evacuate to the nearby gymnasium for... some reason.. And with his first experiment deemed a failure, the monster sets his sights on pretty Agent Martha as the next selection for his potential underwater mating partner. Meanwhile INPIT begins to put the pieces together and becomes suspicious of Dr Leopold and his lab when further evidence is revealed detailing experiments with radioactive chemicals. The monster now clearly suffering from the wound Walker inflicted stumbles into town, and after raiding a nearby drugstore with no success, ambushes a pair of lovebird teens, savagely clawing the boy to death and feasting on his carcass. Then... then there is this slightly weird scene where the Sheriff stops off a community hall where he finds a guy with an acoustic guitar singing to handful of people which turns into a full blown musical number with the Sheriff leading them back to this office and locking them up so they'll be safe all as the guy sings and plays his song...? That odd scene out of the way, the monster works his way to wherever Rex, Walker and Martha are staying and for some reason Walker and Martha are now lovers despite it never being hinted at before now, with the monster witnessing them being intimate and getting jealous... I... think... The following morning after discovering the body of the poor boy and discovering the smashed up drug store, Sheriff Krantz, Rex and Walker go about tracking the monster all over town, following the radioactive trail, and eventually join the dots suspecting the monster definitely has something to do with Dr. Leopold. The monster, meanwhile, makes his way to wherever Martha and Walker are staying and kidnaps Martha, taking her away over his shoulder. Further tracking the monster, the Sheriff, Walker and Rex return to find Martha missing, and endeavour to set off to Leopold's lab in order to get some answers. Sheriff Krantz and Rex arrive first where they discover Dr. Leopold's weird equipment as Walker tracks the monster carrying Martha through the undergrowth, suffering a snake bite as he does. As the Sheriff heads outside to radio for Walker, he is attacked by the returning monster and killed. Bringing Martha inside, the monster begins a second experiment to produce a mate but it catches the attention of Rex, still in the lab, who tries to stop the monster but is severely injured in the process. However turning his attention to... something else... the monster abandons the experiment entirely and starts marching towards the sea with two cannisters in hand, where Walker finally catches up with them and shoots him causing the monster to collapse beneath the waves. Meanwhile back in the lab, Rex is just able to save Martha before the experiment is complete although he dies in the process, but Martha awakes in a trance and follows the monster into the sea with Walker too weak to stop her.

To be honest with you, this wasn't half as bad as I thought it was going to be going in! I'd read a few little bits beforehand and I genuinely thought I was going into the crème de la shit of terrible movies but I have certainly seen much worse than this one. It still wasn't very good as such... but it at least had some semblance of a plot and it was at least mildly entertaining. Which already pitches it above some of the pure bollocks I've covered on this blog. But despite having a couple of positives it was still quite a bad movie if I'm being real with myself...

Let's dissect the negatives first. You could cut about an hour out of the 1 hour 39 minute runtime of this movie and I don't think it would suffer. There is an incredibly liberal amount of exposition going on. Scenes that just last for 10-20 odd minutes of just stuff happening that is largely un-necessary. The first 25 odd minutes alone could have been neatly encapsulated in a 5 minute scene and then there is the whole musical number sandwiched in the last third that was completely un-necessary. Cap that off with some incredibly generous layering of stock footage, mostly of fish, and you have more padding involved than a duvet factory. And it all it serves to do is just drag things out and wear you down. There was more than a few moments in this movie where I just felt viewer fatigue as it trundled through a set piece very meticulously.

Secondly, whilst the overall monster design is mostly good, it suffers from far too much exposure. The whole movie more or less tracks the actions of the monster, which actually was quite refreshing and unique for a monster movie, but as a result you get plenty of time to digest and examine the outfit and the more the monster is on show, the more you begin to notice the inconsistencies and the amateur effects used to put the suit together. Which is a shame because in scenes where the monster is obscured it genuinely looks pretty decent but the illusion is ruined by how on display it is throughout the movie.

Thirdly, every action set piece is fucking dreadful. There is no being kind. The murder scenes are horrific for all the wrong reasons and incredibly amateur. This was the biggest fault with the movie in my opinion. It immediately destroyed any kind of menace, any kind of intimidation the creature might have had and reduced it to a ridiculous pantomime. It really was bad: just vague swipes and gentle brushings across actors who in the subsequent scene were suddenly covered in red paint under torn clothing. Awful awful awful.

And it doesn't really stop there. There was a bare bones storyline that was being forced to labour to a full move run time, hence the heavy degree of padding, and script-wise the characters are mostly just force-fed get out jail plot hole avoiders in order to move the movie along a bit. IE: the Sheriff just suddenly remembers that Dr. Leopold wanted to experiment on humans right before they decide it's worth checking out the lab. Parts of the movie were decently written but parts of it got real lazy real quickly when they ran out of steam. Most of the dialogue was pretty amateurish too and if I didn't know any better I suspect most of the actors were just adlibbing their way through certain bits, which in a way gave it a kind of documentary kind of feel which, although completely unintentional, did actually make the movie feel a little bit different!

However, despite regrettably failing in most key areas, the movie was shot particularly professionally. Cinematography was mostly fine apart from the monster attack scenes and the soundtrack, despite being really minimal and self produced, was suitably unsettling and weird enough that I did kind of dig it. Very of it's time, very late 60's, but kitsch. And I liked it. And despite the heavy layering of padding and the minimal storyline, the movie only dragged a little bit and managed to more or less hold my attention for most of the run time.

But if I am being brutally honest, this just wasn't very good. It's clear there was effort, and it's clear there was an idea but it wasn't anywhere near fully fleshed out enough to be produced into a finished movie and needed a good deal more development first. The dialogue was basic, the script was basic and the storyline was minimal. The monster looked decent but was far too overexposed by the screentime it featured in and ultimately despite decent enough production values and some interesting musical bits, there wasn't really enough here to warrant this movie much beyond a minimal score. 1 out of 5.