1960 (USA)
Contains spoilers.
Now I knew revered b-movie specialist Jerry Warren came with a reputation to rival Ed Wood, and this movie in particular was ridiculed as one of the worst ever; but even I wasn't quite prepared for such incompetence and schlock. Definitely falling in the so dire it's good category, writer, director and producer Warren has truly excelled himself with a piece of cinema so cringe-worthy; and I'm saying this up front, just so god damn awful, that it, just like Ed Wood's endeavours, somehow transcends its own mediocrity to become watchable precisely for the reasons it fails. So yes, it's a 1/10 film, and yes all the things I'm just about to point out are as bad as they sound and it certainly won't appeal to all; but if you've got even a smidgen of the voyeur, then there might just be a fun booze fuelled evening to be had with this undisputed car crash of a movie.
It takes but ten
minutes for Reg (Don Sullivan), Skip (Paul Pepper), Julie (Mitzie Albertson),
and Pam (Brianne Murphy); four of the most insipid nondescript and asexual
middle America teenager's ever to grace the screen to finish their milkshakes,
sail out to the mysterious island™ and get themselves easily imprisoned by glamorous mad scientist Dr. Myra (Katherine Victor.) Another ten and we
uncover her Eastern collaborators (I think it's all supposed to be Russian) and
their plan to pop a nerve paralysing agent into the continent's water
supply and turn every man, woman and child into a totally compliant slave. We also learn that each and every wide angle shot is going to
clumsily staged and rehashed over and over, and each and every line of dialogue
is going to end with a painful second or two of silence while the next actor
cues his or her equally painful reply. 
The story is
incredibly thin, incoherent and awkward even by bad b-movie standards. A
mysterious island with a top secret scientific facility with prison and lab
that no one seems to know about; yet a fully stocked fridge, cocktails at noon
and six kids who easily stumble across it all between water skiing sessions? Captives who pick locks, free themselves and even build an escape raft, instead
choose to return to their cage to have a nap, and not make the little noise
needed to free their girlfriends? Finally, Mitch Evans, a man in a rubber
suit playing a zombie gorilla that's both one of the
most truly ridiculous and amateurish monster scenes in all of cinema; and yet one the absolute screen-stealing highlights of the film. The other being Chuck
Niles as Ivan the zombie, played somewhere between a stock Igor and the hulking
voodoo slaves of the forties zombie plantation forays, and actually a highlight in the real sense; a single
small shining piece of authenticity and competence in a wholly amateur
affair.
It's that post-war,
post dark-continent era that's seeing new scientific knowledge and theory
replace magic and voodoo as the deep-rooted fear and methodology to take away a
persons will and control. At heart it's still a forties / fifties Caribbean
voodoo tale but now atoms, DNA and vaccines constitute the new unknown frontier
and ask all the disturbing questions. Warren's Igor is the archetypical voodoo
zombie; the perfect slave with a desire to work and obey, but very much alive
and pre-Romero. It all starts well, with a good scene of multiple Romero-eque zombies spilling with menace and foreboding out over the landscape. But Dr Myra, an odd cross of Elvira, the perfect 60's housewife and the synonymous Scooby Doo villain and her plan, for all that's b-movie goofyness at its brazen best, is convoluted and a hodgepodge of ideas that merely drags out the already shallow ordeal. There phase 3, an inconsistent neuro-toxins leaving half;
compliant and half
teeming with rage; and a sudden shift to plan b and a zombie-inducing-formula that can be reversed. What initially showed some horror promise soon turns to Igor, the two girls who
are briefly enslaved, and monkey-man to carry the threat, and it's all rather flat, and all scares, along with convincing fights or gunshots, are left firmly at the door.
Ultimately though,
Teenage Zombies is perhaps for the purist, or the desperate, as there are
better good / bad movies, and the good / bad bits are probably as not as
numerous or funny as I think. Jerry Warren however one frames it, is a bad
director and this is a bad film. Sharing Ed Wood's total lack of vision and
inability to see fault or a reason to reshoot, each and every scene is a
show-case for the entirely b-movie actors to clumsy position themselves and
stutter their lines. Add to this the laughable action sequences; championed by
the final 7 person brawl / wrestle in the secret lab, and it's easy to argue
it's as bad, if not worse than Wood's classic. I can't however quite draw
myself to recommend it the same way though. Plan 9 has Depp's Ed Wood film and
nearly forty years of unrivalled infamy; it's untouchable as anything other
than the myth it's become. Not many will have heard of Teenage Zombies and as such it hasn't earned the same reputation or pass, and it's difficult, if I'm honest, to argue for it as anything other than the
awfully amateur, keenly low-budget and utterly unwatchable piece of 60s schlock
that it is 3/10.
Steven@WTD.
Steven@WTD.
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