Cabaret der Zombies

I saw this movie after it featured on MST3K, and the "Mystery Science Theater 3000: 10 Worst Movies They Riffed" made it sound every bit as bad as it was made out to be on the show(the episode was entertaining of course but not one of their best for me). Actually, I have seen far worse movies than The Incredibly Strange Creatures..., it is a bad movie but one of the worst ever made? Not for me. I actually thought the photography and editing were quite good and the make-up likewise. The Incredibly Strange Creatures...is also unique for the longest movie title ever(though also giving an indication of what you're in for), that I know of anyhow, and I loved Angela's hair. There is not much else though that is good though. I found very little to remember about the music itself, other than that it sounded like bad scratchy saxophone playing. The choreography is clumsy and it looks awkward too, and the musical numbers go on for too long and with no momentum. The script has a very ramshackle structure, with confused and crass at best dialogue. The story, one that is so paper-thin you can do it in 20 minutes easily, is just weird(the weirdest movie I've seen possibly, though I knew even from the title it was going to be), goes along at a snail's pace and doesn't make any sense, concluding with an ending that is rather pointless and will make you go "what?" The last act is the most eventful it gets, but in a way that doesn't gel with the rest of the movie and it has no kind of tension and such whatsoever. The zombies don't even appear until only the last act, they're alright-looking enough but don't do anything of note and their screen-time is short-lived. The acting is enough to make anybody cringe, Brett O'Hara in particular chews the scenery to pieces in the worst of ways. The actresses for Carmelita and Madison suffer from the fact that their characters don't seem to have any point in the story. To conclude, bad and brings the word weird to a whole new level, but I've seen worse. 3/10 Bethany Cox

This is a fascinating artifact from another era of pop culture; From the convoluted title (complete with "!!?" at the end) to the open mike "Amateur Night" numbers to the horribly muddled sound recording to the goofy throwaway dialog to the discombobulated ending to the paper-thin plot, this one has to be seen to be believed.

You know the old saw about a movie being 'like a train wreck - you can't look away'?? Well, imagine if a school bus ran into the train wreck and a 727 crashed on top of it and then a herd of lemmings swarmed over the smoking remains on their way to go over a cliff. And then the Jolly Green Giant picked up everything and threw it over the mountain range and into the next state.

The movie piles one jarring, disorienting choice after another in rapid succession. First 'Jerry' rubs boogers out of his eyes on camera, then 'Harold' is jamming our ears with his Lithuanian/Chicano accent, and then 'Angela' throws off the composition of an entire scene with her Mile High Beehive of Hair, following which a bunch of 'dancers' perform bad choreography with all the precision of a dance recital for kindergarten girls, and then some dick-weed who can't carry a tune in a bucket sings the most insipid love song in the history of music while strumming a guitar that sounds like a ukulele. Then Elizabeth Taylor spins a pinwheel to make Jerry commit badly staged murder to cover up the fact that she threw acid in the face of a lumpy alcoholic, following which Jerry dreams that he got his face painted at a Renaissance festival and leaps about like a Thompson's Gazelle while a montage of women point and laugh at him. Then a mechanical wind-up monkey shrieks that we should "GET YOUR TICKETS HERE!! GET YOUR TICKETS HERE!!!" and a bunch of people who previously got acid thrown in their face and were drawn by the Rat Fink Hod Rod guy and have apparently been living on Angel Dust and Pop Tarts break loose and rampage through an Inuit/Swedish/African dance revue until the police come and shoot everyone, including Jerry who also had acid thrown in his face just before the titular 'zombies' got loose. Oh, and there's no moral, THE END.

I'm making the movie sound more coherent than it really is.

And yet, the whole mess is somehow entertaining and amusing, and I ended up being glad I saw it. If I were to meet Steckler (unlikely), I'd shake his hand and comment on how weird the movie was and ask him "WHAT THE HELL WAS HE THINKING?" when he made it.

MST's riffs on the movie are inspired and their version is worth getting hold of. But the movie stand on its own as a lunatic pinball of weirdness, careening randomly off the walls of our expectations of pop culture.

See it if you have a fondness for silly stuff. Otherwise, stay far, far away.

Incredibly Strange, yes..... but is it alive? No, it's got some good points ("hallucinogenic hypnovision", which is detailed in a preface not seen in most U.S. video prints, turns out to involve ushers in monster masks, hardly the doctor's prescription for a happy trip) but overall dull and slack and looking exactly like five dollars. Still, it's a movie that shows Steckler's love for film, even if this somhow doesn't make up for LENGTHY semi-burlesque dance sequences and the absence of any real "zombies."

B-movie fans in the bay area have been treated over the last few years to Steckler's appearances at Will Viharo's "Thrillville Revue", and I'm happy to say that Steckler is a director who can sit in a theater and laugh at his movie with an audience (you just have to take my word for it that there are A LOT of directors who make bad films and take them VERY seriously... just listen to the director's commentary on the film "the Bone Yard" for an example). This is not his best effort (see "The Thrill Killers" for that), but it's pretty fun if you see it with popcorn and a bunch of drunk people. And heck, that's what movies are all about, isn't it?

What can I say about the Incredibly Strange Creatures...I love this movie. I caught this movie on MST3K and was intrigued enough to find a copy of the movie to watch it without the call backs.

It's the story of lovable loser Jerry (played by director Ray Dennis Steckler, under the name Cash Flagg) who runs afoul of side show fortune teller Madame Estrella and her hirsute henchman Ortega, murder and mayhem ensue. During the course of this gripping "monster musical", you'll meet Jerry's unintelligible roommate Harold(who may be foreign or something), Jerry's helmet haired girlfriend, Angela, and ungainly dancer Marge (played by Steckler's one-time leading lady Carolyn Brandt, talentless stripper Carmelita, and other sketchy characters. The action is periodically interrupted by bizarre and vaguely unsettling musical numbers that add to this movie's nightmarish and surreal ambiance. If you enjoy Strange Creatures check out some of Steckler's other work, particularly The Thrill Killers and Rat Pfink a Boo Boo.

Favorite line:

Angela's mother: (Concerned over her daughter's relationship with Jerry.)

"He doesn't even come to the door for you." Angela: (In all seriousness) "He wouldn't be Jerry if he did."

Imagine those directors being sucked into that black hole, and being stretched and torn into many little pieces. Then,imagine that they are reconstituted into a hot mess of a cinema pile without regards to anything remotely resembling coherence, and maybe you can begin to approach this movie. I said approach, since you won't begin to understand it. In fact, I think that this movie must be seen as an acid-fueled dream,filled with bizarre and senseless images assaulting your eyes while frying your brain. I would like to comment on the cinematography, which is actually quite beautiful. I believe that it was done by Vilmos Zsigmond, who of course went on to do great work for much better films. In fact, the images he shoots for this picture go a long way towards giving it a nice,dream-like effect. Believe it or not, the very famous and credible Movies on T.V. by the great Steven Scheuer gave this title 2.5 stars our of 4, praising it mostly for the work of Zsigmond.