Creature of the Walking Dead

The usual Jerry Warren cut and paste job. Its like watching La marca del muerto only with long dull scenes of people explaining the new incoherent plot, and of course, its mildly amusing at that. Decent flick for what it is, not boring but really brings down the original film.

btw prepare to hear the theme of La marca del muerto over and over and over and over again. Its a good piece but its just really overused.

Creature of the Walking Dead (1965)

** (out of 4)

The horror. The fear. The terror. Jerry Warren strikes back with another hack job.

This time he takes the Mexican horror film LA MARCA DEL MUERTO and adds voice-over narration, new scenes with American actors and hacks up the original film. The "original" movie was about a mad scientist who discovers eternal life so he kills young women for their blood. The scientist is eventually killed for his crimes but centuries later a relative, also a scientist, digs up his body, gives it a blood transfusion and the old mad scientist is back alive and committing more crimes.

Obviously it's impossible to fully judge the original film since it's dubbed here, edited down and of course there's the new footage. With that said, watching the footage here certainly makes me want to seek out that film because there was some nice moments in it including a rather good looking monster, some nice atmosphere scattered throughout and it has a fairly interesting story. The sets are all rather cheap and silly looking but at the same time that adds a little charm.

Director Warren made some movies on his own like TEENAGE ZOMBIES and FRANKENSTEIN ISLAND. Whenever Warren made movies on his own they were usually downright awful with very little actually going for them. He often bought the rights to foreign movies and did hack jobs like this one here. His most popular was probably HALF HUMAN with John Carradine. So, how is this film? For the most part it's entertaining thanks in large part to the original footage. The narration added here is all rather silly and there's no question that the newly added footage is horrible. As with his other hack jobs, the new footage is just a group of American actors sitting around and talking about stuff.

No, this slight, silly, forgettable feature is not a spin-off of a certain popular TV series. It's yet another of schlockmeister Jerry Warrens' shameless "cut and paste" jobs: he takes copious footage from a Mexican horror movie, "La Marca del Muerto", removes its soundtrack, adds hilariously moronic narration, and adds some newly shot scenes of his own.

The story has a young scientist removing his grandfathers' body from a mausoleum, using blood and lab equipment to resurrect grandpa, and finds out that - surprise, surprise - grandpa is evil, and he will continue to abduct hapless young victims, and replenish himself with their blood. Meanwhile, in the newly added Warren material, characters basically lounge around and talk about the plot.

Normally, this viewer loves schlock, but this is pretty dull overall. Although there are indications, as usual, that the original foreign film is at least fairly decent, it's all but ruined with the clunky revised soundtrack, and the flatly directed scenes from Warren. This material has dialogue that seems to go on forever, and is not of the slightest interest.

Familiar faces pep things up just a bit. Warren again works with regulars such as Lloyd Nelson, Katherine Victor, and Chuck Niles. Bruno Ve Sota, a corpulent actor and filmmaker who turned up in a fair bit of B movies from the 50s and 60s, is mildly amusing as an inspector who yammers on while getting a massage from Niles' character.

"La Marca del Muerto" does look like it may be worth checking out, due to its Gothic flavours and atmosphere. It's too bad that Warren did it no favours here.

Four out of 10.

Jerry Warren had an odd niche back in the day. He would buy the rights to Mexican films and then cut them to pieces, include some new footage and narration and then release them in the States. This was not unprecidented...American International did this with Japanese and Russian movies many times! In most cases, the results are far from stellar....though perhaps "Creature of the Walking Dead" (originally, "La Marca del Muerto") is an exception.

The film starts with some pointless narration. Soon, the story begins long ago. An evil mad scientist has been experimenting in order to try to live forever. His secret? Stealing the blood of unsuspecting young women! He's soon caught and executed and the story jumps to the present day...and folks are discussing this old crime....just to make sure the audience REALLY knows what happened!

Soon, you see an ancestor of the evil man move into the old mansion and soon he discovers the old dead reprobate's experiments as well as the cells (and skeletons) where he kept his victims as he drained them! I think at this point, I would have moved out and sold the place! Instead, the idiot begins replicating the evil experiments and manages to bring the murder back to life! And, to keep him alive means more victims! All in all, his relative is a real idiot!

So is this any good? Yes and no. The film is not nearly as bad as its overall rating of 2.8 would imply. But the movie has a lot of problems, including a bat clearly on a string, long-winded voiceovers in portions instead of actually SHOWING what was happening as well as the silly notion that the mad scientist and a distant relative look nearly identical (and are played by the same actor). On the other hand, the story is creative and interesting...and very similar to the German film "The Torture Chamber of Dr. Sadism", the execution scene was brilliantly lit and filmed (the cinematographer was very good), and the movie did keep my interest...mostly because the Mexicans appear to have done a decent job with the original movie. Worth watching though far from being a must-see film.

A doctor revives the corpse of an ancestor without realising that, before his death by hanging, he maintained his youthful looks by siphoning the blood from young women into his own body. A cinematic cut-and-paste job from Jerry Warren, who bought the rights to what looks like a half-decent Mexican horror movie from 1961, talked all over the foreign-language dialogue, and added a few English language scenes which have virtually nothing to do with the central plot. It's as messy as it sounds - and not in a fun way