Teenage Zombies

The film is the work of Jerry Warren a schlock king who churned out a bunch of low budget films over the years aimed at capitalizing on the hot horror market. Most of Warren's films are really bad, but they made money thanks to cheapness of cost, and clever titles (Teenage Zombies, Attack of the Mayan Mummy, Wild World of the Bat Woman) that often promised more than they delivered. Occasionally Warren would take an foreign feature, cut the heart of it out and replace it with long static scenes. Amazingly this is one of the few wholly original films that Warren unleashed and it it is almost unlike most of his other snoozers in that its actually watchable.

The plot has US agents searching for a gang of foreign agents are conducting mind control experiments on a small island. As the agents stumble around unable to find them, the bad guys end up battling a group of teens who stumble upon them and their lair.

Far from a great film this is a goofy little flick that was designed for the teenage drive in audiences. Its a low budget treat that has a sense of how ridiculous it all is. It doesn't take it self seriously, which helps a great deal. (Of course I could be wrong and be over praising it since its probably the one Warren film that doesn't stink completely.) Recommended if you're doing a multiple feature horror night at the movies of drive-in style fare.

Six all American Eisenhower era kids decide to go water-skiing or at least four of the six do. When the four fail to show up, the other two go looking for their friends.

The two who are searching come across this island in the middle of their lake inhabited by a strange scientist woman, her Igor like companion and a bunch of mindless men walking around in a trance. It's those zombies that no doubt they've seen in several horror flicks when they've gone to drive-ins. And could their friends be becoming Teenage Zombies?

It's a lot worse than that because our lady scientist who's a poor woman's Gale Sondergaard is a Russian agent. She's experimenting with nerve gas and a way to deliver it in quantity so that they can turn New York, Boston, or Chicago, etc. into a city of zombies, though some might argue that's already happened. In fact she's begging her superiors for more time because the Russians are getting ready with an H-Bomb attack, but her method would be so much neater and would leave all those nice cities intact with a population of slaves.

Teenage Zombies has a no name cast most of whom I won't mention because you've never heard of them. I've seen better acting in junior high school productions, especially from the young folks. The sound quality is horrible and the film looks like it was shot from my father's old Bell&Howell.

But Katherine Victor who played the lady Russian scientist was a real hoot. This was her second film, she was in another science fiction travesty, Mesa of Lost Women first. If anything Teenage Zombies was an improvement.

It says here that the film was released in 1959, but when I saw the film the credits clearly said 1957. The fact that it took two years before the producers inflicted it on the movie-going public should say volumes.

Are they going water skiing or are they going horseback riding? Are they going to be zombies or aren't they? I love these movies. The acting is so stiff. The characters deliver lines and then wait a second or two. The dialog is so pointless that it really doesn't matter. There's this huge island in a lake with a hugre research facility on it. But the people in the town don't seem to know it's there. Still a couple of kids can take a little rowboat with a ten horse and make it to the island. The research that is being done concerns a kind of nerve gas that will turn all Americans into blathering idiots (it's probably too late for that anyway). There's a gorilla running around, a couple of boring spies, and a kind of dragon lady scientist who locks the kids up for future research. The kids have the usual silly nicknames. The sheriff is on the take, so he won't help. My favorite scene is the last minute. I won't spoil it, but it's priceless.

Director Jerry Warren chooses to tell his story "Teenage Zombies" via the master shot. There are about two close ups in the entire film. This allows Warren to fully exploit and reveal the mise- en-scene of every scene. This technique also allows the actors to roam the frame and use their body language to develop their multi-dimensional characters. In particular, Chuck Niles is able to portray a fully fleshed out Ivan because of Warren's deployment of the master shot. It's a brilliant performance that overshadows all the other actors in the movie. Mitch Evans also gives us a subtle and nuanced performance as the gorilla. My one complaint about the film is that we don't see any water skiing. I like films with water skiing in them and I suspect Warren could have cut together an intriguing water skiing montage if he had been so inclined.

Four youths take a boat trip to a remote island where they encounter terrorists developing a gas designed to turn the American population into mindless zombies (insert obvious gag here). The foursome are captured and held prisoner, but their plucky pals Morrie (Jay Hawk) and Dotty (Nan Green) realise that something is wrong and attempt to find their friends.

As the title suggests, this is one of those quickie B-movies from the '50s that was targeted at a teenage drive-in audience. It's a cheap and amateurish film, with a dumb plot, dismal direction and dreadful acting that makes American International's teen horror films (I Was A Teenage Werewolf, Blood of Dracula etc.) seem like great works of art by comparison.

Of course, a film this awful actually proves fairly entertaining as a result: Jay Hawk puts in an excruciatingly bad performance that has to be seen to be believed, there are some poorly executed scuffles between the kids and the baddies, and writer/director Jerry Warren even throws in that mainstay of old B-movie horror films, a wild ape on the rampage (played by a man in an unconvincing gorilla costume).

Honestly, I really shouldn't rate the film any higher than the 1/10 it deserves, but I enjoyed its complete and utter ineptitude enough to give it a couple of extra points.