Teenage Zombies

Outrageous teen/horror movie about a bunch of young people kidnapped by this gang of spies led by a Dr. Myra and her obedient zombie slave Ivan on an island off the US coast.

Dr. Myra is working on this serum together with her two hoods Wrof & Brandt to put into the US water system and make everyone in America become a mindless zombie. This will make it possible for the country that she's working for an unnamed Eastern European power, the Soviet Union?, to take over the USA without firing a shot.These four teenagers who end up on the island Reg Skip Pam & Julie and are quickly captured by Ivan and put in a cage to be experimented on by Dr. Myra.

The teenagers friends Morrie and Dotty go to the island looking for them but are told by Dr. Myra that there's no one there but later go to the local sheriff for help. The sheriff turns out to be working with Dr. Myra and her gang but when he and Morrie & Dotty arrive at the island he has a change of heart.

The sheriff supplied Dr. Myra with drunks and criminals from his jail house and felt that innocent teenagers being used in Dr. Myra's insane ventures are a little too much and refuses to work with her and her hoods thus getting a bullet in his chest from Wrof killing him. Meanwhile the two girls Pam & Julie are exposed to the serum/gas and lose their brain-power and become zombies.

Rag and Skip together with Morrie and Dotty break into Dr. Myra's lab and force her to gave the girls and antidote to give them back their minds after having Dr. Myra lose her with the same gas she used on the girls. It's then that a fight breaks out between the teenagers and Dr. Myra and her two hoods Worf & Brandt as well as Ivan with the monkey/gorilla, one of Dr. Myra's failed experiments, breaking out of the cage killing Brandt as everyone runs for their lives to the boat by the beach to escape.

Having it out on the boat the teenagers overpower Dr. Myra and Worf and take them prisoner to the police and US military authorities on shore thus saving the USA from a covert takeover by a hostile power; as for Ivan he completely disappeared right off the radar screen.

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.

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.

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.

i saw this at a friends house and i absolutely had to have it. it's a great b-flick. if you love them too, pick this one up and check it out.

drawbacks: the movie has a slow start and the 'teenagers' are only zombified for maybe 4 minutes... this movie really should've been called zombie island, zombie island resort, adventure to zombie island, zombie lab #12 or something like that.