Creature of the Walking Dead

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.

This film begins in the 19th century with a man named "Dr. John Malthus" (Fernando Casanova) stalking and then kidnapping a young woman coming home from church one night. After placing her unconscious body in his laboratory, he immediately begins to drain her blood with a hollow tube and siphoning it off into his own body. How much blood he intended to drain from her is unknown because, just moments into the procedure he is interrupted by the police and dragged off to jail while she remains tied up and unable to free herself. She eventually dies of hunger in the laboratory while Dr. Malthus is tried and executed for the previous murders of several other people. The scene then shifts to a number of years later with a relative of Dr. Malthus named "Dr. Martin Malthaus" (also played by Fernando Casanova) inheriting the house and discovering the secret laboratory previously used by his infamous ancestor. Not only that, but inside the laboratory he also discovers a secret journal that Dr. John Malthus used to write a formula for immortality. Fascinated by this discovery, Martin decides to dig up the body of his ancestor and, with modern laboratory devices, attempts to recreate the secret formula in an attempt to bring to bring him back to life--and it's then that the horror begins all over again. Now, rather than reveal any more, I will just say that, when I first began watching this movie, I thought that I had seen it before as everything was much too familiar. Sure enough, I soon realized that the initial part of the movie was borrowed from the 1961 film "La Marca del Muerto" but with music and narration in the place of the original dialogue. Likewise, key segments of the original film were also inserted at various other times to essentially create an entirely different picture. The problem with this cheap and disingenuous technique was that it lent a rather patchwork quality to the picture and rendered it somewhat incomprehensible at times. For example, in one particular scene Dr. John Malthaus is conducting an experiment on a woman but it never showed how that woman came to be found in this predicament. Admittedly, there exists the possibility that the film I was watching had been edited and was a bit incomplete in that regard. Even so, I'm not sure it would have made much difference as I didn't enjoy this film that much and for that reason, I have rated it accordingly.

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.

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

This is far from being a good film but I think it's a little bit better than awful. I found it on the interesting side even though it is a chopped up version of 'La Marca Del Muerto' with extra footage, dubbing and cutting out scene from the original film.

I am one of the weird people that found Jerry Warren's 'Face of the Screaming Werewolf' strangely appealing - and that is an awful film. 'Creature of the Walking Dead' isn't quite as bad as 'Screaming Werewolf' to me. Something about both films bad films that I like - I think it's the oddness of the films that attracts me.

Creature of the Walking Dead is not a film that horror fans should see - it's one to easily pass up but is watchable for some.

6/10