3. The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies (1964)

2. Equinox (1970)

4. Dawn of the Dead (1978)

Now there’s a title that rolls right off the tongue. I’ve previously reviewed The Incredibly Strange Creatures at far greater length, so if you want to know more about this bizarro mid 60’s flick, go ahead and check that out.

The Incredibly Strange Creatures is what you get when you take the ramblings of a drunken beatnik, film a talent show, and give it all the William Castle treatment during its theatrical run. You see, Castle was someone who employed in-theater gimmickry to accompany his movies. These gimmicks ranged from having audiences cheer for what ending they wanted to see (Mr. Sardonicus) to having a floating glow-in-the-dark skeleton fly over the audience (House on Haunted Hill). Director and star Ray Dennis Steckler tried his hand at this kind of gimmickry with The Incredibly Strange Creatures by having actors (sometimes including himself) dress up like zombies and run around the theater. Did it work as intended? There’s nothing I could find that says one way or another, but it likely provided audience members with a welcome distraction from watching the travesty onscreen.

The Incredibly Strange Creatures is not a good movie, at least in the traditional sense of the word “good”. The movie is notorious for its padded runtime. This padding comes in the form of musical numbers. Yes, it’s a musical–the first monster musical ever made, beating out The Horror of Party Beach by a month. These scenes were all filmed in the span of a day with minimal time for practicing and nailing down routines. The result is a disastrous, particularly when backup dancers are involved. Steckler even had the dancers chew gum in the hopes that it would distract from their footwork. It doesn’t. If there’s any saving grace here, it’s that the songs rarely clock in over three minutes in length. Even when the songs are thrown back-to-back-to-back, the unintentional hilarity is enough to hold your attention, even if it’s only to see how bad the next song is.

When the movie isn’t being drawn out with musical numbers, it’s following beatnik Ray Dennis Steckler (alias Cash Flagg) as he makes one bad life choice after the next. He quickly falls into the trap of the psychotic fortune teller Estrella, has a fever dream, and goes on a killing spree while sporting his dorkiest-looking hoodie. In that one sentence, I’ve explained the entire plot of the movie. Is it any wonder the film has been subject to overwhelmingly negative reviews over the years? It currently commands a measly 2.2 on IMDb and a 14% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes.

There aren’t many fans of this movie, which is likely why it hasn’t seen a new home video release in 15 years. The film can currently be found on YouTube in its full version as well as an edited-down version for Mystery Science Theater 3000. They cut one scene of bloodshed from their version, but the movie is kept largely in tact, so unless you’re just dying to see what kind of violence this movie can muster, the MST3K version is more highly recommended for first-time viewers.

The Monster Roster:

• Estrella — a fortune teller with a crystal ball, a mole, and a penchant for throwing acid in men’s faces. This also turns them into zombies somehow. Other times, she may use Hallucinogenic Hypnovision (a cute name for a spinning wheel a la The Twilight Zone) to turn ordinary people into crazy killers that do her bidding. Almost makes you wonder why she’d bother keeping all those zombies locked up.
• Ortega — the eternally-smoking henchman of Estrella. He’s in desperate need of a shower and likely works for her with the agreement that one day he’ll get to take one. That day will never come, but he’s gotten quite comfortable killing in the meantime.
• Zombies — the monsters of Estrella’s creation. They have no affiliations and will try to kill anything that gets in their way–Estrella included. Given the businessman at the beginning gets to wear the same clothes as a zombie, I can only assume two of the other zombies Estrella created were formally pirates.
• Hypnotized Jerry — after falling into Estrella’s trap, Jerry becomes a psychotic killer who is triggered at the sight of any kind of spinning circle. The length of this hypnotism varies, but it lasts the longest when Estrella uses her wheel. Under this spell, Jerry becomes the goofiest slasher until Ricky Caldwell blew all previously contenders away in Silent Night, Deadly Night Part 2 (1988)

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  Estrella

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  Ortega

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  Zombies

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  Hypnotized Jerry

The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies (1964) — Review

“Ah, good old-fashioned nightmare fuel.”

According to the 2004 documentary The 50 Worst Movies Ever Made, The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies is the worst movie ever made. While it certainly could win for most absurdly long title, is it truly the worst?

First, let’s have a look at the plot and the characters. Jerry is a beatnik, a real cool guy who doesn’t care about work or being told what to do. He just wants to live his life, man. How he affords to live at all is irrelevant. Jerry is played by the director, Ray Dennis Steckler, under the pseudonym–I kid you not–Cash Flagg. Jerry has a friend named Harold who’s probably paying the rent while Jerry does his soul-searching. He’s the heavy-accented voice of reason in Jerry’s hedonistic mind. Jerry also has a girlfriend named Angela. She lives with her conservative mother and her college-bound brother who both look down on Jerry. These three friends go to the Pike to remind us here in the 21st century how much amusement parks have improved since the 60’s. There, they visit Estrella, a crazy fortune teller who mutilates men’s faces with acid and turns them into zombies. She’s aided in this horrific scheme by her filthy, deformed, and perpetually-smoking henchman Ortega. Jerry and friends go to have their fortunes read, but Jerry, being the lovable guy that he is, disregards the ominous vision Estrella has and doesn’t bother to pay. They leave. Next to Estrella’s is a strip show. Jerry feels a strong urge to see the show after locking eyes with a beautiful stripper named Carmelita, and he ditches Angela when she objects to seeing the show with him, leaving Harold to get her home safe. How’s that for a likable lead? Well, Jerry gets what’s coming to him, as Carmelita was actually a lure for Estrella. She hypnotizes Jerry, causing him to dream of facepainted women locking him in a maze of arms, imitating set a sentient amusement park turnstiles, and also making him kill the one of the musical acts in the film. It’s up to Harold and Angela to save their friend from this murderous spell. Will they? Should they?

It’s important to note that The Incredibly Strange Creatures is a monster musical. It beat out the equally lambasted Horror of Party Beach (1964) by a month in its release, so it is also the first in this strange little subgenre. Interspersed throughout the plot of the film are musical numbers, but this film has more in common with The Ed Sullivan Show than it does The Sound of Music (1965). You see, the songs have nothing to do with the plot of the film. For example, the show Jerry ditches Angela for features three performances that pad the runtime by nearly ten minutes. In all, there are ten of these scenes, only four of which loosely connect to the story. They range from generic songs, to poorly-choreographed dance numbers, to even more-poorly-choreographed dance numbers. It’s like watching a bad variety show…which is kind of what I’d expect to see at an old amusement park.

Despite all of the film’s clear technical ineptitude, The Incredibly Strange Creatures is, well, incredibly watchable. Its runtime is padded by the musical numbers, but none of the music is unbearable. The songs are all relatively short, so even when they’re thrown back-to-back-to-back, you’re not clawing your eyes out waiting for the movie to get back on track. At its worst, you end up laughing at the ridiculous costumes and how little coordination there is between the backup dancers. The Incredibly Strange Creatures is like Horror of Party Beach in this enjoyably bad sense, though it never delivers a bop like “The Zombie Stomp”. Then again, it doesn’t force me to endure the second-hand embarrassment of watching the Del-Aires fake-cry during “Joy Ride”, so it does have that going for it. But I digress. The Incredibly Strange Creatures is a merciful movie. The fifty minutes of the film that isn’t padding is an unfocused assemblage of bad character writing, horrible dialogue, and trippy sequences preceded by “Hallucinogenic Hypnovision”, which is just a cute name for a hypnotic spiral Estrella uses on Jerry. All of this combined with the terrible acting create an entertaining mess of a movie. It’s hard not to laugh at exchanges like this, especially when Angela (Sharon Walsh) attempts to deliver the last line with such sincerity:

Angela’s Mother [after Jerry arrives at Angela’s house]: Someday, he’s going to meet a girl that’s just his type, and you’re going to be hurt.

Angela: I don’t think so.

Angela’s Mother: He didn’t even come to the door for you!

Angela: He wouldn’t be Jerry if he did.

And no more than a half hour of movie later, Angela’s mother’s words turn out to be true. Amazing.

The incompetence in front and behind the camera gives the film a certain appeal, but the what elevates it from comical flop to something more is its setting. I’m not just talking about the amusement park. I love the neon-lit rides, the old wooden roller coaster, and the creepy-ass animatronics, but there are a lot of films out there that also have that stuff and are significantly more competent, like the thriller Night Tide (1961) and the beach party musical (sans monsters) Beach Party (1963), both of which were filmed at or near the Pike. What makes The Incredibly Strange Creatures special is that it captures a moment in time. The mid-60’s was a time of great cultural change, between the innocence of the 50’s and the hippie counterculture of the late 60’s. It comes across in nearly every facet of the film, from the music to proto-psychedelic dream sequences to the fashion. Jerry’s outlook on work, life, and sticking it to the man originated in beatnik culture, but would continue through the hippie movement. This snapshot of the country in that moment, seeing the change manifest in art, is fascinating and makes The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies more than a funny name.

And that brings us back to the question I posed at the beginning of this review. Is this the worst movie ever made? If you took the film on its objective qualities alone, I think you could make a case for why it’s one of the worst. The plot is scatterbrain, and the movie crams in nearly a half hour of filler to get the runtime to a somewhat respectable 80 minutes. By most marks, that is the making of a bad film. But film is not something that operates on objective principles. It ain’t physics. It’s art, and art is inherently subjective. We can deconstruct this film all we want, laugh at every ridiculous decision made by a man who willingly uses the pseudonym Cash Flagg, but if I’m laughing, then I’m having a good time. It follows then that the movie isn’t actually that bad. Maybe it’s even, dare I say, good? Not in the same way as Tarkovsky, of course, but it explains why films like Hobgoblins (1988), Troll 2 (1990), and Birdemic: Shock and Terror (2010) have gained cult followings over the years.

So there you have it. The Incredibly Strange Creatures may’ve been grilled on Mystery Science Theater 3000 and named the “Worst Movie Ever Made” by some guys back in the 2000’s, but it’s a good movie to me, and at the end of the day, that’s all that really matters. Who knows, maybe you’ll think it’s a good movie too.